AI & RoboticsNews

AI Weekly: The trends that shaped 2020

December 29, 2020
A few days ago, I published a story about books that I read throughout the year to improve and inform my job covering artificial intelligence and adjacent industries. In all, the multi-part review contains nine books published in 2020 that explore subjects like business strategy, policy, and geopolitics, as well as the human rights consequences associated with AI deployments. Too Smart, for…
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AI & RoboticsNews

AI research survey finds machine learning needs a culture change

December 26, 2020
The machine learning community, particularly in the fields of computer vision and language processing, has a data culture problem. That’s according to a survey of research into the community’s dataset collection and use practices published earlier this month. What’s needed is a shift away from reliance on the large, poorly curated datasets used to train machine learning models. Instead, the…
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AI & RoboticsNews

An AI reporter’s favorite books of 2020

December 24, 2020
The older I get, the more I wish I could stop time so I could read more books. Books that earn my time and attention are those that promise to enrich me as a person and deepen my understanding of AI for the work I do as senior AI staff writer at VentureBeat. This year, I…
AI & RoboticsNews

Let this eerily accurate AI dunk on your Spotify habits

December 24, 2020
If you’re a Spotify user, you might have checked out your 2020 listening data with Spotify Wrapped. It’s a straightforward celebration of your year in music and podcasts, a judgement-free overview of what you listened to. The Pudding, however, is distorting that mirror a bit, with a bot that roasts you for the music that got you through 2020. In Spotify’s book (and mine)…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google told its AI research scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ on sensitive topics

December 23, 2020
(Reuters) — Alphabet’s Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists’ papers by launching a “sensitive topics” review, and in at least three cases requested that authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications and interviews with researchers involved in the work. Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers…
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