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Female Pioneers in Data Science You May Not Know

#artificialintelligence

Whilst many will be familiar with our Women in AI lists which include those currently pushing boundaries in the present day, we thought we would put together a list of women who have been instrumental in the advancement of Computer Science and Data Science, providing the foundations for AI in the 21st Century. How many of the below are you familiar with? Dame Mary Cartwright was a University of Oxford Graduate in Mathematics at a time in which Women had only just been allowed to take degree classifications at the prestigious school. Mary then obtained a Yarrow fellowship at Cambridge University, later pursuing research in the theory of Functions through until her retirement in 1968, becoming one of the first to study what would later become known as Chaos theory. Cartwright had a distinguished career in analytic function theory and university administration, publishing over 100 papers on classical analysis, differential equations and related topological problems.


Replication Markets: Results, Lessons, Challenges and Opportunities in AI Replication

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The last decade saw the emergence of systematic large-scale replication projects in the social and behavioral sciences, (Camerer et al., 2016, 2018; Ebersole et al., 2016; Klein et al., 2014, 2018; Collaboration, 2015). These projects were driven by theoretical and conceptual concerns about a high fraction of "false positives" in the scientific publications (Ioannidis, 2005) (and a high prevalence of "questionable research practices" (Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn, 2011). Concerns about the credibility of research findings are not unique to the behavioral and social sciences; within Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are areas of particular concern (Lucic et al., 2018; Freire, Bonnet, and Shasha, 2012; Gundersen and Kjensmo, 2018; Henderson et al., 2018). Given the pioneering role of the behavioral and social sciences in the promotion of novel methodologies to improve the credibility of research, it is a promising approach to analyze the lessons learned from this field and adjust strategies for Computer Science, AI and ML In this paper, we review approaches used in the behavioral and social sciences and in the DARPA SCORE project. We particularly focus on the role of human forecasting of replication outcomes, and how forecasting can leverage the information gained from relatively labor and resource-intensive replications. We will discuss opportunities and challenges of using these approaches to monitor and improve the credibility of research areas in Computer Science, AI, and ML.


It's Morphin' Time! Combating Linguistic Discrimination with Inflectional Perturbations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Training on only perfect Standard English corpora predisposes pre-trained neural networks to discriminate against minorities from non-standard linguistic backgrounds (e.g., African American Vernacular English, Colloquial Singapore English, etc.). We perturb the inflectional morphology of words to craft plausible and semantically similar adversarial examples that expose these biases in popular NLP models, e.g., BERT and Transformer, and show that adversarially fine-tuning them for a single epoch significantly improves robustness without sacrificing performance on clean data.


Expert calls for protocols to keep alien viruses from infecting Earth after humans visit Mars

Daily Mail - Science & tech

It may sound like a plot from a science fiction film, but NASA and the world governments are concerned about alien viruses contaminating Earth. As the first humans prepare for the Mars mission, experts warn that protocols are necessary to keep extraterrestrial pollutants from hitchhiking on space ships and astronauts when returning home from the Red Planet. Stanford professor of aeronautics and astronautics Scott Hubbard said in an interview that the solution is'planetary protection'. Mechanical systems will have to undergo a combination of chemical cleaning and heat sterilization, while the tubes containing samples from Mars need to be treated'as though they are the Ebola virus until proven safe.' Hubbard also suggests that astronauts must be quarantine once they touch down on our planet, as the first men who visited the moon in the Apollo mission did. As the first humans prepare for the Mars mission, experts warn that protocols need to be created to keep extraterrestrial pollutants from hitchhiking on space ships and astronauts when returning home.


AI researcher had to remove basic grammar tools to get software to understand Donald Trump

Daily Mail - Science & tech

The developers of a speech recognition bot assigned to analyze the public statements of politicians hit a major stumbling block when it tried to make sense of Donald Trump. Built by a tech startup called FactSquared, the bot AI was assigned to go through more than 11 million words Trump has spoken or tweeted since 1976--in interviews, campaign speeches, media appearances, and social media posts. According to FactSquared's CEO Bill Frischling, the bot failed to understand Trump's speeches until he brought in a specialist to strip out all of the bot's grammar and syntax coding. The tech startup FactSquared created an AI bot to try and catalog and analyze Donald Trump's public appearances and interviews, but they were so incoherent and rambling the bot actually crashed. 'It was still trying to punctuate it like it was English, versus trying to punctuate it like it was Trump,' Frischling told The LA Times.


Boston Dynamics' 'Spot' robotic dog deployed in Singapore to remind people to keep a safe distance

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Boston Dynamics' robotic dog, Spot, is roving Singapore parks in an effort to remind pedestrians to remain a safe distance from one another. According to a statement from the country's National Parks Board, Spot will traverse a 4-mile swath of Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park during off-peak hours while playing a recorded message that reminds park-goers'observe safe distancing measures.' The bot will also be fitted with cameras that are'enabled with... video analytics' which will be used to estimate the number of people in the park. According to a statement, the cameras will not track or record specific individuals, and no personal data will be collected. MailOnline has reached out to Singapore's Government Technology Agency to find out more about the video analytics system equipped to the bot and will update with further information.


How To Win A Million Dollars Via Your AI And Meanwhile Benefit Humanity

#artificialintelligence

Make a million dollars via AI that benefits humanity. You might not realize that you are already sitting on a million dollars and merely need to embark on a relatively modest effort to turn the hidden treasure trove into an in-your-hands pile of cash. And at the same time be benefiting humanity. Well, in the second part, benefiting humanity, it's a core requirement to get the money and likely will be immediately followed by fame and acclaim if you like that kind of thing. There is a contest underway that promises a prize of $1,000,000 to someone or some entity that has managed to innovatively perform an outstandingly good deed with AI that demonstrably benefits humanity. It is legit and on the up-and-up.


Australian military gets first drone that can fly with artificial intelligence

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It's also the first aircraft "to be designed, engineered and manufactured in Australia in more than 50 years," Boeing said in a statement. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the drones will protect the country's pricier combat aircraft like F-35 stealth fighters and their pilots in the future, and drone production will help with a current crisis, fighting the effects of the coronavirus. "The Loyal Wingman program has helped support around 100 high-tech jobs in Australia. Such projects will be critical to bolster growth and support jobs as the economy recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic," Morrison said in a statement. The Australian government says it has invested about $40 million into the project.


Fastest Soft Robots To-Date Developed by Researchers

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Paolo Pirjanian is an Armenia born in Iran and fled to Denmark as a teen. From the time he was young, he was fascinated by computers and started coding in his bedroom. After getting his PhD in robotics, Paolo became an early leader in the field of consumer robotics who has 16 years of experience developing and commercializing cutting-edge home robots. He worked at NASA JPL and led world-class teams and companies at iRobot, Evolution Robotics, and others. In 2016, Paolo founded Embodied, Inc. with the vision to build socially and emotionally intelligent digital companions that improve care and wellness and support people in living better lives every day.


Technology for All by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate

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CAMBRIDGE โ€“ We live in a world with an ever-widening chasm between the skills of the "average" worker and the capabilities demanded by frontier technologies. Robots, software, and artificial intelligence have increased corporate profits and raised demand for skilled professionals. But they replace factory, sales, and clerical workers โ€“ hollowing out the traditional middle class. This "skills gap" contributes to deepening economic inequality and insecurity and ultimately to political polarization โ€“ the signal problems of our time. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court, heedless of the political consequences for Europe and Germany, has issued a ruling that risks sacrificing the euro and possibly even the European Union.