Cosmic Log
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.
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.
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.
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.
AI ethics will join privacy, security and accessibility on the list, Shum said today at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco.
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.”
For months, the White House has been talking up artificial intelligence as one of America’s most important tech frontiers. Now we’re starting to see some of the dollar signs behind the talk.
In newly released budget documents, the Trump administration says it wants to split $850 million in civilian federal spending on AI research and development between the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Energy Department.
This is in addition to $927 million in Defense Department spending requests for AI and machine learning, including $208 million for the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.
China wants to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030 — but a new analysis by Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, suggests that Chinese researchers are on track to take the lead well before that.
The analysis is based on a tally of the most impactful research papers in the AI field, as measured by AI2’s Semantic Scholar academic search engine.
“If current trends continue, within five years, China will surpass us in terms of the top, highest-impact papers,” the institute’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, told GeekWire. “The other thing to realize is that citations are what you might call a lagging indicator, because the paper has to be published, people have to read it, and they have to write their own paper and cite it.”
Do we need a National Algorithm Safety Board? How about licensing the software developers who work on critical artificial intelligence platforms? Who should take the lead when it comes to regulating AI? Or does AI need regulation at all?
The future of AI and automation, and the policies governing how far those technologies go, took center stage today during a policy workshop presented by Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2. And the experts who spoke agreed on at least one thing: Something needs to be done, policy-wise.
“Technology is driving the future — the question is, who is doing the steering?” said Moshe Vardi, a Rice University professor who focuses on computational engineering and the social impact of automation.
We’ve got Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant — so do we really need more synthesized voices to do our bidding?
Absolutely, say the founders of WellSaid Labs, a startup that’s being spun out from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (also known as AI2).
“We’re just solving a different problem,” co-founder and chief technology officer Michael Petrochuk told GeekWire. “Alexa and Google Home are trying to solve the problem of clearly, slowly communicating — pronouncing everything the same way, in a monotone format so it could be understood by everyone.”
WellSaid, in contrast, is developing a stable of AI-powered voices customized for different context, and sounding so lifelike that you wouldn’t believe they’re robots. During a recent video demonstration for a roomful of AI aficionados, most folks guessed that the images were generated by an algorithm, but not the voices.
It may seem as if everyone’s already on the bandwagon for artificial intelligence and machine learning, with players ranging from giants like Amazon and Microsoft to startups like Xnor.ai and Canotic — but the head of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, says there’s still plenty of room to climb aboard.
“Let me assure you, if you have a machine learning-based startup in mind … you’re not late to the party,” AI2’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, told more than 70 people who gathered Feb. 26 at Create33 in downtown Seattle for a Startup Grind event.
Etzioni had a hand in getting the party started back in 2004, with the launch of a startup called Farecast that used artificial intelligence to predict whether airline fares would rise or fall. The company was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $115 million and has since faded into the ether. But Etzioni said the basic approach, which involves analyzing huge amounts of data to identify patterns and solve problems, is just hitting its stride.
The potential applications range from spam detection and voice recognition to health care, construction and self-driving cars.
“It’s really a versatile technology, and we’re going to see more and more startups based on machine learning,” Etzioni said.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — When the first human explorers head for Mars, they’re likely to have a non-human judging their performance and tweaking their interpersonal relationships when necessary.
NASA and outside researchers are already working on artificial intelligence agents to monitor how future long-duration space crews interact, sort of like the holographic doctor on “Star Trek: Voyager.” But there’ll also be a need for the human touch — in the form of crew members who could serve the roles of social directors or easygoing jokesters.
That’s the upshot of research initiatives discussed over the weekend here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.