AI News Roundup — September 2019
by Gabriella Runnels and Macon McLean
The Opex AI 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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Serious Monkey Business
You know we’re nearing Peak AI when experts begin using facial recognition technology on chimps (though this isn’t even the first time we’ve covered animal facial recognition). The model in question, powered by a deep neural network and millions of chimp portraits, drastically outperforms human experts in both accuracy and speed when it comes to labeling the chimps and identifying their sex. Researchers say this new development could benefit the study of chimp populations and even help protect endangered species.
From Adversarial Networks to Adversarial Attacks
This month, one unlucky fellow found himself the victim of “one of the world’s first publicly reported artificial-intelligence heists.” After receiving an odd call from a man he thought was his boss, this employee of an unnamed British company transferred nearly a quarter million dollars to a “secret account.” Turns out, it wasn’t his boss at all, but a wily thief using voice synthesizing technology to convincingly mimic his boss’s speech.
BrAIniac
Passing an eighth-grade science test might not seem like a huge deal for a human, but for AI, it’s momentous. The ability to understand the language and logic of grade school exams has, until recently, been beyond the abilities of artificial intelligence. Just a few weeks ago, however, a new algorithm created in a Seattle research lab passed an eighth-grade exam with flying colors, and even scored high enough to earn a B on a twelfth-grade test.
Military Ethics: No Longer an Oxymoron?
The Pentagon is searching for qualified candidates to fill a new position that they think will play a vital role in the near future: military ethicist. As part of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), this new government employee would guide the defense department’s forays into artificial intelligence from both a moral perspective. While China appears to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to AI innovation for a number of reasons, the hope is that the Pentagon’s ethicist would monitor the propriety of not only AI initiatives, but data usage as well.
Facebook Creates Deepfake Detection Challenge
Facebook, criticized for their role in the spread of misinformation during previous elections, recently announced the creation of a dataset for a deepfake detection challenge, intended to find credible solutions to identifying fraudulent information and remove it from their platform. Built on these exclusively Facebook-created videos (starring paid actors who have given full consent) and run by The Partnership on AI, the competition will bestow an undetermined amount of prize money upon the individual or team with the best-performing deepfake detector, with the total purse in excess of $10,000,000. The dataset will be finalized during the International Conference of Computer Vision in October, and then will be released in full in December.
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 October for more of the most interesting developments in the AI community (from our point of view, of course).
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