Last Week in AI
Every week, my team at Invector Labs publishes a newsletter to track the most recent developments in AI research and technology. You can find this week’s issue below. You can sign up for it below. Please do so, our guys worked really hard on this:
From the Editor: Three AI Legends Win The “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”
This was a tremendous week for the artificial intelligence(AI) community. ACM named Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award popularly known as the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”. Beyond the recognition, the award represents a strong validation of the current importance of AI in the future of computer science.
Often referred to as the “godfathers of AI”, Bengio, Hinton and LeCun have been at the forefront of different schools of thought that constitute the basics of modern machine learning and deep learning technologies. Hinton has been the mind behind some of the cornerstones to modern deep learning such as backpropagation and Boltzman Machine models. Bengio is more well-known for his work on generative adversarial neural networks as well as natural language processing. The current Chief Scientist at Facebook, LeCun has led the charge in transformational areas such as convolutional neural networks and vision analysis systems. A large percentage of the AI models we use today have drawn inspiration from the work of these three legends.
Congrats! Well deserved.
Now let’s take a look at the core developments in AI research and technology this week:
AI Research
The Turing Award, known as the Nobel of Computer Science, was awarded to three pioneers of the AI field.
>Read more in the ACM press release
Google AI researchers proposed a method for learning policies of complex tasks using video inputs.
>Read more in this blog post from Google Research
DeepMind published a very insightful study about formal techniques for ensuring the robustness of AI models.
>Read the entire blog post from DeepMind here
Cool AI Tech Releases
Google released an update to its GAN library that contains new adversarial network techniques.
>Read more in this blog post from the Google AI Research team
Staying with Google, the internet giant unveiled a fascinating prototype of TossingBot, a picking robot that knows how to pick and throw objects into selected boxes.
>Read more in this blog post from Google AI Research
AI in the Real World
In one of the biggest validations of the AI space to date, McDonnald’s Acquired AI startup Dynamic Yield for $300M.
>Read more in this coverage from Wired
MIT researchers discussed the new categories of jobs that will emerge as part of the evolution of AI.
>Listen to the entire conversation in this MIT podcast
In a sign of how true prison reform should work, Finland is piloting programs to train inmates in AI technologies.
