Dust in the Mind

For COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss the Stanford Social Innovation Review report on the problem with COVD-19 AI solutions (e.g., data gaps, inconsistency, etc), and how to fix them. The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) provides a thorough report on AI and COVID-19, whose findings generally suggest that barriers might exist for the employment of AI in tackling COVID-19. In regular AI news, the US has its first known case of an erroneous arrest due to facial recognition technology, with the arrest of Robert Williams in Detroit in January 2020 (and disclosed on 24 June). The European Commission white paper on AI gets two more responses, from Facebook and from the Center for Data Innovation. Sergei Ivanov provides a breakdown of contributors for the upcoming International Conference on Machine Learning. Researchers have identified a new threat vector against neural networks, one that increases energy consumption and latency. And a follow-up with the Pulse upsampling tool shows a bias toward producing white faces, likely inherited from its training dataset, StyleGAN. In research, Denny Britz examines replicability issues in AI research, and how academic incentive systems are driving the AI research community toward certain types of research. The Marine Corps University Journal turns into the Journal of Advanced Military Studies, and its first issue focuses on innovation and future war. The Combat Studies Institute Press publishes On Strategy: A Primer, including a chapter on future war by Mick Ryan. And Major Nicholas Narbutovskih pens Dust, a story about two warring factions with different approaches to autonomous systems.