The new Anthony Bourdain documentary, "Roadrunner," is one of many projects dedicated to the larger-than-life chef, writer and television personality. But the film has drawn outsize attention, in part because of its subtle reliance on artificial intelligence technology. Using several hours of Bourdain's voice recordings, a software company created 45 seconds of new audio for the documentary. The AI voice sounds just like Bourdain speaking from the great beyond; at one point in the movie, it reads an email he sent before his death by suicide in 2018. "If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don't know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI, and you're not going to know," Morgan Neville, the director, said in an interview with The New Yorker.

Every company may want to put artificial intelligence to work, but most companies aren't blessed with the ability to hire battalions of data scientists–nor is that necessarily the right approach. As Gartner analyst Svetlana Sicular once argued, often the best possible data scientist is the person you already employ who knows your data and simply needs help figuring out how to unlock it. For many business line owners, it's this kind of approach that may make the most sense, as they seek to be smarter with the data they already have. One company working to enable this vision is Cambridge, Massachusetts-based machine learning startup Akkio, which pairs AI with low code in an attempt to democratize AI. I caught up with company co-founder and COO Jon Reilly to learn more.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Women in the AI field are making research breakthroughs, spearheading vital ethical discussions, and inspiring the next generation of AI professionals. We created the VentureBeat Women in AI Awards to emphasize the importance of their voices, work, and experience, and to shine a light on some of these leaders. In this series, publishing Fridays, we're diving deeper into conversations with this year's winners, whom we honored recently at Transform 2021. Briana Brownell, winner of VentureBeat's Women in AI entrepreneur award, didn't enter this field to earn accolades.

Yesterday Olga Tokarczuk (2018 Nobel Prize in Literature) said in an interview that when she thinks about literature, she no longer thinks about books!!! So, how should we effectively tell the most important story in predictive modelling i.e. We (MI2DataLab) are currently working on an exciting and interdisciplinary experiment combining a classic textbook with a comic book, combining a description of methods and software with a description of process, combining a description of a specific use-case about COVID-19 data analysis with universal best practices. These 52 page long teaching materials describe how to build a predictive model, compare the developed models, and use XAI to analyze them, plus a bonus -- how to deploy model with explanations in a similar form to https://crs19.pl/. The material is prepared as a starter for predictive modelling. The included code examples can be executed and experimented with on your own (the first version has examples in R, but there will be albo translation for Python).

Early reviews of the new documentary film ROADRUNNER about the late food mogul Anthony Bourdain were overwhelmingly positive. Upon its official release last week, though, it started to get some backlash particularly after filmmaker Morgan Neville said he used artificial intelligence technology to create some quotes in Anthony's voice. In an interview with The New Yorker, Neville explained how his team "created an A.I. model of his [Bourdain's] voice" because there were three quotes wanted for the film that had no previous recordings before. By sending a software company hours of recordings and footage, they were able to splice together these quotes in Anthony's voice. "If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don't know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you're not going to know," Neville told The New Yorker: "We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later."

One night last fall, unable to sleep, Joshua Barbeau logged onto a mysterious chat website called Project December. It was Sept. 24, around 3 a.m., and Joshua was on the couch, next to a bookcase crammed with board games and Dungeons & Dragons strategy guides. He lived in Bradford, Canada, a suburban town an hour north of Toronto, renting a basement apartment and speaking little to other people. A 33-year-old freelance writer, Joshua had existed in quasi-isolation for years before the pandemic, confined by bouts of anxiety and depression. Once a theater geek with dreams of being an actor, he supported himself by writing articles about D&D and selling them to gaming sites. Many days he left the apartment only to walk his dog, Chauncey, a black-and-white Border collie. Usually they went in the middle of the night, because Chauncey tended to get anxious around other dogs and people. They would pass dozens of dark, silent, middle-class homes. Then, back in the basement, Joshua would lay ...

TechRepublic's Karen Roby spoke with Jahanzaib Ansari, co-founder and CEO of Knockri, a behavioral skills assessment platform, about unconscious bias in artificial intelligence. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Karen Roby: I think what makes this really interesting and why I wanted to talk to you, Jahanzaib, is because your desire to create this company was rooted in your own personal story. Jahanzaib Ansari: I was actually applying to jobs and I wouldn't hear back from employers. I have a long, ethnic name, which is Jahanzaib, and so my co-founder, Maaz, is like, "Why don't you just anglicize it?"

Abstract--Language instruction plays an essential role in the natural language grounded navigation tasks. However, navigators trained with limited human-annotated instructions may have difficulties in accurately capturing key information from the complicated instruction at different timesteps, leading to poor navigation performance. In this paper, we exploit to train a more robust navigator which is capable of dynamically extracting crucial factors from the long instruction, by using an adversarial attacking paradigm. Specifically, we propose a Dynamic Reinforced Instruction Attacker (DR-Attacker), which learns to mislead the navigator to move to the wrong target by destroying the most instructive information in instructions at different timesteps. By formulating the perturbation generation as a Markov Decision Process, DR-Attacker is optimized by the reinforcement learning algorithm to generate perturbed instructions sequentially during the navigation, according to a learnable attack score. Then, the perturbed instructions, which serve as hard samples, are used for improving the robustness of the navigator with an effective adversarial training strategy and an auxiliary self-supervised reasoning task. Experimental results on both Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) and Navigation from Dialog History (NDH) tasks show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the visualization analysis shows the effectiveness of the proposed DR-Attacker, which can successfully attack crucial information in the instructions at different timesteps.

Google has always been the master of AI and today, the CEO of Google himself stated in an interview with BBC that Artificial Intelligence is man's greatest discovery. For the leader of the technology giant," in the next 25 years artificial intelligence and quantum computing will completely revolutionize our lives" he stated. Pichai compared AI to other discoveries like fire and electricity, explaining the change it will bring will be just as profound. Artificial intelligence is indeed a technology that leverages human cognitive processes in machines. Google and Amazon already are making use of it to carry out certain processes because it is faster than humans and makes fewer mistakes.

Thank you for joining us the bossy bees. I'm sitting down with Albert miles today to talk about artificial intelligence, or AI. We're excited for all the amazing capabilities this technology will bring. But we're talking about some of the insidious ways in which it can be applied. Don't forget to check out the bossy bees on Patreon for exclusive content on this podcast. Want me to go ahead? My name is Albert Myles. And I am what they call a knowledge program manager in customer content services for a large tech company, located in RTP. And that's a fancy way of saying that I am responsible for ensuring that the knowledge that's captured in support and in the development and in side of customer content is transferred to other areas effectively and efficiently. At the end of the day, I tell people, I try to help our company, learn what it already knows. And I try to help us organize what we already know. And then I help us try to distribute what all everything that we know. And it's a very, very, very new program, but I'm having fun getting it launched. And that's where we started together, and you've taken it miles and miles and miles away from where it started. And you are, I think, you know, I really dislike you putting that title on yourself, because you do so much more than, like your, your knowledge is far beyond that. And it does come together. It really does come together nicely. In your job, you know, but I think that the reason you're, you know, program has gone so far is because you bring so much experience like what we're talking about today, like you, you have such an affinity and inclination for technology that it brings a lot to the table. And then also married to something that you and I are both pretty passionate about, which is diversity, inclusion, Justice type of stuff.