The Low-Res Valley

In AI news, researchers from the University of Copenhagen develop a machine learning model that estimates the chances of risk of death due to COVID at various stages of a hospital stay, including a 80 percent accuracy whether a patient with COVID will require a respirator. The Joint AI Center has a double-announcement, with the Tradewind Initiative, which seeks to develop an acquisition ecosystem to speed the delivery of AI capabilities, and with Blanket Purchase Agreements for AI testing and evaluation services. Kaggle publishes a survey on the 2020 State of Data Science and ML, which examines information from ~2000 data scientists about their jobs and their experiences. PeopleTec releases an "Overhead MNIST," a dataset containing benchmark satellite imagery for 10 categories (parking lots, cars, plans, storage tanks, and others). Epic's Unreal Engine introduces the MetaHuman Creator for release later this year, which purports to create ultra-realistic visuals for virtual human characters; Andy uses the moment to describe the "Uncanny Valley," which the Epic tech might manage to leap out of. And researchers from Carnegie Mellon and George Washington show that, like language transformers, image representations contain human-like biases. In research, researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology create a Ramanujan Machine, which can generate conjectures for mathematical constants, without proof. Researchers demonstrate initial steps of reconstructing video from brain activity. The report of the week examines U.S. public opinion on AI, with views on declining support for development and divided views on facial recognition. DeepMind London approaches the topic of common sense from the viewpoint of animals. And the book of the week comes from the author of the aforementioned paper, Murray Shanahan, and his 2010 book Embodiment and the Inner Life.