AI News Roundup — November 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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A Stroll Through Time
Google Maps has long been an excellent tool for traveling virtually through the world (and even to other planets!), but now you can even use Google Maps to travel virtually through time. A new open-source project from Google Research allows users to see what different locations would have looked like at different points in history. The data for these historical models come from old fire insurance maps, and the open-source nature of the project means that anyone who has other historical maps or useful data sources can enhance the models at will.
Seeing AI to AI
It is reasonable to suggest that the fundamental purpose of AI should be to enhance human life and improve the world, and AI technologies that support people with disabilities certainly bolster our attempt to achieve this purpose. Microsoft recently built an app called Seeing AI, which people with visual impairments can use to identify objects in the world around them. Now, Microsoft is expanding this functionality with the ambitious goal of creating an AI that can identify objects “specific to that individual person” — for example, the app should be able to distinguish any old coat lying around from its user’s coat. Efforts like this have suffered from lack of data in the past, but through crowdsourcing and other creative strategies, new data sources to power these models are becoming more and more readily available.
AI See All
If you Google “Palantir,” one of the top questions that people ask is “Why is Palantir evil?” Palantir is a data analytics company that was founded in 2003 and was funded in part by the CIA. Palantir still does business with the CIA today, along with several other Western countries’ counter-terrorism organizations. Palantir executive Alex Karp has said that he believes “that Western civilization has rested on our somewhat small shoulders a couple of times in the last 15 years.” The name “Palantir” comes from the palantíri — the mystical stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that could be used to communicate across Middle-earth. This name is perhaps fitting, given that the power of the palantíri could be abused to see more than one rightfully should. For an in-depth look at this polarizing company, check out this article from The New York Times.
AI for PDEs ASAP
I took PDEs in college, and what I took away most vividly from that class is just how limited the scope of analytically solvable PDEs actually is. This is kind of a problem, since PDEs are incredibly useful in a number of fields. Naturally, practitioners turn to numerical methods, which are often very computationally intensive — and that’s where AI steps into the picture.
Experts at Caltech have just unveiled a best-in-class deep learning model for solving PDEs. By transforming outputs from standard 3D axes into Fourier space, the network was able to approximate PDE solution functions more quickly and accurately than before.
New DAIry Hits the Shelves
AI can compose music, write realistic text, conduct protein simulations for drug development, and solve mathematical equations more efficiently than ever before, but only now has it reached the final frontier: milk. A new vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, lactose-free milk just became available for sale at Whole Foods stores all across the country, and it was designed by AI. That’s right: AI built a milk. Primarily from cabbage and pineapple, no less!
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 December for more of the most interesting developments in the AI community (from our point of view, of course).
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