Atlas Surveilled

In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss research that provides a comprehensive survey on applications of AI in fighting COVID-19. The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the AI Initiative at the Future Society launch a global alliance: Collective and Augmented Intelligence against COVID-19 (CAIAC). MIT and the IBM Watson AI Lab publish a paper that suggests a computational limit to progress in deep learning. The Atlas of Surveillance provides an open-source look at technologies that law enforcement are using across the US, to include facial recognition and drones. Similarly, Surfshark has compiled information on the status of facial recognition technology around the globe, along with additional useful information. MIT finds systematic shortcomings in the ImageNet dataset, with an observation that the crowdsourcing data collection pipeline can cause "misalignments." Research from Google Brain shows that "self-attention" can allow agents to identify task-critical visual hints, and ignore task-irrelevant elements. UC Berkeley, Google, CMU, and Facebook demonstrate "one policy to rule them all," where they use one global policy to control the movement of a wide variety of agent morphologies (which would normally require training and tuning for each separate morphology). The Army's Cyber Institute releases the "Invisible Force" graphic novel, which examines potential uses of AI technology in a future fictional scenario. Alife 2020 makes a compilation of its July conference available, clocking in a nearly 800 pages. And Gwern examines the creative side of GPT-3 through poetry, humor, and other probing interactions