Journey to the Cause of Reason

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news, including research from the San Diego School of Medicine, which used an AI algorithm to analyze terabytes of gene expression data in response to viral infections, identifying 20 genes that predict the severity of a patient's response (across many different viruses). Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announces a new AI and Data Acceleration initiative, which includes operational data teams and flyaway technical experts. China says it has AI fighter jet pilots that can beat human pilots in simulated dogfights. A study from Stanford estimates the density of CCTV cameras in large cities around the globe (by using computer vision algorithms on street view image data). NIST held a workshop on AI Measurement and Evaluation, with an interesting 22-page read-ahead document. Appen updates its State of AI and Machine Learning report, examining various business-related views and metrics on AI, showing a general maturing of the AI market. Researchers from Tubingen and Max Planck show that the behavioral difference between human and machine vision is narrowing, but still has room for improvement (particularly with out-of-distribution data). Researchers from Stanford, University of College London, and MIT develop a counterfactual simulation model to provide quantitative predictions on how people think about causation, possibly serving as a bridge between psychology and AI. Adam Wagner uses a reinforcement learning approach to search for examples that would disprove conjectures in graph theory and finds examples that disprove five such conjectures. Justin Solomon's Numerical Algorithms provides the core methods for machine learning. And Budiansky publishes a look at the life of Kurt Gödel, in Journey to the Edge of Reason.