Media
Ms Marvel: Trailblazing Muslim superhero goes gaming
"It's the representation in gaming I've waited for my whole life." Marvel's Avengers are assembling once again, not on the big screen, but for a blockbuster video game. It features many of the superheroes you might expect, including Iron Man, Hulk and Captain America. But they are joined by a new addition: Kamala Khan. The Muslim-American teenager of Pakistani heritage, who has shape-shifting abilities, is the latest character to adopt the Ms Marvel moniker.
Chinese state news agency unveils 'the world's first 3D AI anchor'
China's state news agency has revealed its first 3D AI-powered news anchor after replicating the looks and the actions of a human journalist with cutting-edge technologies. The virtual female presenter, branded as the world's first of its kind, can move around smoothly and display complex facial expressions. She can even change her outfits and hairstyles according to different scenarios, a spokesperson said. Beijing's state media has revealed'the world's first 3D AI news anchor' today after'cloning' a human reporter with cutting edge technologies. The virtual female presenter, branded as the world's first of its kind, can move around smoothly and display complex facial expressions The uncanny avatar (pictured), named Xin Xiaowei, was developed by Xinhua along with Sogou, a Chinese technology company specialising in web search.
Identifying a melody by studying a musician's body language
We listen to music with our ears, but also our eyes, watching with appreciation as the pianist's fingers fly over the keys and the violinist's bow rocks across the ridge of strings. When the ear fails to tell two instruments apart, the eye often pitches in by matching each musician's movements to the beat of each part. A new artificial intelligence tool developed by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab leverages the virtual eyes and ears of a computer to separate similar sounds that are tricky even for humans to differentiate. The tool improves on earlier iterations by matching the movements of individual musicians, via their skeletal keypoints, to the tempo of individual parts, allowing listeners to isolate a single flute or violin among multiple flutes or violins. Potential applications for the work range from sound mixing, and turning up the volume of an instrument in a recording, to reducing the confusion that leads people to talk over one another on a video-conference calls.
[D] The machine learning community has a toxicity problem
First of all, the peer-review process is broken. Every fourth NeurIPS submission is put on arXiv. There are DeepMind researchers publicly going after reviewers who are criticizing their ICLR submission. On top of that, papers by well-known institutes that were put on arXiv are accepted at top conferences, despite the reviewers agreeing on rejection. In contrast, vice versa, some papers with a majority of accepts are overruled by the AC.
Artificial Stupidity
Public debate about AI is dominated by Frankenstein Syndrome, the fear that AI will become superhuman and escape human control. Although superintelligence is certainly a possibility, the interest it excites can distract the public from a more imminent concern: the rise of Artificial Stupidity (AS). This article discusses the roots of Frankenstein Syndrome in Mary Shelley's famous novel of 1818. It then provides a philosophical framework for analysing the stupidity of artificial agents, demonstrating that modern intelligent systems can be seen to suffer from 'stupidity of judgement'. Finally it identifies an alternative literary tradition that exposes the perils and benefits of AS. In the writings of Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ASs replace, oppress or seduce their human users. More optimistically, Joseph Furphy and Laurence Sterne imagine ASs that can serve human intellect as maps or as pipes. These writers provide a strong counternarrative to the myths that currently drive the AI debate. They identify ways in which even stupid artificial agents can evade human control, for instance by appealing to stereotypes or distancing us from reality. And they underscore the continuing importance of the literary imagination in an increasingly automated society.
Unbiased Loss Functions for Extreme Classification With Missing Labels
Schultheis, Erik, Qaraei, Mohammadreza, Gupta, Priyanshu, Babbar, Rohit
The goal in extreme multi-label classification (XMC) is to tag an instance with a small subset of relevant labels from an extremely large set of possible labels. In addition to the computational burden arising from large number of training instances, features and labels, problems in XMC are faced with two statistical challenges, (i) large number of 'tail-labels' -- those which occur very infrequently, and (ii) missing labels as it is virtually impossible to manually assign every relevant label to an instance. In this work, we derive an unbiased estimator for general formulation of loss functions which decompose over labels, and then infer the forms for commonly used loss functions such as hinge- and squared-hinge-loss and binary cross-entropy loss. We show that the derived unbiased estimators, in the form of appropriate weighting factors, can be easily incorporated in state-of-the-art algorithms for extreme classification, thereby scaling to datasets with hundreds of thousand labels. However, empirically, we find a slightly altered version that gives more relative weight to tail labels to perform even better. We suspect is due to the label imbalance in the dataset, which is not explicitly addressed by our theoretically derived estimator. Minimizing the proposed loss functions leads to significant improvement over existing methods (up to 20% in some cases) on benchmark datasets in XMC.