Holiday Special: Enjoy A Wonderful Xmas Surrounded by AI!

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SyncedReview

4 min readDec 23, 2018

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Synced Holiday Exclusive
Interview with NeurIPS 2018 Best Paper Team -“Math Is Forever”
Synced had an exclusive interview with the NeurIPS 2018 best paper team, members of the University of Toronto and Vector Institute team led by Assistant Professor David Duvenaud, discussing their winning submission Neural Ordinary Differential Equations a math-based approach to designing deep learning models that is stimulating discussion across the machine learning community.
(Synced)

London’s Met Police Is Using Facial Recognition On Christmas Shoppers
Shoppers on some of London’s busiest streets will today be targeted by facial recognition software that can scan hundreds of faces a second. For eight hours today and tomorrow, the Metropolitan Police Service will be testing the system in and around Soho, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. The aim is to help control crime in the area, particularly the use of violence.
(Forbes)

These AI-generated Christmas Songs Are So Freakin’ Festive
Ding-a-ling. It’s impossible to escape the chiming melodies of holiday songs this time of year. Swedish AI company Made by AI decided we didn’t already have enough jangling Christmas melodies haunting our every move, so it set an artificial-intelligence system loose to create some new ones.
(CNET)

We Tried Teaching An AI to Write Christmas Movie Plots. Hilarity Ensued. Eventually.
Perhaps more than anyone, research scientist Janelle Shane popularized AI humor. You may have seen her work. During Halloween this year, she partnered with the New York Times to generate costume names with a neural network. The results — and illustrations — are pretty fantastic: “Sexy Minecraft Person” and “Vampire Chick Shark,” to name a few.
(MIT Technology Review)

Technology

Nevergrad: An open source tool for derivative-free optimization
“Most machine learning tasks — from natural language processing to image classification to translation and many others — rely on derivative-free optimization to tune parameters and/or hyperparameters in their models. To make this faster and easier, we have created and are now open-sourcing a Python3 library called Nevergrad.”
(Facebook)

Exploring Quantum Neural Networks
“Today we talk about two recent papers from the Google AI Quantum team that make progress towards understanding the power of quantum computers for learning tasks. The first constructs a quantum model of neural networks to investigate how a popular classification task might be carried out on quantum processors. In the second paper…”
(Google AI)

Open-sourcing DeepFocus, an AI-powered system for more realistic VR images
“We’re open sourcing DeepFocus, a new AI framework for rendering more realistic VR focus effects in real time. Facebook Reality Labs built DeepFocus to show DL can help render highly compute-intensive visuals in VR, and we’re using it in Half Dome.”
(Facebook AI)

Deconstructing BERT: Distilling 6 Patterns from 100 Million Parameters
“What goes on in the mind of BERT? Using an interactive visualization tool, we uncovered some surprisingly intuitive patterns.”
(Jesse Vig Blog)

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NeurIPS 2018 Through the Eyes of First-Timers
First-timers to NeurIPS can explore and enjoy a tech environment full of energy, innovations, and mind-blowing discussions among people studying and working in AI. However, with almost 9,000 attendees packing a single venue for a week, NeurIPS can also be a bit overwhelming. Synced asked NeurIPS 2018 attendees to share their first-timer experiences.
(Synced)

Ex-Google AI Chief Joins Apple’s Executive Team
Apple is ramping up its ambitious AI strategy, announcing today that John Giannandrea — the former Google AI Chief that Apple poached this April — has joined the company’s executive team as Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
(Synced)