Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Africa


The US Has a Plan to Document Human Rights Violations in Ukraine

WIRED

The US government has said it will fund data-gathering on the conflict in Ukraine. In addition to laying the groundwork for war-crime prosecutions, the move would share critical, real-time data with humanitarian organizations. The newly established Conflict Observatory will use open source investigation techniques (OSINT) and satellite imagery to monitor the conflict in Ukraine and collect evidence of possible war crimes. Outside organizations and international investigators would be able access the resulting database, a US State Department spokesperson confirmed in an email. Partners for the Conflict Observatory include Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, artificial intelligence company PlanetScape Ai, and Esri, a geographic information systems company, according to a State Department press release.


What can we learn from a new documentary on Elon Musk?

The Guardian

You could be forgiven for believing that we've already achieved the era of autonomous vehicles. Tesla, the electric car manufacturer run by Elon Musk, refers to a version of its Autopilot software as "Full Self Driving". The company released a (misleadingly edited) video of an autonomous vehicle navigating city streets, its drivers' hands on their lap – a style replicated by enthusiasts. Musk has repeatedly assured in speeches and interviews that autonomous vehicles were one to two years away – or, as he put it in 2015, a "solved problem" because "we know what to do and we'll be there in a few years." But the existing Autopilot technology has not yet realized those promises and, as a new New York Times documentary illustrates, the gap in expectation and reality has led to several deadly crashes.


A Tale of Two Flows: Cooperative Learning of Langevin Flow and Normalizing Flow Toward Energy-Based Model

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper studies the cooperative learning of two generative flow models, in which the two models are iteratively updated based on the jointly synthesized examples. The first flow model is a normalizing flow that transforms an initial simple density into a target density by applying a sequence of invertible transformations. The second flow model is a Langevin flow that runs finite steps of gradient-based MCMC toward an energy-based model. We start from proposing a generative framework that trains an energy-based model with a normalizing flow as an amortized sampler to initialize the MCMC chains of the energy-based model. In each learning iteration, we generate synthesized examples by using a normalizing flow initialization followed by a short-run Langevin flow revision toward the current energy-based model. Then we treat the synthesized examples as fair samples from the energy-based model and update the model parameters with the maximum likelihood learning gradient, while the normalizing flow directly learns from the synthesized examples by maximizing the tractable likelihood. Under the short-run non-mixing MCMC scenario, the estimation of the energy-based model is shown to follow the perturbation of maximum likelihood, and the short-run Langevin flow and the normalizing flow form a two-flow generator that we call CoopFlow. We provide an understating of the CoopFlow algorithm by information geometry and show that it is a valid generator as it converges to a moment matching estimator. We demonstrate that the trained CoopFlow is capable of synthesizing realistic images, reconstructing images, and interpolating between images. Normalizing flows (Dinh et al., 2015; 2017; Kingma & Dhariwal, 2018) are a family of generative models that construct a complex distribution by transforming a simple probability density, such as Gaussian distribution, through a sequence of invertible and differentiable mappings. Due to the tractability of the exact log-likelihood and the efficiency of the inference and synthesis, normalizing flows have gained popularity in density estimation (Kingma & Dhariwal, 2018; Ho et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2019; Prenger et al., 2019; Kumar et al., 2020) and variational inference (Rezende & Mohamed, 2015; Kingma et al., 2016).


Royal Mail is building 500 drones to carry mail to remote communities

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Royal Mail is building a fleet of 500 drones to carry mail to remote communities all over the UK, including the Isles of Scilly and the Hebrides. The postal service, which has already conducted successful trials over Scotland and Cornwall, will create more than 50 new postal drone routes over the next three years as part of a new partnership with London company Windracers. Drones, or UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles), can help reduce carbon emissions and improve the reliability of island mail services, Royal Mail claims. They offer an alternative to currently-used delivery methods that can be affected by bad weather – ferries, conventional aircraft and land-based deliveries. They can also take off from any flat surface (sand, grass or tarmac) providing it is long enough.


Google Translate adds 24 new languages

BBC News

"For many supported languages, even the largest languages in Africa that we have supported - say like Yoruba, Igbo, the translation is not great. It will definitely get the idea across but often it will lose much of the subtlety of the language," Google Translate research scientist Isaac Caswell told the BBC.


Machine Learning Execution is a Directed Acyclic Graph

#artificialintelligence

As we continue to develop machine learning Operations (MLOps), we need to think of machine learning (ML) development and deployment flow as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). DAG is a scary acronym, but so are LTSM, DNN, backward propagation, GAN, transformer, and many others. I think using "pipeline" is wrong. The problem with "pipeline" is that it is slang. I can assure you the human brain is not a "pipeline."


Findings of the Shared Task on Offensive Span Identification from Code-Mixed Tamil-English Comments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

(Sivanantham and Seran, 2019). It is widely spoken in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India, Combating offensive content is crucial for different Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore. Tamil is an entities involved in content moderation, which official language of Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Singapore, includes social media companies as well as individuals and the Union Territory of Puducherry in (Kumaresan et al., 2021; Chakravarthi and India. Significant minority speak Tamil in the four Muralidaran, 2021). To this end, moderation is other South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, often restrictive with either usage of human content Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, as well as the moderators, who are expected to read through Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands the content and flag the offensive mentions (Arsht (Sakuntharaj and Mahesan, 2021, 2017, 2016; and Etcovitch, 2018). Alternatively, there are Thavareesan and Mahesan, 2019, 2020a,b, 2021).


How 10 Skin Tones Will Reshape Google's Approach to AI

WIRED

For years, tech companies have relied on something called the Fitzpatrick scale to classify skin tones for their computer vision algorithms. Originally designed for dermatologists in the 1970s, the system comprises only six skin tones, a possible contributor to AI's well-documented failures in identifying people of color. Now Google is beginning to incorporate a 10-skin tone standard across its products, called the Monk Skin Tone (MST) scale, from Google Search Images to Google Photos and beyond. The development has the potential to reduce bias in data sets used to train AI in everything from health care to content moderation. Google first signaled plans to go beyond the Fitzpatrick scale last year; internally, the project dates back to a summer 2020 effort to make AI "work better for people of color," according to a Twitter thread from Xango Eyeé, a responsible AI product manager at the company.


Google's Immersive View for Maps looks incredible

PCWorld

For years, users of Google Maps have had numerous tools to navigate the planet: Street View, 3D representations, and more. Now Google is adding Immersive View, combining real-world imagery and artificial intelligence to make 3D maps even more lifelike. Google made the announcement at Google I/O, its annual developer conference, held for the first time in three years at the Shoreline Ampitheatre in Mountain View, Calif. "Around the world, we've mapped around 1.6 billion buildings, and over 60 million kilometers of roads today," Pichai said. "Some remote and rural areas have previously been difficult to map due to scarcity of high-quality imagery, and distinct building types and terrain.


The Charlettes: An AI engineer in Ivory Coast and Ghana

Al Jazeera

Charlette Désiré N'Guessan comes from an intriguing family, where all the women share the same name: Charlette. It is confusing, and also a little ironic, since she is a software engineer who has invented a facial recognition app. In The Charlettes, by filmmaker Gauz, we see how this particular Charlette has made an impact in the tech world in Ivory Coast and Ghana, winning prizes and plaudits for her artificial intelligence (AI) identity invention. Gbaka-Brede Armand Patrick, known professionally as Gauz, is a multidisciplinary and self-proclaimed iconoclastic artist, based in Ivory Coast.