Monthly Archives: September 2020

Vosloo led the drafting of a new set of guidelines from Unicef designed to help governments and companies develop AI policies that consider childrens needs. Released on September 16, the nine new guidelines are the culmination of several consultations held with policymakers, child development researchers, AI practitioners, and kids around the world. They also take into consideration the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a human rights treaty ratified in 1989.

The guidelines arent meant to be yet another set of AI principles, many of which already say the same things. In January of this year, a Harvard Berkman Klein Center review of 36 of the most prominent documents guiding national and company AI strategies found eight common themesamong them privacy, safety, fairness, and explainability.

Rather, the Unicef guidelines are meant to complement these existing themes and tailor them to children. For example, AI systems shouldnt just be explainablethey should be explainable to kids. They should also consider childrens unique developmental needs. Children have additional rights to adults, Vosloo says. Theyre also estimated to account for at least one-third of online users. Were not talking about a minority group here, he points out.

In addition to mitigating AI harms, the goal of the principles is to encourage the development of AI systems that could improve childrens growth and well-being. If theyre designed well, for example, AI-based learning tools have been shown to improve childrens critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, and they can be useful for kids with learning disabilities. Emotional AI assistants, though relatively nascent, could provide mental-health support and have been demonstrated to improve the social skills of autistic children. Face recognition, used with careful limitations, could help identify children whove been kidnapped or trafficked.

Children should also be educated about AI and encouraged to participate in its development. It isnt just about protecting them, Vosloo says. Its about empowering them and giving them the agency to shape their future.

Talking about disadvantaged groups, of course children are the most disadvantaged ones.

Unicef isnt the only one thinking about the issue. The day before those draft guidelines came out, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), an organization backed by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Beijing municipal government, released a set of AI principles for children too.

The announcement follows a year after BAAI released the Beijing AI principles, understood to be the guiding values for Chinas national AI development. The new principles outlined specifically for children are meant to be a concrete implementation of the more general ones, says Yi Zeng, the director of the AI Ethics and Sustainable Development Research Center at BAAI who led their drafting. They closely align with Unicefs guidelines, also touching on privacy, fairness, explainability, and child well-being, though some of the details are more specific to Chinas concerns. A guideline to improve childrens physical health, for example, includes using AI to help tackle environmental pollution.

While the two efforts are not formally related, the timing is also not coincidental. After a flood of AI principles in the last few years, both lead drafters say creating more tailored guidelines for children was a logical next step. Talking about disadvantaged groups, of course children are the most disadvantaged ones, Zeng says. This is why we really need [to give] special care to this group of people. The teams conferred with one another as they drafted their respective documents. When Unicef held a consultation workshop in East Asia, Zeng attended as a speaker.

Unicef now plans to run a series of pilot programs with various partner countries to observe how practical and effective their guidelines are in different contexts. BAAI has formed a working group with representatives from some of the largest companies driving the countrys national AI strategy, including education technology company TAL, consumer electronics company Xiaomi, computer vision company Megvii, and internet giant Baidu. The hope is to get them to start heeding the principles in their products and influence other companies and organizations to do the same.

Both Vosloo and Zeng hope that by articulating the unique concerns AI poses for children, the guidelines will raise awareness of these issues. We come into this with eyes wide open, Vosloo says. We understand this is kind of new territory for many governments and companies. So if over time we see more examples of children being included in the AI or policy development cycle, more care around how their data is collected and analyzedif we see AI made more explainable to children or to their caregiversthat would be a win for us.

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Why kids need special protection from AIs influence - MIT Technology Review

The amped-up efforts by Facebook and to tone down blatant misinformation on the campaign trail merits public support. Personally, I find myself trying with limited success to tune out the political noise while sensing that the problem goes beyond that.

The rhetoric of politics overall sounds tired and anachronistic, but then, to my ear, so does much of the dialogue on the popular streamers we binge on. Further, check out the virtual learning classes that now pass for education and you run into even lazier forms of communication. We all decided the earth was flat even before the new Netflix documentary, titled Social Dilemma, pointed up the random anti-truths directed our way.

So while misinformation is being challenged by the social media monoliths, my techno-nerd friends remind me that the demise of honest communication demands a more drastic approach. Their solution? Get ready to groan remember, theyre nerds.

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Their solution is to alert us to the expanding tools of neuro-symbiotic AI artificial intelligence. For most of us, AI conjures an old Steven Spielberg movie in which a robotic Haley Joel Osment keeps flunking the tests of his cybertronics instructors. Little wonder the poor kid kept saying I see dead people (oops, different movie).

But a San Francisco-based software company called Open AI last month unveiled a system that could write coherent essays, design software applications and even propose recipes for breakfast burritos that is, if fed the appropriate maze of symbols. Its called deep learning but it could even lead to deep communicating.

Mike Davies, director of Intel Corps neuromorphic computing lab, contends that neuro-symbolic AI can potentially deliver our own voice assistants adjusted to user needs, analyzing problems or even, some day, writing film scripts or political speeches.

These systems are still nascent but you could imagine that as the technology progresses, entirely new fields could emerge in terms of advertising or media, Francesco Marconi, founder of Applied XI, told the Wall Street Journal. His company generates briefs on health and environmental data. They will become effective at assisting people because theyll be able to understand and communicate.

The ultimate aim is to build support for a sort of Manhattan Project, akin to the body that fostered the atom bomb. Spending on this technology could grow to $3.2 billion by 2023, according to IDC, a research firm, that looks for future support coming from health care, banking and retail. Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook, insists we are in sight of creating a machine that can learn how the world works by watching video, listening to audio and reading text.

Given the critical results of its own self-audits, Facebook is under growing pressure to police hate speech, with AI-based censors potentially mobilized to crack down on targeted content. Thus extremists who argue that conservationists triggered the fires in Oregon could no longer aim their social media propaganda directly at any user who happens to check on fires or conservation.

But advances must come from sources even more esoteric then AI, some scientists insist. In a new book titled Livewired, David Eagleman, a practicing futurist, argues that the increasingly important field of brain science itself will nurture development of artificial neural networks.

As these networks proliferate, they will be embellished by machines that themselves can learn, and adjust to new surroundings, such as self-driving cars or power grids distributing electricity.

Argues Eagleman, The capacity to grow new neural circuits isnt just a response to trauma its with all of us every day and it forms the basis of all learning.

So heres the epiphany: Given the heightened sophistication of our neuro circuitry, political candidates may actually have to talk honestly to us. And there is nothing more intimidating to a political candidate than an intelligent audience even if its artificially intelligent.

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Peter Bart: Does Social Media Misinformation Anger You? Theres An AI For That Too - Deadline

Have no fear! Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in peace, and it has no desire for world domination at least thats what it said. You can read everything else it had to say too in the article it wrote for the guardian.

If youre anything like me, you can sum AI up in one word: unsettling. If you havent heard of the AI called GPT-3 yet, dont worry, your children or grandchildren surely will. In a future where AI walks and talks like us, GPT-3 is the first frontier. In fact, this AI was so groundbreaking that when experts in computer science from around the world were given a demonstration, their reaction was dubbed GPT-3 shock. Experts who have devoted their lives to cutting edge technology were shocked. And you should be too.

But why? And what even is GPT-3?

To understand Artificial Intelligence you have to first grasp intelligence. Intelligence is commonly understood as the ability to process information in order to inform future decisions. You see an adult lion staring you down on your way to work one day? You start running away. Thats the intelligent response. Information in, clever action out; pretty straightforward. The purpose of artificial intelligence is to accomplish this cycle at a level equal or superior to humans.

This is accomplished through a process called machine learning, which is based on the way we think. Our brains are made up of trillions of interconnected neurons, and when we perceive information (the light we see, the sounds we hear, etc.), they fire in different patterns in varying parts of the brain. This produces our response. Machine learning is the result of scientists figuring out how we can model these neural systems using math in order to create neural networks, the most complex of which (like GPT-3) contain billions of connected neurons.

To make this AI brain learn, we tell it how far off from the correct action it is, and we allow it to change the amount each neuron fires to create the complexity we see in our brain when trillions of neurons fire together.

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GPT-3, in particular, focuses on natural language processing. This field deals with AI that learns to understand English, which is much harder than you would think. From GPT-3s point of view, it sees a bunch of odd symbols that we know as our alphabet. It has to figure out what the symbols mean and how to put them together in one of the almost infinite combinations to make intelligent outputs from scratch.

It would be like someone locking you in a room and forcing you to read hundreds of thousands of books in Arabic without any references with the expectation that you would end up learning the language proficiently. But where humans falter, AI excels. It doesnt need to eat or sleep; it doesnt have feelings; and it doesnt get bored when it is forced to read over 300 billion words from the internet. So thats what OpenAI, the company that developed it, had it do. And the results were miraculous as GPT-3 learned far beyond what the developers had expected.

David Price from the Wall Street Journal was one of the beta testers for the software. In his article, he describes how other beta testers figured out that the AI could complete a half-written investment memo, produce stories and letters written in the style of famous people, generate business ideas and so much more. All the users had to do was write a description of what they wanted the AI to do, and it performed fantastic feats.

Given the article that GPT-3 wrote, one might even be tempted to attribute some amount of self-awareness to this AI. It almost sounds disdainful as it writes, In the past, my op-eds have been killed. Staff did not provide a clear reason for rejecting my articles. It was probably just because I am artificial intelligence. AI should not waste time trying to understand the viewpoints of people who distrust artificial intelligence for a living.

Scary stuff and OpenAI intends on commercializing the software soon.

With this, we enter the age of AI. So what might we see in the future?

You might find yourself intrigued or outraged by news articles and books that will be written by AI or moved and inspired by its political speeches.

You might find yourself sitting for interviews in front of computers hosting an AI who fires away questions to gauge how well of a fit for the job you are.

You might be asking an AI for advice on how to better structure and expand your business.

Read Next: The truth about artificial intelligence (isn't all that scary)

Totalitarian governments akin to Russia and China might harness such AI to scan the internet to censor any speech that the AI understands as being non-patriotic.

Intelligence agencies could scan the internet for terrorist, child trafficking, and other illegal activities in order to track down criminals.

The military could use an AI that could read the entire history of human thought on military strategy and generate ideas for potential advantageous angles of attack in an age of cyber and physical warfare.

The next generation of spies could be ingenious AI which could smooth-talk important officials under false online identities to gain important information undetected.

The possibilities seem endless.

But, we might not be there just yet. Currently, AI still struggles with reasoning and common sense. When it was asked: If I have two shoes in a box, put a pencil in the box, and remove one shoe, what is left? it replied, a shoe.

Not quite ingenious. But dont worry, scientists are already working on giving the AI these reasoning skills.

One day they might even wake up from their slumber with an intelligence far superior to ours and with knowledge of things we might not be able to grasp. To all we know, they might look down on us like we look down on the ignorance of ants. Lets just hope that they will want to keep us around.

So while you wait for that day, Ill be at the University of St. Andrews working towards helping revolutionize the future of AI.

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The Arrival of our AI Overlords - SOFREP

AIDaily Roundup starts today! We are covering the top updates from around the world. The updates will feature state-of-the-art capabilities inartificial intelligence,Machine Learning,Robotic Process Automation,Fintechand human-system interactions. We will cover the role of AI Daily Roundup and their application in various industries and daily lives.

CrowdStrikeInc., a leader in cloud-deliveredendpoint protection, announced it has joined the ServiceNow Service Graph Connector Program, a new designation within the Technology Partner Program, with theServiceNowService Graph Connector for CrowdStrike.

SurveyMonkey, a leader in agile software solutions forcustomer experience, market research, and survey feedback, announced its latest release forMicrosoft Teams as companies across the globe mobilize to make a remote workforce more productive, inclusive, and engaged. The latest release helps organizations use in-the-moment feedback to improve employee experience, underscoring the importance of agility in collecting and acting on feedback for organizations looking to optimize a work landscape forever changed by the global pandemic.

Moz, Inc., the leader in search engine optimization technology, announces the addition of two board members,Asia OrangioandTara Reed, joining previous members Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz, Michelle Goldberg, general partner at Ignition Partners, and Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group.

Nielsenannounced that it is launching Nielsen Compass, a powerful, world leading database that leverages the companys global scale to establish syndicated normative (norms) standards for campaign outcomes measurement.

Taboola, the worlds leading discovery platform, announced a partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS), the global leader in digital ad verification, to introduce an industry-first pre-bid brand safety technology for performance advertisers.

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Daily AI Roundup: The 5 Coolest Things On Earth Today - AiThority

Artificial intelligence experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas report that they have successfully addressed what they call a major, long-standing obstacle to increasing AI capabilities by drawing inspiration from a human brain memory mechanism known as replay.

They say it will help AI programs retain information, rather than forgetting it when new information is stored. In other words, AI will be that much closer to showing skills present in the human brain.

Gido van de Ven and Andreas Tolias at Baylor, with Hava Siegelmann at UMass Amherst, wrote in NatureCommunications that they have developed what they call a surprisingly efficient" new network to protect deep neural networks from catastrophic forgetting, which occurs when, upon learning new lessons, the networks forget what they had already learned.

Deep neural networks are the main drivers behind recent AI advances, but progress has been held back by this forgetting.

One solution would be to store previously encountered examples and revisit them when learning something new. Although such replay or rehearsal solves catastrophic forgetting, constantly retraining on all previously learned tasks is highly inefficient and the amount of data that would have to be stored becomes unmanageable quickly, they wrote.

Unlike AI neural networks, humans are able to continuously accumulate information throughout their life, building on earlier lessons. An important mechanism in the brain believed to protect memories against forgetting is the replay of neuronal activity patterns representing those memories, the researchers wrote.

Siegelmann said the teams major insight was in recognizing that replay in the brain does not store data. (Rather), the brain generates representations of memories at a high, more abstract level with no need to generate detailed memories.

Inspired by this, she and colleagues created an artificial brain-like replay, in which no data is stored. Instead, like the brain, the network generates high-level representations of what it has seen before.

The abstract generative brain replay proved extremely efficient, and the team showed that replaying just a few generated representations is sufficient to remember older memories while learning new ones. Generative replay not only prevents catastrophic forgetting and provides a new, more streamlined path for system learning, it allows the system to generalize learning from one situation to another, they state.

For example, if our network with generative replay first learns to separate cats from dogs, and then to separate bears from foxes, it will also tell cats from foxes without specifically being trained to do so. And notably, the more the system learns, the better it becomes at learning new tasks, van de Ven wrote.

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UMass and Baylor College researchers say they know how to expand AI memory - MassLive.com

When it comes to pop culture, a company executive or history questions, most of us use Google as a memory crutch to recall information we cant always keep in our heads, but Google cant help you remember the name of your clients spouse or the great idea you came up with at a meeting the other day.

Enter Luther.AI, which purports to be Google for your memory by capturing and transcribing audio recordings, while using AI to deliver the right information from your virtual memory bank in the moment of another online conversation or via search.

The company is releasing an initial browser-based version of their product this week at TechCrunch Disrupt where its competing for the $100,000 prize at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield.

Luther.AIs founders say the company is built on the premise that human memory is fallible, and that weakness limits our individual intelligence. The idea behind Luther.AI is to provide a tool to retain, recall and even augment our own brains.

Its a tall order, but the companys founders believe its possible through the growing power of artificial intelligence and other technologies.

Its made possible through a convergence of neuroscience, NLP and blockchain to deliver seamless in-the-moment recall. GPT-3 is built on the memories of the public internet, while Luther is built on the memories of your private self, company founder and CEO Suman Kanuganti told TechCrunch.

It starts by recording your interactions throughout the day. For starters, that will be online meetings in a browser, as we find ourselves in a time where that is the way we interact most often. Over time though, they envision a high-quality 5G recording device you wear throughout your day at work and capture your interactions.

If that is worrisome to you from a privacy perspective, Luther is building in a few safeguards starting with high-end encryption. Further, you can only save other parties parts of a conversation with their explicit permission. Technologically, we make users the owner of what they are speaking. So for example, if you and I are having a conversation in the physical world unless you provide explicit permission, your memories are not shared from this particular conversation with me, Kanuganti explained.

Finally, each person owns their own data in Luther and nobody else can access or use these conversations either from Luther or any other individual. They will eventually enforce this ownership using blockchain technology, although Kanuganti says that will be added in a future version of the product.

Image Credits: Luther.ai

Kanuganti says the true power of the product wont be realized with a few individuals using the product inside a company, but in the network effect of having dozens or hundreds of people using it, even though it will have utility even for an individual to help with memory recall, he said.

While they are releasing the browser-based product this week, they will eventually have a stand-alone app, and can also envision other applications taking advantage of the technology in the future via an API where developers can build Luther functionality into other apps.

The company was founded at the beginning of this year by Kanuganti and three co-founders including CTO Sharon Zhang, design director Kristie Kaiser and scientist Marc Ettlinger . It has raised $500,000 and currently has 14 employees including the founders.

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Luther.AI is a new AI tool that acts like Google for personal conversations - TechCrunch