Cognitive Science

Abstract: Model efficiency has become increasingly important in computer vision. In this paper, we systematically study various neural network architecture design choices for object detection and propose several key optimizations to improve efficiency. First, we propose a weighted bi- directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN), which allows easy and fast multi- scale feature fusion; Second, we propose a compound scaling method that uniformly scales the resolution, depth, and width for all backbone, feature network, and box/class prediction networks at the same time. Based on these optimizations, we have developed a new family of object detectors, called EfficientDet, which consistently achieve an order-of-magnitude better efficiency than prior art across a wide spectrum of resource constraints. In particular, without bells and whistles, our EfficientDet-D7 achieves stateof- the-art 51.0 mAP on COCO dataset with 52M parameters and 326B FLOPS1, being 4x smaller and using 9.3x fewer FLOPS yet still more accurate ( 0.3% mAP) than the best previous detector.

Conventional DDNs are "growing wider and deeper, with the complexity growing from millions to hundreds of millions of parameters in the last few years," a DARPA presolicitation document says. "The basic computational primitive to execute training and inference functions in DNN is the multiply and accumulate (MAC) operation. As DNN parameter count increases, SOA networks require tens of billions of MAC operations to carry out one inference." This means that the accuracy of DNN "is fundamentally limited by available MAC resources," DARPA says. "Consequently, SOA high accuracy DNNs are hosted in the cloud centers with clusters of energy hungry processors to speed up processing. This compute paradigm will not satisfy many DoD applications which demand extremely low latency, high accuracy artificial intelligence (AI) under severe size, weight, and power constraints."

Prior to becoming a full-time musician, Grimes learned how to use the production software Logic for her neuroscience studies at Montreal's McGill University. The Vancouver native brought her unique perspective to Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast, where she spoke about artificial intelligence's growing capacity to create music. "I feel like we're in the end of art, human art." said Grimes, who is now going by the name c in reference to the speed of light. "Once there's actual AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), it's gonna be so much better at making art than us… Once AI can totally master science and art, which could happen in the next 10 years, probably more like 20 or 30 years." She also predicted that AI will reach a point when it will be building and creating art for itself.

A brain circuit that controls the compulsive drinking of alcohol has been discovered in mice, offering a hope of one day finding a cure for alcoholism in humans. Scientists have long sought to understand why some people are prone to develop drinking problems while others are not. The team's discovery in mice, if translated to humans, may provide doctors a way to reveal whether someone is likely to become a compulsive drinking later in life. Alcoholism is a chronic brain disease in which an individual drinks compulsively -- often accompanied by negative emotions. Whereas previous studies have focused on examining the brain after a drinking disorder develops, the researchers from the Salk Institute in California set out to prove that brain circuits can make some people more likely to be alcoholics.

For someone with a neurological disorder that impairs their movement, such as stroke or Parkinson's disease, getting to the doctor's office for a checkup can be difficult. What if a patient could just take a video clip of their movements with a smartphone app that interprets the video and sends the results to their doctor? Hardeep Ryait, Ian Whishaw and Artur Luczak, together with their colleagues from the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge, propose just that in their paper, Data-driven analyses of motor impairments in animal models of neurological disorders, published today in the prestigious journal, PLOS Biology. First, they asked people with special training to score the quality of reaches for food made by rats that had suffered a stroke that impaired their movements. They then provided this information to a state-of-the-art deep neural network, a type of machine learning that simulates the brain's neural network, so that it could learn to score the rats' reaching movements with human-expert accuracy.

Grimes appeared on the podcast Mindscape with the theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, discussing artificial intelligence, virtual personae, her production process, and more. Listen to the episode below. "I feel like we're in the end of art, human art," she tells Carroll. "Once there's actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they're gonna be so much better at making art than us...once AI can totally master science and art, which could happen in the next 10 years, probably more like 20 or 30 years." Grimes, who says she's "post-style," also details the birth of a new digital avatar, possibly named "War Nymph."

Then Alexa takes over basic household functions. And now a robot may be conducting your job interview. That's right--portions of corporate America are now using artificial intelligence ("AI") to conduct interviews of job applicants. How does this work, what are the risks and has there been a legislative response? And how would the Luddites respond to this?

As new technologies automate more traditional and routine tasks, executives and employees recognize that emotional intelligence (EI) skills – such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management – will be a key requisite for success in the years to come. While demand for EI skills is set to increase by six times in the next 3-5 years, recruitment and training in this area has mostly failed to adapt. This is set to leave many companies unable to reap the benefits EI offers in terms of employee satisfaction, revenue generation, lower attrition and cost reductions. The "Emotional intelligence – the essential skillset for the age of AI" report from the Capgemini Research Institute provides a global look at how companies view EI and recommends that they combine technology with the talent to develop relevant skills among their employees. Executives said employees need to develop EI skills so they can adapt to more client/person-facing roles (76%) and take on tasks requiring EI skills that cannot be automated (also 76%) such as empathy, influence and teamwork.

Female fruit flies get a boost in their long-term memory after mating thanks to a molecule found in male fly semen. This molecule – called the sex peptide – binds to the sperm of male flies and is passed on to females, where it travels from the reproductive tract to the brain. It was already known that this molecule, which is unique to fruit flies, alters behaviour. After mating, it changes what females prefer to eat and makes them reject future mating partners, for example. It does this by acting on nerve cells, or neurons, located throughout the body.