Unless you're an English speaker, and one with as neutral an American accent as possible, you've probably butted heads with a digital assistant that couldn't understand you. With any luck, a couple of open-source datasets from MLCommons could help future systems grok your voice. The two datasets, which were made generally available in December, are the People's Speech Dataset (PSD), a 30,000-hour database of spontaneous English speech; and the Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC), a dataset of some 340,000 keywords in 50 languages. By making both datasets publicly available under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses, MLCommons hopes to democratize machine learning – that is to say, make it available to everyone – and help push the industry toward data-centric AI. David Kanter, executive director and founder of MLCommons, told Nvidia in a podcast this week that he sees data-centric AI as a conceptual pivot from "which model is the most accurate," to "what can we do with data to improve model accuracy."

The saying "data is the new oil," was reportedly coined by British mathematician and marketing whiz Clive Humby in 2006. Data is the fuel powering modern AI models; without enough of it the performance of these systems will sputter and fail. And like oil, the resource is scarce and controlled by big businesses. What do you do if you're a small computer vision company? You can turn to fake data to train your models, and if you're lucky it might just work.

It's become increasingly clear that quantum computers won't have a single moment when they become clearly superior to classical hardware. Instead, we're likely to see them becoming useful for a narrow set of problems and then gradually expand out from there to an increasing range of computations. The question obviously becomes one of where the utility will be seen first. The quantum-computing startup Rigetti now has a white paper that identifies, at least theoretically, a case when quantum hardware should offer an advantage. And it is actually useful: replacing a neural network that's used for analyzing weather data.

LOS ANGELES/WASHINGTON, Nov 15 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When the sheriff in Suffolk County, New York, requested $700,000 from the U.S. government for an artificial intelligence system to eavesdrop on prison phone conversations, his office called it a key tool in fighting gang-related and violent crime. But the county jail ended up listening to calls involving a much wider range of subjects - scanning as many as 600,000 minutes per month, according to public records from the county obtained by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Beginning in 2019, Suffolk County was an early pilot site for the Verus AI-scanning system sold by California-based LEO Technologies, which uses Amazon speech-to-text technology to transcribe phone calls flagged by key word searches. The company and law enforcement officials say it is a crucial tool to keep prisons and jails safe, and fight crime, but critics say such systems trample the privacy rights of prisoners and other people, like family members, on the outside. "The ability to surveil and listen at scale in this rapid way - it is incredibly scary and chilling," said Julie Mao, deputy director at Just Futures Law, an immigration legal group.

Gebru said she hopes to use the funding to break free of the broken incentives of Big Tech, where she said outspoken researchers can be sidelined, potential harms are evaluated only after an AI system is in use and profitable AI projects -- such as large language models, the subject of Gebru's contested paper at Google -- are treated as inevitable once they have been deployed in the real world. There was little consideration for concepts like AI applications that did not use big data sets, or focused on less profit-oriented aims, such as language revitalization, she said.

ISM001-055 demonstrated highly promising results in multiple preclinical studies including in vitro biological studies, pharmacokinetic and safety studies. The compound significantly improved myofibroblast activation which contributes to the development of fibrosis. ISM001-055's novel target is potentially relevant to a broad range of fibrotic indications. "We are very pleased to see Insilico Medicine's first antifibrotic drug candidate entering into the clinic. We believe this is a significant milestone in the history of AI-powered drug discovery because to our knowledge the drug candidate is the first ever AI-discovered novel molecule based on an AI-discovered novel target. We have leveraged our end-to-end AI-powered drug discovery platform, including the usage of generative biology and generative chemistry, to discover novel biological targets and generate novel molecules with drug-like properties. ISM001-055 is the first such compound to enter the clinic, and we expect more to come in the near future," said Feng Ren, Ph.D., CSO of Insilico Medicine.

Robots that do everything from helping people get dressed in the morning to washing (and putting away) the dishes have been a dream for as long people have uttered the words "artificial intelligence." But, in a field where the state of the art currently rests far short of that level of sophistication, a fundamental challenge has emerged: Namely, what will "success" even look like, should the day come when robots are able to perform these key tasks to human standards. To do these mundane but surprisingly complex tasks, a robot must be able to perceive, reason, and operate with full awareness of its own physical dimension and capabilities, but also of the world and objects around it. In robotics, this combination of situational and physical awareness and capability is known as embodied AI. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Stanford University has released the Benchmark for Everyday Household Activities in Virtual, Interactive, and Ecological Environments (BEHAVIOR).

As scientists laid the foundations of artificial intelligence, Pamela McCorduck was there. McCorduck, an author who wrote some of the first novels and histories about AI and was a generous friend of CMU, died Oct. 18. McCorduck described herself as an eyewitness to the birth and growth of AI. She was possibly best known for her 1979 book, "Machines Who Think," which chronicles the history of AI from the dreams and nightmares of ancient poets and prophets to the scientific discoveries of the 20th century. The novel contains the famous quote, "Artificial intelligence began with the ancient wish to forge the gods."

Many people considered it a "formless blur of colors," an image that was abstract but slightly resembling a human face. The image isn't even properly positioned on the canvas, rather it is skewed towards the northwest. In October 2018, this "art piece": Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an algorithm-generated print, was sold for $432,500, thus beginning the AI-Art goldRush. Humans have always created and enjoyed all forms of art, for viewing purposes, for aesthetic purposes, and even for therapeutic purposes. Since the discoveries of an artistic shell carved by homoerectus, the art business has grown in leaps and bounds and become a highly profitable industry.

The Hoover Institution's Condoleezza Rice and HAI Co-Director Fei-Fei Li discuss AI ethics, technology advances, and the...