Media
Out of the Echo Chamber: Detecting Countering Debate Speeches
Orbach, Matan, Bilu, Yonatan, Toledo, Assaf, Lahav, Dan, Jacovi, Michal, Aharonov, Ranit, Slonim, Noam
An educated and informed consumption of media content has become a challenge in modern times. With the shift from traditional news outlets to social media and similar venues, a major concern is that readers are becoming encapsulated in "echo chambers" and may fall prey to fake news and disinformation, lacking easy access to dissenting views. We suggest a novel task aiming to alleviate some of these concerns -- that of detecting articles that most effectively counter the arguments -- and not just the stance -- made in a given text. We study this problem in the context of debate speeches. Given such a speech, we aim to identify, from among a set of speeches on the same topic and with an opposing stance, the ones that directly counter it. We provide a large dataset of 3,685 such speeches (in English), annotated for this relation, which hopefully would be of general interest to the NLP community. We explore several algorithms addressing this task, and while some are successful, all fall short of expert human performance, suggesting room for further research. All data collected during this work is freely available for research.
Using Artificial Intelligence to Analyze Fashion Trends
Analyzing fashion trends is essential in the fashion industry. Current fashion forecasting firms, such as WGSN, utilize the visual information from around the world to analyze and predict fashion trends. However, analyzing fashion trends is time-consuming and extremely labor intensive, requiring individual employees' manual editing and classification. To improve the efficiency of data analysis of such image-based information and lower the cost of analyzing fashion images, this study proposes a data-driven quantitative abstracting approach using an artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm. Specifically, an A.I. model was trained on fashion images from a large-scale dataset under different scenarios, for example in online stores and street snapshots. This model was used to detect garments and classify clothing attributes such as textures, garment style, and details for runway photos and videos. It was found that the A.I. model can generate rich attribute descriptions of detected regions and accurately bind the garments in the images. Adoption of A.I. algorithm demonstrated promising results and the potential to classify garment types and details automatically, which can make the process of trend forecasting more cost-effective and faster.
Now your phone can become a robot that does the boring work
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- If any factory worker could program low-cost robots, then more factories could actually use robotics to increase worker productivity. This is because workers would be able to shift to taking on more varied and higher-level tasks, and factories could produce a greater variety of products. That's the idea behind a prototype smartphone app Purdue University researchers have developed that allows a user to easily program any robot to perform a mundane activity, such as picking up parts from one area and delivering them to another. The setup could also take care of household chores – no more plants dying because you forgot to water them. Purdue researchers present their research on the embedded app, called VRa, on June 23 at DIS 2019 in San Diego.
r/artificial - Yoshua Bengio Elected Royal Society Fellow
The Royal Society yesterday announced that Turing Award winner and director of MILA Yoshua Bengio has been elected as one of its new Fellows and Foreign Members. "As one of the founding fathers of deep learning, Yoshua Bengio is honoured this year. His work on neural networks and machine translation helped bring about the AI revolution transforming the 21st century," reads the Royal Society announcement.