While 2021 was an exciting year for AI regarding innovations and new inventions, it was immune to controversies and scandals. In this article, we take a look at some of the most prominent ones that grabbed headlines. From the range of announcements made at the Tesla AI Day 2021, one that caught the fancy of a lot of people was the humanoid robot. Introduced in a unique manner, a human dressed in a white bodysuit and shiny mask did the news reveal during the event. Called Optimus, this humanoid robot, standing five feet eight inches and weighing 125 pounds, would be capable of performing repetitive tasks; the first prototype is likely to be released next year.

Recent text-to-image matching models apply contrastive learning to large corpora of uncurated pairs of images and sentences. While such models can provide a powerful score for matching and subsequent zero-shot tasks, they are not capable of generating caption given an image. In this work, we repurpose such models to generate a descriptive text given an image at inference time, without any further training or tuning step. This is done by combining the visual-semantic model with a large language model, benefiting from the knowledge in both web-scale models. The resulting captions are much less restrictive than those obtained by supervised captioning methods. Moreover, as a zero-shot learning method, it is extremely flexible and we demonstrate its ability to perform image arithmetic in which the inputs can be either images or text and the output is a sentence. This enables novel high-level vision capabilities such as comparing two images or solving visual analogy tests.

When people think of artificial intelligence, the images that often come to mind are of the sinister robots that populate the worlds of "The Terminator," "i, Robot," "Westworld," and "Blade Runner." For many years, fiction has told us that AI is often used for evil rather than for good. But what we may not usually associate with AI is art and poetry -- yet that's exactly what Ai-Da, a highly realistic robot invented by Aidan Meller in Oxford, central England, spends her time creating. Ai-Da is the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist, and on Friday she gave a public performance of poetry that she wrote using her algorithms in celebration of the great Italian poet Dante. The recital took place at the University of Oxford's renowned Ashmolean Museum as part of an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of Dante's death.

Robots have histories that extend far back into the past. Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots all find expression from the human imagination in works and contexts beyond Ovid (43 BCE to 17 CE) and the story of Pygmalion in cultures across Eurasia and North Africa. This long history of our human-machine relationships also reminds us that our aspirations, fears, and fantasies about emergent technologies are not new, even as the circumstances in which they appear differ widely. Situating these objects, and the desires that create them, within deeper and broader contexts of time and space reveals continuities and divergences that, in turn, provide opportunities to critique and question contemporary ideas and desires about robots and artificial intelligence (AI). As early as 3,000 years ago we encounter interest in intelligent machines and AI that perform different servile functions.

When people think of artificial intelligence, the images that often come to mind are of the sinister robots that populate the worlds of "The Terminator," "i, Robot," "Westworld," and "Blade Runner." For many years, fiction has told us that AI is often used for evil rather than for good. But what we may not usually associate with AI is art and poetry -- yet that's exactly what Ai-Da, a highly realistic robot invented by Aidan Meller in Oxford, central England, spends her time creating. Ai-Da is the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist, and on Friday she gave a public performance of poetry that she wrote using her algorithms in celebration of the great Italian poet Dante. The recital took place at the University of Oxford's renowned Ashmolean Museum as part of an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of Dante's death.

Precision medicine is a clinical approach for disease prevention, detection and treatment, which considers each individual's genetic background, environment and lifestyle. The development of this tailored avenue has been driven by the increased availability of omics methods, large cohorts of temporal samples, and their integration with clinical data. Despite the immense progression, existing computational methods for data analysis fail to provide appropriate solutions for this complex, high-dimensional and longitudinal data. In this work we have developed a new method termed TCAM, a dimensionality reduction technique for multi-way data, that overcomes major limitations when doing trajectory analysis of longitudinal omics data. Using real-world data, we show that TCAM outperforms traditional methods, as well as state-of-the-art tensor-based approaches for longitudinal microbiome data analysis. Moreover, we demonstrate the versatility of TCAM by applying it to several different omics datasets, and the applicability of it as a drop-in replacement within straightforward ML tasks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was once the stuff of science fiction. It is used in mobile phone technology and motor vehicles. But concerns have emerged about the accountability of AI and related technologies like machine learning. In December 2020 a computer scientist, Timnit Gebru, was fired from Google's Ethical AI team. She had previously raised the alarm about the social effects of bias in AI technologies.

House of Gucci, in theaters this week, is ostensibly a drama about the family behind the Italian fashion house, but it is soon clear what the movie is really about: accents. It's a showcase for stars like Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, and Al Pacino to test-drive their Italian and Italian-accented English, and critical reactions have been mixed, to say the least: Lady Gaga was slammed by one expert for sounding more Russian than Italian, and Jared Leto earned comparisons to a certain cartoon plumber. How fair is all this grousing? To get an expert's perspective on the matter, Slate spoke to Garrett Strommen, who runs a Los Angeles company that offers language lessons and dialect coaching, among other services. Strommen has worked as a dialect coach and consultant for TV, movies, commercials, video games, and more, and agreed to explain exactly what is going on with Gaga and Leto in House of Gucci. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. Heather Schwedel: Can you tell me about your background with Italian?

Dante's Divine Comedy has inspired countless artists, from William Blake to Franz Liszt, and from Auguste Rodin to CS Lewis. But an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet's death will be showcasing the work of a rather more modern devotee: Ai-Da the robot, which will make history by becoming the first robot to publicly perform poetry written by its AI algorithms. The ultra-realistic Ai-Da, who was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller and named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, was given the whole of Dante's epic three-part narrative poem, the Divine Comedy, to read, in JG Nichols' English translation. She then used her algorithms, drawing on her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis, to produce her own reactive work to Dante's. Ai-Da will perform the poems on Friday night at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.

Successful adoption of Edge AI requires understanding and integrating different elements in a way that this stack can be seamlessly deployed in the target environment. Implementing an Edge AI application requires an understanding of aspects like the tasks to be performed, hardware, frameworks, and models. For deep neural networks to run at the edge; hardware, frameworks, and tools need to work collectively. As edge AI applications vary according to the use case, these requirements need to be thought through for each of the scenarios. It is necessary to select proper hardware, frameworks, and tools that will be compatible with each other and the best suited for the use case. Below we discuss briefly a few of the frameworks, hardware processors, and development boards.