AI with AI: Artificial Intelligence with Andy Ilachinski

Listener Survey In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss research that uses NLP to predict mutations in a virus that would allow it to avoid detection by antibodies. In regular AI news, the US Food and Drug Administration publishes an Action Plan for AI and ML, with more to follow. The White House launches the National AI Initiative Office, which will work with the private sector and academia on AI initiatives. The AI Now institute has launched an effort for "A New AI Lexicon," in which it invites contributors to provide perspectives and narratives for describing new vocabulary that adequately reflects demands and concerns related to AI technology. And the Federal Reserve is asking for comments about the use of AI/ML in banking, as it considers increasing oversight of the technologies. In research, Michal Kosinski at Stanford University publishes in Nature Reports how facial recognition technology can identify a person's political orientation (to 72% accuracy); Andy and Dave spend some extra time discussing the challenges and implications behind such applications of facial recognition technology. Researchers at Columbia University demonstrate the ability of an AI observer to "visualize the future plans" of an actor, solely through visual information. The report of the week comes from CNAS on AI and International Stability: Risks and Confidence-Building Measures. The book of the week examines How Humans Judge Machines. And finally, a YouTube documentary from Noclip examines how machine learning plays out in Microsoft's Flight Simulator.

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In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss an editorial in The Lancet Digital Health, which examines whether preliminary models add clinical value to health-care systems. In regular AI news, an Italian court rules that the European food delivery app Deliveroo used a "discriminatory" algorithm, potentially opening the door for liability even with unintentional algorithmic discrimination. A study from Google, OpenAI, Apple, Stanford, Berkeley, and Northeastern shows that large language models trained on public data can expose personal information, by making it possible to extract specific pieces of training data. In research, OpenAI combines the mini-GPT algorithm DALL-E with an image-to-text algorithm CLIP, to create an extremely powerful and flexible generative model, capable of generating high-quality images based on text instructions. The report of the week comes from the Connections 2020 Conference proceedings, which examined Representing AI in Wargames. The survey of the week looks at neural network interpretability. Kevin Murphy provides the book of the week, with Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction. And Geoff Hinton speak on Eye on AI with Craig S. Smith about his latest research and the future of AI.

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In COVID-related news, Andy and Dave discuss a commercial AI model from Biocogniv that predicts COVID-19 infection using only blood tests, with a 95% sensitivity and a 49% specificity. In a story that highlights the general challenge with algorithms, Stanford reported challenges in using a rules-based algorithm to determine priority of vaccine distribution, when it omitted front-line doctors from initial distribution. In non-COVID AI news, Vincent Boucher and Gary Marcus organize a second "AI Debate" on the topic of Moving AI Forward: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which included Daniel Kahneman, Christof Koch, Judea Pearl, Fei-Fei Li, Margaret Mitchel, and many others. Reuters reports that Google's PR, policy, and legal teams have been editing AI research papers in order to give them a more positive tone, and to reduce discussions of the potential drawbacks of the technology. And Microsoft patents a "chat bot technology" that would seek to reincarnate deceased people. In research, Google announces MuZero, which masters chess, Go, shogi, and the Atari Learning Environment by planning with a learned model (and no information on the rules). Jeff Heaton provides the book of the week, with Applications of Deep Neural Networks. A survey paper from four universities looks at Data Security for Machine Learning. Another survey paper examines how researchers develop and use datasets for machine learning research. And the ConwayLife.com community celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Game of Life, to include an online simulator called the Exploratorium.

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Just in time for the holidays, Andy and Dave look back and some of the more memorial AI-related stories from 2020. They begin with the passing of mathematician John Conway, creator of The Game of Life, who died in April at 82 from complications due to COVID-19; Andy and Dave will talk more about The Game of Life in next week's podcast. With an example of how not to use AI, in July, the International Baccalaureate Educational Foundation turned to machine learning algorithms to predict student grades, due to COVID-related cancelations of actual testing, much to the frustration of numerous students and parents. Also in July, over 1400 mathematicians signed and delivered a letter to the American Mathematical Society, urging researchers to stop working on predictive-policing algorithms. In September, Elon Musk demonstrated the latest iteration of Neuralink, complete with pig implantees. And finally, Andy and Dave examine the GPT family algorithms with a discussion on GPT-2 and GPT-3.

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In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss the results of the C3.ai COVID-19 challenge. In regular AI news, the US Air Force announces an AI, ARTUm, controlling a military plane for the first time. A Nature publication shows the AI collaboration links between institutions based on the last 5 years. The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center publishes research on 4-bit training of deep neural networks to accelerate the process. Researchers at Oregon State University publish advances with a new type of optical sensor that can naturally detect moving objects. And the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Crane along with ONR announce a prize challenge for AI in Small Unit Maneuver (AISUM). In meta-research, researchers create a graph-based toolkit for analysis and comparison of games. Other research examines the fossil records to discover patterns in Earth's biological mass extinction events. In the book of the week, the US Army War College Class of 2020 publishes an Estimation of Technological Convergence. György Buzsáki's The Brain from the Inside Out takes a different look at how the brain functions. And for the holidays, Andy and Dave play around with Google's blob opera singers.

Andy and Dave discuss the recent announcement that the U.S. Department of Defense announces that it will adopt the Defense Innovation Board's detailed principles for using AI. The European Commission releases its white paper on AI. The University of Buffalo's AI Institute receives a grant to study gamers' brains in order to build AI military robots. Microsoft announces Turing-NLG, a 17-billion parameter language model. MIT's CSAIL demonstrates TextFooler, which makes synonym-like substitutions of words, the results of which can severely degrade the accuracy of NLP classifiers. Researchers from McAfee show simple tricks to fool Tesla's Mobileye EyeQ3 camera. And Andy and Dave conclude with a discussion with Professor Josh Bongard, from the University of Vermont, on his recent "xenobots" research.

In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss a report from MIT that identifies gaps in coverage from COVID vaccines, and uses machine learning to identify peptide additions to increase their efficacy. The GAO and the National Academy of Medicine release a combined report on AI in health care. Nature provides access to a large collection of open datasets related to COVID research and information. In non-COVID-related AI news, President Trump signs an executive order on the governmental development of AI, which includes a requirement for OMB to produce a roadmap by the end of May 2021. The FY21 National Defense Authorization Act boots the JAIC's role and performance, to include a funding stream for acquisition authority. The ML-Reproducibility Challenge 2020 kicks off, with submissions due by 29 January 2021. Researchers in China announce the creation of a photonic quantum computer that achieves quantum supremacy in conducting Gaussian boson sampling. The Bjarke Ingles Group unveils its plans to create an "AI city," a tech-hub in Chongqing, China. And the Navy's uncrewed Overlord test vessel completes a 4700 nautical mile journey with minimal human assistance, to include passage through the Panama Canal. Researchers at Georgia State University demonstrate an approach to continual learning with deep artificial neurons (DANs), a neural network, where the neurons are themselves small deep neural networks. And researchers at Tencent AI Lab demonstrate an almost society-of-agents approach to creating an a deep reinforcement algorithm that can play multi-player online battle arena (MOBA) games.

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In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss a Facebook model that provides county-level forecasts on the spread of COVID-19. IN non-COVID AI news, DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 won the 14th biennial Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP), scoring above 90 on a global distance test for around two-thirds of the test proteins. Partnership on AI establishes The AI Incident Database (AIID) to provide an open-access resource on failures of AI systems, currently containing over 1,000 publically available "incident reports." CSET publishes a report on '"Cool Projects" or "Expanding the Efficiency of the Murderous American War Machine?"' which examines the perspectives of US AI industry professional toward working on Department of Defense funded AI projects. The UN, in conjunction with Trend Micro Research and the European Cybercrime Centre, releases a report on Malicious Uses and Abuses of AI, which highlights the potential physical impacts of hackers on autonomous- and AI-related technologies. And LtGen Michael Groen, the new Director of the Joint AI Center, provides an overview of the JAIC's goals and objectives. In research, NVidia, Rice University, and Caltech publish the BONGARD-LOGO benchmark set, as an expansion of the Bongard Problems, which provide free-form shape concepts to test context-dependent perception, analogy-making perception, and perception with few samples. Joshua C. Gellers provides the book of the week, examining the case for Rights for Robots. And Google AI releases Verse by Verse, which draws upon the writings of various poets to help users generate their own poems, of which Andy and Dave both share examples.

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In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss research from MIT, BIM, and Harvard Medical School, which uses machine learning on Reddit posts to track the pandemic's impact on mental health. And the UK and is planning to use AI to spot dangerous side effects in COVID vaccinations. In non-COVID AI news, Andy and Dave take a look at how the AI-based poll predictions faired in the 2020 US election. The White House issues guidance for federal agencies on AI applications. The University of Copenhagen makes Carbontracker available, which provides an estimate of the energy consumption for training deep learning algorithms. DARPA selects 5 teams to head to the next phase of its Air Combat Evolution competition. And the 34th Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) plans for virtual proceedings in early December. In research, 40 authors from Google publish findings on the challenges of deploying an AI system into the real world, such as unexpectedly poor behavior, which they attribute to underspecification. The Marine Corps University Press releases the second volume of Destination Unknown. Andy's "vintage magazine of the week" is the April 1985 of Byte, which covered Artificial Intelligence. And Matt Stone and Trey Parker introduce Sassy Justice, a parody comedy which warns of the dangers of deepfakes, by itself being a series of deepfakes (including President Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Vice President Al Gore, and many others).

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Andy and Dave welcome Arthur Holland Michel to the podcast for a discussion on predictability and understandability in military AI. Arthur is an Associate Researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and author of the book Eyes in the Sky: the Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All. Arthur recently published The Black Box, Unlocked: Predictability and Understandability in Military AI, and the three discuss the inherent challenges of artificial intelligence and the challenges of creating definitions to enable meaningful global discussion on AI.

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