AI with AI: Artificial Intelligence with Andy Ilachinski

Andy and Dave discuss a couple of recent reports and events on AI, including the Sixth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Next, Edward Ott and fellow researchers have applied machine learning to replicate chaotic attractors, using "reservoir computing." Andy describes the reasons for his excitement in seeing how far out this technique is able to predict a 4th order nonlinear partial differential equation. Next, Andy and Dave discuss a few adversarial attack-related topics: a single-pixel attack for fooling deep neural network (DNN) image classifiers; an Adversarial Robustness Toolbox from IBM Research Ireland, which provides an open-source software library to help researchers in defending DNN against adversarial attacks; and the susceptibility of the medical field to fraudulent attacks. The BAYOU project takes another step toward giving AI the ability to program new methods for implementing tasks. And Uber Labs releases source code that can train a DNN to play Atari games in about 4 hours on a *single* 48-core modern desktop! Finally, after a review of a few books and videos, including Paul Scharre's new book "Army of None," Andy and Dave conclude with a discussion on potatoes.

This week, Andy, Larry, and Dave welcome Major General Mick Ryan, Commander of the Australian Defence College. Mick has recently published a report on Human-Machine Teaming for Future Ground Forces, in which he identifies keys areas for human-machine teams, as well as challenges that military forces will have in incorporating these new capabilities. The group discusses some of these issues, and some of the broader challenges in both the near- and far-term.

Andy and Dave start this week’s podcast with a review of some of the latest announcements: the latest meeting of the UN Convention on Certain Convention Weapons, SecDef Mattis’s announcement of a new joint program office for AI, a declaration of cooperation on AI by 25 European countries, and a UK Parliament report on AI. They then discuss the latest Center for the Study of the Drone report, which compares U.S. Dept of Defense drone spending for FY19 with FY18. The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has launched a “Moments in Time” dataset, the first steps toward building a large and robust set of short videos for action classification purposes. Google has increased the quality of its AI in picking voices out of a noisy room, by making use of additional information (here, video). And Google has introduce a way to “talk to books;” Andy and Dave were a bit underwhelmed, but check it out and judge for yourself. Finally, Andy and Dave close with a selection of whimsical comments from the news, and a selection of videos.

Anna Williams joins Dave in welcoming CAPT Sharif Calfee for a two-part discussion on unmanned systems and artificial intelligence. As part of his fellowship research, CAPT Calfee has been speaking with organizations and subject matter experts across the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Government, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, University Affiliated Research Centers, and Industry, in order to understand the broader efforts involving unmanned systems, autonomy, and artificial intelligence. In the first part of their discussion, the group discusses the progress and the challenges that the CAPT has observed in his engagements. In the second part, the group discusses various steps that the U.S. Navy can take to move forward more deliberately, to include the consideration for a new Naval Reactors-like office to oversee AI.

Anna Williams joins Dave in welcoming CAPT Sharif Calfee for a two-part discussion on unmanned systems and artificial intelligence. As part of his fellowship research, CAPT Calfee has been speaking with organizations and subject matter experts across the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Government, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, University Affiliated Research Centers, and Industry, in order to understand the broader efforts involving unmanned systems, autonomy, and artificial intelligence. In the first part of their discussion, the group discusses the progress and the challenges that the CAPT has observed in his engagements. In the second part, the group discusses various steps that the U.S. Navy can take to move forward more deliberately, to include the consideration for a new Naval Reactors-like office to oversee AI.

Andy and Dave cover a wide variety of topics this week, starting with two prominent examples of employees and researchers objecting to certain uses of AI technology. Andy and Dave then discuss a recent GAO report on AI, as well as France’s announcement to invest in AI. They also discuss AI in designing chemical synthesis pathways, AI in reading echocardiograms, meta-learning (learning how to learn in unsupervised learning), helping robots express themselves when they fail, and a collection of papers, graphic novels, and videos. By the end, Dave’s arms are flailing wildly!

Dave starts with a shocking revelation! Can you pass the test?? Andy and Dave then discuss MIT Tech Review’s EmTech Digital Conference, which highlighted the latest in AI research. Next, Andy and Dave discuss the rapid expansion of newly reported AI models, including the “GAN Zoo.” Venture capital funding in the U.S. suggests that the AI market may be cooling. Andy describes new insight into brain function that will likely lead to further AI breakthroughs. And after a discussion of an AI playing Battlefield 1, Andy and Dave close with a look at AIs learning in electric dreams, and a GAN that can lip sync a face to an audio-video clip.

With the news of the first death at the digital hands of a driverless vehicle, Andy and Dave discuss some of the broader issues surrounding the understanding and implementation of AI technology. In other news, they discuss the creation of a digital version of yeast (DCell) as a way to provide insight into the otherwise “black box” of AI. Then, after describing DeepMind’s efforts into using evolutionary Auto Machine Learning to discover neural network architectures, Andy and Dave discuss an example of how background knowledge (“priors”) transfers to the world of games, and how that compares with AI.

Larry Lewis, Director of CNA’s Center for Autonomy and AI, again sits in for Dave this week. He and Andy discuss: the recent passing of physicist Stephen Hawking (along with his “cautionary” views on AI); CNAS’s recent launch of a new Task Force on AI and National Security, Microsoft’s AI breakthrough in matching human performance translating news from Chinese to English; a report that looks at China’s “AI Dream” (and introduces an “AI Potential Index” to assess China’s AI capabilities compared to other nations); a second index, from a separate report, called the “Government AI Readiness Index,” which inexplicably excludes China from the top 35 ranked nations; and the issue of legal liability of AI systems. They conclude with call outs to a fun-to-read crowd-sourced paper written by researchers in artificial life, evolutionary computation, and AI that tells stories about the surprising creativity of digital evolution, and three videos: a free BBC-produced documentary on Stephen Hawking, a technical talk on deep learning, and a Q&A session with Elon Musk (that includes an exchange on AI).

Larry Lewis, Director of CNA’s Center for Autonomy and AI, sits in for Dave this week, as he and Andy discuss: a recent report that not all Google employees are happy with Google’s partnership with DoD (in developing a drone-footage-analyzing AI); research efforts designed to lift the lid – just a bit - on the so-called “black box” reasoning of neural-net-based AIs; some novel ways of getting robots/AIs to teach themselves; and an arcade-playing AI that has essentially “discovered” that if you can’t win at the game, it is best to either kill yourself or cheat. The podcast ends with a nod to a new free online AI resource offered by Google, another open access book (this time on the subject of Robotics), and a fascinating video of Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame, lecturing about artificial general intelligence and the “computational universe” to a computer science class at MIT.