AI with AI

Andy and Dave discuss the latest corporate buzz on the Department of Defense’s JEDI contract, in which Microsoft employees publish an open letter and accuse the company of straying from its AI principles; a new DARPA program seeks to codify humans’ basic common sense through computational models and repositories; MIT establishes the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, a $1B initiative and the single largest by an American academic institution; MIT also announces an Autonomous Vehicle Technology study, a data-driven effort for “safe and enjoyable” human-AI interaction in driving; Wired takes a look at initial data on accidents involving self-driving vehicles; and researchers (at least 23!) publish a complete electron microscopy volume of the brain of the fruit fly. In deeper topics, Andy and Dave discuss research from the University of Louisville that shows the failure of neural networks to understand optical illusions. Researchers from UPenn, ARL, and NYU demonstrate a drone that can be controlled by your eyes. Stocco and colleagues demonstrate BrainNet, a “social network” that allows 3 people to transmit “thoughts” to each other. And researchers at Ecole Centrale de Lyon have created a new framework that may allow robots to autonomously optimize their own hyper-parameters – about which Dave tries to look on the bright side.