A Tesseract to Follow

In COVID-related AI news, Purdue University has built a website that tracks global response to social distancing, by pulling live footage and images from over 30,000 cameras in 100 countries. Simon Fong, Nilanjan Dey, and Jyotismita Chaki have published Artificial Intelligence for Coronavirus Outbreak, which examines AI's contribution to combating COVID-19. Researchers at Harvard and Boston Children's Hospital use a "regular" Bayesian model to identify COVID-19 hotspots over 14 days before they occur. In non-COVID AI news, the acting director of the JAIC announces a shift to enabling joint warfighting operations. The DoD Inspector General releases an Audit of Governance and Protection of DoD AI Data and Technology, which reveals a variety of gaps and weaknesses in AI governance across DoD. Detroit Police Chief James Craig reveals that the police department's experience with facial recognition technology resulted in misidentified people about 96% of the time. Over 1400 mathematicians sign and deliver a letter to the American Mathematical Society, urging researchers to stop working on predictive-policing algorithms. DARPA awards the Meritorious Public Service Medal to Professor Hava Siegelmann for her creation and research in the Lifelong Learning Machines Program. And Horace Barlow, one of the founders of modern visual neuroscience, passed away on 5 July at the age of 98. In research, Udrescu and Tegmark release AI Feynman 2.0, with unsupervised learning of equations of motion by viewing objects in raw and unlabeled video. Researchers at CSAIL, NVidia, and the University of Toronto create the Visual Causal Discovery Network, which learns to recognize underlying dependency structures for simulated fabrics, such as shirts, pants, and towels. In reports, the Montreal AI Ethics Institute publishes its State of AI Ethics. In the video of the week, Max Tegmark discusses the previously mentioned research on equations of motion, and also discusses progress in symbolic regression. And GanBreeder upgrades to ArtBreeder, which can create realistic-looking images from paintings, cartoons, or just about anything.