Media
Understand your Algorithm with Grad-CAM
Is AI just a black box that we started trusting enough to drive cars, detect diseases, identify suspects just because of the hype? You may have heard of the Netflix documentary, Coded Bias (you can watch the film here). The film criticizes deep learning algorithms for their inherent biases; specifically their failure to detect dark-skinned and female faces. The film suggests that the solution to the problem is in government. To "push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all."
Findings of the Shared Task on Offensive Span Identification from Code-Mixed Tamil-English Comments
Ravikiran, Manikandan, Chakravarthi, Bharathi Raja, Madasamy, Anand Kumar, Sivanesan, Sangeetha, Rajalakshmi, Ratnavel, Thavareesan, Sajeetha, Ponnusamy, Rahul, Mahadevan, Shankar
(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).
Racing tiny cars using only Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Thirteen university students from across Canada are in Ottawa to put their artificial intelligence skills to the test. It's called the Amazon Web Services DeepRacer League, where small 1/18th scale cars are being trained to complete a racetrack as fast as possible, by themselves. "It has major components in order to do the autonomous driving," says Amanda Foo, DeepRacer Senior Technical Program Manager. They are driven by what is called reinforcement learning. "It's just like training a dog," Carleton University mechanical engineering student Masoud Karimi says.
Sonos launches cheaper Ray soundbar and new voice control system
Sonos, the wireless home-audio specialist, is launching a lower-cost model of its popular TV soundbars alongside its own new voice control system for its smart speakers after its public bust-up with Google. The new Ray soundbar is a more compact version of Sonos's popular Arc and Beam models, designed to fit neatly in TV stands without affecting sound quality. It connects to a TV through an optical cable, has wifi for streaming music and can be controlled with the Sonos app or a TV remote. The Ray will cost £279 in the UK or $279 in the US from 7 June, sitting below the £449 Beam as the firm's most affordable model. It has two tweeters and two midwoofer speakers, along with the company's Trueplay smart tuning system, promising balanced sound with solid bass and crisp dialogue.
The new Sonos voice assistant seems faster than the competition
Sonos devices have supported Amazon's Alexa voice assistant for almost five years now. The Sonos One from 2017 was the first speaker the company made with built-in microphones, and almost every speaker it's made since has worked with Alexa, not to mention Google Assistant. Despite supporting those popular services, though, Sonos has decided to build its own voice assistant. Dubbed Sonos Voice Control, the feature is specifically designed to work with music only, so this isn't exactly a competitor to Alexa and Google Assistant. Instead, it's meant to control your music as quickly as possible, and with privacy in mind.
More Wear OS watches are coming from Fossil, Montblanc and Samsung
After launching a new version of Wear OS in collaboration with Samsung last I/O, Google is back with more updates. At this year's I/O developer conference, the company unveiled features coming to Android 13 and a new Google Wallet, as well as emergency SOS coming to Wear OS. Google also shared that there are now three times more Wear OS devices this year as there were last year and that new devices from Samsung, Montblanc, Mobvoi and Fossil are coming. Google didn't provide much detail about those devices, though it did later say that more third-party apps were also coming to Wear OS, including SoundCloud and Deezer. Samsung published a blog post sharing that Galaxy Watch 4 owners can soon download the Google Assistant for "faster and more natural voice interactions, enabling quick answers and on-the-go help."