Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s not only the lost jobs that are reshaping work in the wake of COVID-19; the of many of the remaining jobs has…
Using AI to uncover “risky” behaviors among parolees is problematic on many levels. Nevertheless, researchers will soon embark on an ill-conceived effort to do so at Tippecanoe County Community Corrections in Indiana. Funded by a grant from the Justice Department and in…
A team of AI researchers have created a way for humans to train robots to use cheap, freely available materials in order to scale the collection of training data and enable widespread adoption. The experiment utilizes reacher-grabber devices on a pole, the kind people with…
Researchers use AI classifiers to expose potential vulnerabilities in Microsoft remote desktop
August 13, 2020
Microsoft’s encrypted Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) contains vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to detect activities, keystrokes, and mouse movements in 30-second traces. That’s according to a preprint study from researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, who claim the protocol’s design exposes “fine-grained” actions on which machine learning models could be…
What Kamala Harris’ record says about major AI policy issues
August 13, 2020
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden chose Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) to be his vice presidential running mate today. Born in Oakland, California and raised in Berkeley, Harris is the first African American woman and first Asian American woman to be chosen as a U.S.
Researchers claim bias in AI named entity recognition models
August 13, 2020
Twitter researchers claim to have found evidence of demographic bias in named entity recognition, the first step toward generating automated knowledge bases, or the repositories leveraged by services like search engines. They say their analysis reveals AI performs better at…
Research shows natural language benchmarks don’t measure AI models’ general knowledge well
August 13, 2020
Open-domain question-answering models — models theoretically capable of responding to novel questions with novel answers — often simply memorize answers found in the data on which they’re trained, depending on the data set. That’s the assertion of a team of researchers affiliated with Facebook and the University College London, who in a preprint paper present evidence that 60%-70% of…
Research shows natural language benchmarks don’t measure AI models’ general knowledge well
August 13, 2020
Open-domain question-answering models — models theoretically capable of responding to novel questions with novel answers — often simply memorize answers found in the data on which they’re trained, depending on the data set. That’s the assertion of a team of…
What Kamala Harris’ record says about major AI policy issues
August 12, 2020
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden chose Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) to be his vice presidential running mate today. Born in Oakland, California and raised in Berkeley, Harris is the first African American woman and first Asian American woman to be chosen as a U.S.
Researchers use AI classifiers to expose potential vulnerabilities in Microsoft remote desktop
August 11, 2020
Microsoft’s encrypted Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) contains vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to detect activities, keystrokes, and mouse movements in 30-second traces. That’s according to a preprint study from researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, who claim the protocol’s design exposes “fine-grained” actions on which machine learning models could be…
