AI & Robotics

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…

The fervor around state-of-the-art AI language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 hasn’t died down. If anything, it’s gaining steam. Melanie Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Portland State University, found evidence that GPT-3 can make primitive analogies. Raphaël Millière, a philosopher of mind and cognitive science at Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society, asked…

In April, Salesforce detailed the AI Economist, a research environment for understanding how AI could improve economic design. The company pledged to eventually make the codebase available in open source, and today marks the release of the initial version. Studies have shown that income inequalities can negatively impact economic growth, opportunity, and health, and tax policy has similar effects.

Just how comprehensively do natural language processing (NLP) pipelines support widely spoken languages? A recent study coauthored by researchers at Clarkson University and Iona College sought to investigate the degree to which NLP tools understand eight dialects: English, Chinese, Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, and the Senegalese language Wolof. Their findings suggest there are caveats…