Underbyte

In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss research from MIT, BIM, and Harvard Medical School, which uses machine learning on Reddit posts to track the pandemic's impact on mental health. And the UK and is planning to use AI to spot dangerous side effects in COVID vaccinations. In non-COVID AI news, Andy and Dave take a look at how the AI-based poll predictions faired in the 2020 US election. The White House issues guidance for federal agencies on AI applications. The University of Copenhagen makes Carbontracker available, which provides an estimate of the energy consumption for training deep learning algorithms. DARPA selects 5 teams to head to the next phase of its Air Combat Evolution competition. And the 34th Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) plans for virtual proceedings in early December. In research, 40 authors from Google publish findings on the challenges of deploying an AI system into the real world, such as unexpectedly poor behavior, which they attribute to underspecification. The Marine Corps University Press releases the second volume of Destination Unknown. Andy's "vintage magazine of the week" is the April 1985 of Byte, which covered Artificial Intelligence. And Matt Stone and Trey Parker introduce Sassy Justice, a parody comedy which warns of the dangers of deepfakes, by itself being a series of deepfakes (including President Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Vice President Al Gore, and many others).