AI News Roundup — May 2020
by Gabriella Runnels and Macon McLean
The AI News Roundup provides you with our take on the coolest and most interesting Artificial Intelligence (AI) news and developments each month. Stay tuned and feel free to comment with any stories you think we missed!
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The Data Don’t Lie
During these stressful times, many of us have turned to comfort food, takeout, and homemade baked goods to help get us through the days. Online, people joke (and perhaps genuinely fret) about the potential weight gain and detrimental health effects of such lifestyle changes. But how much do we really need to worry?
According to the data, our health isn’t suffering nearly as much as it may seem. Homecooked meals, hikes in nature, and home workouts are also part of the pandemic experience for many people around the world. So enjoy that homemade sourdough loaf, try out that YouTube yoga video, and remember that as long as you’re staying safe and healthy, you’re doing alright.
Supervise Your Machine Learning
In the field of AI, we know that models are only as good as the data we feed them. And when the data is suddenly weird, the models don’t always react well.
Unsurprisingly, data on human behavior over the past few months has been pretty atypical, and machine learning models that power various systems from marketing to supply chain management have encountered some serious issues. Just how great an impact these AI breakdowns will have on our daily lives remains to be seen, so it’s important to ensure that these algorithms don’t run amok without any human supervision.
CamerAI
While most think of AI as something done on a laptop, cloud servers, or state-of-the-art supercomputers, Sony has brought it to cameras. Featuring the first ever image sensor (the part of the camera that receives light to actually record visual information) with built-in AI, the IMX500 has built-in processing power that enables on-device computer vision computation.
Instead of recording images, sending them to a different device for assessment, and returning the computed results, the IMX500 can operate all on its lonesome for reduced latency and a lower risk of information exposure. Although it’s limited to a few simple algorithms, this innovation is the beginning of a new journey into practical on-device AI.
RoboMonitoring Social Distancing
The last time we talked robot dogs, it was related to doing their training virtually and then transferring the model to the robopup itself. I doubt the virtual training prepared it for enforcing social distancing rules!
In Singapore, a robodog named SPOT has been deployed to public parks to calmly remind parkgoers of health guidelines. Equipped with cameras that can identify people in its field of view, the dog traverses uneven ground throughout parks to identify people who are too close for safety and cautions them against congregating too closely.
New Quarters for Data Labelers
Samasource, a data labeling company, employs many workers all across the globe who affix tags to images and text to aid machine learning classification tasks. Some of their employees live in Kenya, where large cities have seen very strict lockdowns thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic. This has resulted in a skyrocketing unemployment rate, since many of Nairobi’s and Mombasa’s citizens have jobs that include manual labor or other tasks that necessitate physical presence.
In response, Samasource has made deals with previously vacant local hotels to house workers for free. These hotels allow for ongoing virtual work, and they also provide a socially distant source of community for workers. Samasource has arranged for a nurse to take temperatures of workers daily, and meals are provided in-room.
That’s it for this month! In case you missed it, here’s last month’s roundup with even more cool AI news. Check back in June for more of the most interesting developments in the AI community (from our point of view, of course).
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