Life Is Like a Box of Matrices

Andy and Dave start with COVID-related AI news, and efforts from the Roche Data Science Coalition for UNCOVER (the United Network for COVID-19 Data Exploration and Research), which includes a dataset of a curated collection of over 200 publicly available COVID-19 related datasets; efforts from Akai Kaeru are included. The Biomedical Engineering Society publishes an overview of emerging technologies to combat COVID-19. Zetane Systems uses machine learning to search the DrugVirus database and information from the National Center for Biotechnology to identify existing drugs that might be effective against COVID. And researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are using machine learning to narrow down a space of 41 million compounds to identify candidates for further testing. And the IEEE hosted a conference on 9 July, "Does your COVID-19 tracing app follow you forever?" In non-COVID-related AI news, MIT takes offline the TinyImages dataset, due to its inclusion of derogatory terms and images. The second (actually first) wrongful arrest from facial recognition technology (again by the Detroit Police Department) comes to light. Appen Limited releases its annual "State of AI and ML" report, with a look at how businesses are (or aren't) considering AI technologies. Anaconda releases its 2020 State of Data Science survey results. And the International Baccalaureate Educational Foundation turn to machine learning algorithms to predict student grades, due to COVID-related cancelations of actual testing, and much to the frustration of numerous students and parents. Research from the Vector Institute and the University of Toronto tackles analogy and the Raven Progressive Matrices with an ensemble of three neural networks for objects, attributes, and relationships. Researchers at the University of Sydney and the Imperial College London have established CompEngine, a collection of time-series data (over 24,000 initially) from a variety of fields, and have placed them into a common feature space; CompEngine then self-organizes the information based on empirical properties. Garfinkel, Shevtsov, and Guo make Modeling Life available for free. Meanwhile, Russell and Norvig release the not-so-free 4th Edition of AI: A Modern Approach. Lex Fridman interviews Norvig in a video podcast. And the Elias Henriksen creates the Computer Prophet, which generates metaphors from a database of collected sayings.