This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series: Automation and jobs in the new normal.
In early spring 2020, Smithfield, Tyson, and other industrial food suppliers warned that upwards of millions of pounds of meat could disappear from the U.S. supply chain as a result of the coronavirus. Although it now appears these fears were overblown or possibly a ploy to bolster exports…
At the Hot Chips 2020 conference, which was held virtually this year, IBM announced the IBM Power10. It’s the successor to the Power9 and represents the next generation of the company’s processor family. IBM claims that the Power10 delivers up to three times greater…
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…
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 partnership with the Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Department, Florida State University, and the University of…
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…
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. vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket. Though a vice presidential pick can sometimes be considered ceremonial, if…
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…
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…
