AI with AI

In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss an announcement from WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, WVU Medicine, and Oura Health, with the ability to predict COVID-19 related symptoms up to three days in advance via biometric monitoring. Japan's M3 is teaming with Alibaba's AI Tech to provide CT-scan capability to hospitals that can identify COVID-related pneumonia. The Pentagon taps into the virus-relief CARES Act to use AI for virus cure and vaccine efforts. Rockefeller announces efforts to use GPT-2 to automatically summarize COVID-19 medical research articles, but the results aren’t that great. In regular AI news, IBM announces it is no longer offering general-purpose facial recognition or analysis software, due to concerns about the technology being used to promote racism. And in a related announcement, Amazon places a one-year moratorium on allowing law enforcement to use its Rekognition facial recognition platform. USSOCOM has posted an RFI for potential contractors to provide its Global Analytics Platform, a $300-600M contract that would follow its previous eMAPS contract. And NASA launches its Entrepreneurs Challenge, seeking new ideas for space exploration. In research, from the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, Google Brain, University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University, and Facebook AI, comes a different approach to defining intrinsic motivation for taskless problems, wherein agents seek out future inputs that are expected to be novel. The report of the week comes from the Stanley Center for Peace and Security, with a look at The Militarization of AI. Researchers at Beijing Academy and Cambridge University come together to pen a white paper calling for "cross-cultural cooperation" on AI ethics and governance. Efron, Hastie, and Cambridge University Press provide Computer Age Statistical Inference for free. And DeepMind and the UCL Centre for AI are producing a Deep Learning Lecture Series.