White House technology official Michael Kratsios addresses scores of executives, experts and officials at a White House summit focusing on artificial intelligence in 2018. (White House OSTP Photo / Erik Jacobs)
The Trump administration is updating the Obama administration’s strategy for artificial intelligence to put more emphasis on public-private partnerships like the one forged this year by Amazon and the National Science Foundation.
Three years after the initial strategic plan for AI research and development was released, the update was issued online overnight. It makes tweaks in the seven policy priorities that were laid out in the waning days of the Obama White House, and adds public-private partnerships as an eighth priority.
Xnor engineer Oliver Krengel works with the AI2GO self-serve software platform. (Xnor Photo)
Now you too can put a little AI on your device, even if you’re not up on the ins and outs of artificial intelligence.
The way to do it is with AI2GO, a newly released self-serve software platform from Xnor.ai, a Seattle AI startup. AI2GO comes with a set of ready-to-go applications and deep-learning models that can be selected and downloaded with just a few clicks.
Ali Farhadi, Xnor’s co-founder and CXO (Chief Xnor Officer), told GeekWire that the platform is designed for developers and small companies that want to take advantage of AI tools such as face recognition or object classification without having to start from scratch.
“The problem of deploying AI is getting harder and harder, and it shouldn’t be that way,” Farhadi said.
Cornell University information scientist Solon Barocas, at right, speaks during a panel discussion on the ethics of artificial intelligence at Seattle University, while Carnegie Mellon University’s David Danks and Google researcher Margaret Mitchell look on. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
San Francisco’s board of supervisors took a significant step this week when it voted to ban the use of facial recognition software for law enforcement purposes, but such measures by themselves won’t resolve the ethical issues surrounding surveillance enabled by artificial intelligence.
At least those are the first impressions from a trio of experts focusing on the social implications of AI’s rapid rise.
SalesPal CEO Ashvin Naik, Google Cloud’s Chanchal Chatterjee, Audioburst’s Rachel Batish and T-Mobile’s Chip Reno discuss the future of artificial intelligence at the Global AI Conference in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Artificial intelligence can rev up recommendation engines and make self-driving cars safer. It can even beat humans at their own games. But what else will it do?
At today’s session of the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference, a panel of techies took a look at the state of AI applications — and glimpsed into their crystal balls to speculate about the future of artificial intelligence.
Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global innovation policy and communications, talks about Amazon’s “invention machine” at the Global AI Conference. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Taking advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning may be part of Paul Misener’s job as an Amazon executive, but he’s doing it for fun as well.
Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global innovation policy and communications, gave a personal endorsement for Amazon Web Services’ machine learning platform today at the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference in Seattle.
“Amazon SageMaker is a really cool service offered by Amazon Web Services,” he told the audience at the Washington State Convention Center. “This brings machine learning out to everyone, including me. I’ve done some fooling around with things on it, some hobby things.”
Erez Barak, senior director of product for Microsoft’s AI Division, speaks at the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Artificial intelligence can work wonders, but often it works in mysterious ways.
Machine learning is based on the principle that a software program can analyze a huge set of data and fine-tune its algorithms to detect patterns and come up with solutions that humans may miss. That’s how Google DeepMind’s Alpha Go AI agent learned to play the ancient game of Go (and other games) well enough to beat expert players.
But if programmers and users can’t figure out how AI algorithms came up with their results, that black-box behavior can be a cause for concern. It may become impossible to judge whether AI agents have picked up unjustified biases or racial profiling from their data sets.
That’s why terms such as transparency, explainability and interpretability are playing an increasing role in the AI ethics debate.
Transparency figures in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s “10 Laws of AI” as well — and Erez Barak, senior director of product for Microsoft’s AI Division, addressed the issue head-on today at the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference in Seattle.
“We believe that transparency is a key,” he said. “How many features did we consider? Did we consider just these five? Or did we consider 5,000 and choose these five?”
Social-media entrepreneur Sean Langhi poses a question for panelists during a discussion of AI bias. From left are University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, ChatMode’s Chad Oda, EqualAI’s Miriam Vogel, Microsoft’s Navrina Singh and LivePerson’s Alex Spinelli. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
It may not yet be clear how societies will guard against the potential downside of artificial intelligence — including algorithmic bias, invasions of privacy and unjustified profiling — but it’s already abundantly clear that safeguards are needed.
That’s the bottom line from April 17’s panel discussion on AI bias, presented in Seattle by EqualAI and LivePerson.
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, won the the Hire of the Year award at the 2014 GeekWire Awards. This year, AI innovations are getting their own category. (GeekWire Photo)
Artificial intelligence is one of the Seattle area’s fastest-growing tech frontiers, so it only makes sense for the field to get its own category at the GeekWire Awards.
Recognizing innovations in AI and its allied technologies, ranging from computer vision to machine learning and natural language processing, has always been a part of the big part of the awards, of course. In fact, some of 2019’s contenders for the top AI prize have shown up as finalists in previous years.
But there’s a new twist this year: We’ve split our traditional “Innovation of the Year” award into two categories, focusing on AI and health. The split shines a tighter spotlight on two areas of technology where the Pacific Northwest stands out.
The five finalists in this new category — Highspot, Mighty AI, Olis Robotics, Textio and Xnor — have already made names for themselves.
Facebook’s Yann LeCun, Mila’s Yoshua Bengio and Google’s Geoffrey Hinton share the 2018 Turing Award. (ACM Photos)
The three recipients of the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2018 Turing Award, known as the “Nobel Prize of computing,” are sharing the $1 million award for their pioneering work with artificial neural networks — but that’s not all they share.
Throughout their careers, the researchers’ career paths and spheres of influence in the field of artificial intelligence have crossed repeatedly.
Yann LeCun, vice president and chief AI scientist at Facebook, conducted postdoctoral research under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton, who is now a vice president and engineering fellow at Google. LeCun also worked at Bell Labs in the early 1990s with Yoshua Bengio, who is now a professor at the University of Montreal and an adviser for Microsoft’s AI initiative.
All three also participate in the Learning in Machines and Brains program sponsored by CIFAR, previously known as the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
In the March 27 award announcement, ACM credited the trio with rekindling the AI community’s interest in deep neural networks — thus laying the groundwork for today’s rapid advances in machine learning.
Harry Shum is Microsoft’s executive vice president for AI and research. (GeekWire Photo)
Microsoft will “one day very soon” add an ethics review focusing on artificial-intelligence issues to its standard checklist of audits that precede the release of new products, according to Harry Shum, a top executive leading the company’s AI efforts.
Shum, who is executive vice president of Microsoft’s AI and Research group, said companies involved in AI development “need to engineer responsibility into the very fabric of the technology.”
