[Abstraction Intensifies]

In COVID-related AI news, a report from Cambridge University and University of Manchester examines recent studies on using chest x-rays and CTs scans to detect and diagnose COVID, and finds that only 29 of 168 studies had reproducible results; the report further found that all of the studies had high or unclear risk of bias, such that none of the studies had value for use in clinics. CSET provides an overview of how China has used AI in its COVID-19 response. In non-COVID AI news, a GAO report finds systemic problems with facial recognition technology at U.S. airports. The University College of London provides an overview of AI’s use in crime, with deepfakes ranked as the most concerning. Researchers at the University of Warwick and the Alan Turing Institute develop a machine learning algorithm to identify potential planets from astronomy data. And NASA uses an algorithm to predict more accurately when hurricanes will rapidly intensify. In research, MIT, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and Columbia University present a machine learning model to abstract relations in videos about everyday actions. Researchers in the Netherlands demonstrate that (large!) adversarial patches can work for surveillance imagery of military assets on the ground. The UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute releases a Special Collection on AI. Researchers in Germany and Korea provide a view of continual and open-world learning. And Georgia Tech provides the People Map as a way to discover research expertise at an institution. Click here to visit our website and explore the links mentioned in the episode.