Some of The Best AI Content of 2018

There’s a lot of content produced on artificial intelligence on a daily basis. Across the team, we receive dozens of newsletters, listen to quite a few podcasts, and share a wide variety of other content.

Many topics have sparked conversations, inspired ideas and got us thinking critically about what we are doing.

We thought we’d share some of the best of what we’ve read in 2018, as most of us will have time to catch up over the holidays.

Here are our top picks for some of the best content that went out in 2018:

Podcasts

• Y Combinator podcast discussing AI public policy & perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be0NSfPRoWg
• The a16z podcast is another great one that discusses tech and culture trends, news, and the future. Our picks for standout episodes:
• “Seeing into the Future — Making Decisions, Telling Stories” released on September 8, 2018
• “Beyond Zero-Sum Thinking in the Game of Tech… and Life” released on July 6, 2018
• HBR (Harvard Business Review) Ideacast airs weekly and hosts some of the leading thinkers in business and management. A particularly interesting one is “How Alibaba Is Leading Digital Innovation in China” — released in September 201

Articles

• How should an algorithm solve the trolley problem? Turns out that it depends on where you’re from:https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612341/a-global-ethics-study-aims-to-help-ai-solve-the-self-driving-trolley-problem/
• This piece on AI outperforming lawyers in evaluating contracts is very indicative of the power AI has to eliminate a lot of our more mundane work:
  https://www.geek.com/tech/ai-beats-human-lawyers-at-their-own-game-1732154/
• The always brilliant Ben Evans defines ideas in machine learning in ways that anyone can understand: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/06/22/ways-to-think-about-machine-learning-8nefy
• OpenAI on how GPU clustering is accelerating deep learning faster than Moore’s Law: https://blog.openai.com/ai-and-compute/
• The “Is This AI?” flowchart is a fun take on what qualifies as AI: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612404/is-this-ai-we-drew-you-a-flowchart-to-work-it-out

Insight Reports

• Assessing the potential economic impact of artificial intelligence (ITU): https://www.itu.int/pub/S-GEN-ISSUEPAPER-2018-1
• Applying artificial intelligence for social good (Mckinsey): https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/artificial-intelligence/applying-artificial-intelligence-for-social-good
• AI Index Report 2018 (with the mission of grounding the conversation about AI in data): http://cdn.aiindex.org/2018/AI%20Index%202018%20Annual%20Report.pdf
• Development of the World AI Industry, 2018 (Gartner & Chinese Academy of Information Communications Technology): http://www.caict.ac.cn/kxyj/qwfb/bps/201809/P020180918696200669434.pdf

Scientific Papers

• Differentiable Architecture Search: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.09055
• Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
• Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02611
• Deep Inventory Time Translation to Improve Recommendations for Real-World Retail (by our very own Stradigi AI research team): https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3240380

Note: There are many more papers we could’ve include, this is but a very small sample! Many fantastic research papers are available online, all you have to do is search for them.

Videos/Talks

• Yann LeCun and Christopher Manning discuss deep learning and innate prior: https://youtu.be/fKk9KhGRBdI
• Erik Brynjolfsson presents his research on what capabilities machine learning can currently automate in the workplace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txhAqVez0hI
• Joe Rogan Experience with Dr. Ben Goertzel is fascinating interview, with one of AI’s most interesting characters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qfB8clUIaY

We expect a great many more advancements in the AI space in 2019, with many coming from our hometown, Montreal. As we continue to thrive, we hope that as an industry we remain dedicated to to breaking down barriers and pushing technological advancement in a equitable and ethical way.

Happy holiday reading!

Stradigi AI is currently in hyper growth and looking for smart, driven and enthusiastic people to join our team. Contact us today!