Episodes
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00:31:00 AI with AI: Debater of the AI-ncients, Part 2 (Dota 2)
AI with AI addIn the second part of this epic podcast, Andy and Dave continue their discussion with research from MIT, Vienna University of Technology, and Boston University, which uses human brainwaves and hand gestures to instantly correct robot mistakes. The research uses a combination of electroencephalogram (EEG, brain signals) and electromyogram (EMG, muscle signals) in combination to allow a human (without training) to provide corrective input to a robot while it performs tasks. On a related topic, MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory demonstrated the rules for human brain plasticity, by showing that when one synapse connection strengthens, the immediately neighboring synapses weaken; while suspected for some time, this research showed for the first time how this balance works. Then, research from Stanford and Berkley introduces a Taskonomy, a system for disentangling task transfer learning. This structured approach maps out 25 different visual tasks to identify the conditions under which transfer learning works from one task to another; such a structure would allow data in some dimensions to compensate for the lack of data in other dimensions. Next up, OpenAI has developed an AI tool for spotting photoshopped photos, by examining three types of manipulation techniques (splicing, copy-move, and removal), and by also examining local noise features. Researchers at Stanford have used machine learning to recreate the periodic table of elements after providing the system with a database of chemical formulae. And finally, Andy and Dave wrap up with a selection of papers and other media, including CNAS’s AI: What Every Policymaker Needs to Know; a beautifully-done tutorial on machine learning; the Question for AI by Nilsson; Nonserviam by Lem; IPI’s Governing AI; the US Congressional Hearing on the Power of AI; and Twitch Plays Robotics.
- 00:36:24
AI with AI: Debater of the AI-ncients, Part 1 (Dota)
AI with AI addIn breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss a potentially groundbreaking paper on the scalable training of artificial neural nets with adaptive sparse connectivity; MIT researchers unveil the Navion chip, only 20 square millimeters in size and consumes 24 milliwatts of power, it can process real-time camera images up to 171 frames per second, and can be integrated into drones the size of a fingernail; the Chair of the Armed Services Subcommitttee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities convened a roundtable on AI with subject matter experts and industry leaders; the IEEE Standards Association and MIT Media Lab launched the Council on Extended Intelligence (CXI) to build a “new narrative” on autonomous technologies, including three pilot programs, one of which seeks to help individuals “reclaim their digital identity;” and the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, which wants to shape the responsible design and use of robotics, releases a report on Drones in the Service of Society. Then, Andy and Dave discuss IBM’s Project Debater, the follow-on to Watson that engaged in a live, public debate with humans on 18 June. IBM spent 6 years developing PD’s capabilities, with over 30 technical papers and benchmark datasets, Debater can debate nearly 100 topics. PD uses three pioneering capabilities: data-driven speech writing and delivery, listening comprehension, and the ability to model human dilemmas. Next up, OpenAI announces OpenAI Five, a team of 5 AI algorithms trained to take on a human team in the tower defense game, Dota 2; Andy and Dave discuss the reasons for the impressive achievement, including that the 5 AI networks do not communicate with each other, and that coordination and collaboration naturally emerge from their incentive structures. The system uses 256 Nvidia graphics cards and 128,000 processor cores; it has taken on (and won) a variety of human teams, but OpenAI plans to stream a match against a top Dota 2 team in late July.
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Missing episodes?
- 00:45:05
AI with AI: The AIth Sense - I See WiFi People
AI with AI addIn breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss the recently unveiled Wolfram Neural Net Repository with 70 neural net models (as of the podcast recording) accessible in the Wolfram Language; Carnegie Mellon and STRUDEL announce the Code/Natural Language (CoNaLa) Challenge with a focus on Python; Amazon releases its Deep Lens video camera that enables deep learning tools; and the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2018 conference in Salt Lake City. Then, Andy and Dave discuss DeepMind’s Generative Query Network, a framework where machines learn to turn 2D scenes into 3D views, using only their own sensors. MIT’s RF-Pose trains a deep neural net to “see” people through walls by measuring radio frequencies from WiFi devices. Research at the University of Bonn is attempting to train an AI to predict future results based on current observations (with the goal of “seeing” 5 minutes into the future), and a healthcare group of Google Brain has been developing an AI to predict when a patient will die, based on a swath of historical and current medical data. The University of Wyoming announced DeepCube, an “autodidactic iteration” method from McAleer that allows solving a Rubik’s Cube without human knowledge. And finally, Andy and Dave discuss a variety of books and videos, including The Next Step: Exponential Life, The Machine Stops, and a Ted Talk from Max Tegmark on getting empowered, not overpowered, by AI.
- 00:44:00
AI with AI: How to Train Your DrAIgon (for good, not for bad)
AI with AI addIn recent news, Andy and Dave discuss a recent Brookings report on the view of AI and robots based on internet search data; a Chatham House report on AI anticipates disruption; Microsoft computes the future with its vision and principles on AI; the first major AI patent filings from DeepMind are revealed; biomimicry returns, with IBM using “analog” synapses to improve neural net implementation, and Stanford U researchers develop an artificial sensory nervous system; and Berkley Deep Drive provides the largest self-driving car dataset for free public download. Next, the topic of “hard exploration games with sparse rewards” returns, with a Deep Curiosity Search approach from the University of Wyoming, where the AI gets more freedom and reward from exploring (“curiosity”) than from performing tasks as dictated by the researchers. From Cognition Expo 18, work from Martinez-Plumed attempts to “Forecast AI,” but largely highlights the challenges in making comparisons due to the neglected, or un-reported, aspects of developments, such as the data, human oversight, computing cycles, and much more. From the Google AI Blog, researchers improve deep learning performance by finding and describing the transformation policies of the data, and using that information to increase the amount and diversity of the training dataset. Then, Andy and Dave discuss attempts to using drone surveillance to identify violent individuals (for good reasons only, not for bad ones). And in a more sporty application, “AI enthusiast” Chintan Trivedi describes his efforts to train a bot to play a soccer video game, by observing his playing. Finally, Andy recommends an NSF workshop report, a book on AI: Foundations of Computational Agents, Permutation City, and over 100 video hours of the CogX 2018 conference.
- 00:48:26
AI with AI: Game of Drones - AI Winter Is Coming
AI with AI addIn breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss Google’s decision not to renew the contract for Project Maven, as well as their AI Principles; the Royal Australian Air Force holds a biennial Air Power Conference with a theme of AI and cyber; the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) releases its 2017 annual report; China holds a Defense Conference on AI in cybersecurity, and NVidia’s new Xavier chip packs $10k worth of power into a $1299 box. Next, Andy and Dave discuss a benevolent application of adversarial attack methods, with a “privacy filter” for photos that are designed to stop AI face detection (reducing detection from nearly 100 percent to 0.5 percent). MIT used AI in the development of nanoparticles, training neural nets to “learn” how a nanoparticle’s structure affects its behavior. Then the remaining topics dip deep into the philosophical realm, starting with a discussion on empiricism and the limits of gradient descent, and how philosophical concepts of empiricist induction compare with critical rationalism. Next, the topic of a potential AI Winter continues to percolate with a viral blog from Piekniewski, leading into a paper from Berkley/MIT that discovers a 4-15% reduction in accuracy for CIFAR-10 classifiers on a new set of similar training images (bringing into doubt the idea of robustness of these systems). Andy shares a possibly groundbreaker paper on “graph networks,” that provides a new conceptual framework for thinking about machine learning. And finally, Andy and Dave close with some media selections, including Blood Music by Greg Bear and Swarm by Frank Schatzing.
- 00:41:14
AI with AI: Detective Centaur and the Curse of Footstep Awareness
AI with AI addAndy and Dave didn’t have time to do a short podcast this week, so they did a long one instead. In breaking news, they discuss the establishment of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), yet-another-Tesla autopilot crash, Geurts defending the decision to dissolve the Navy’s Unmanned Systems Office, and Germany publishes a paper that describes its stance on autonomy in weapon systems. Then, Andy and Dave discuss DeepMind’s approach to using YouTube videos to train an AI to learn “hard exploration games” (with sparse rewards). In another “centaur” example, facial recognition experts form best when combined with an AI. University of Manchester researches announce a new footstep-recognition AI system, but Dave pulls a Linus and has a fit of “footstep awareness.” In other recent reports, Andy and Dave discuss another example of biomimicry, where researchers at ETH Zurich have modeled the schooling behavior of fish. And in brain-computer interface research, a noninvasive BCI system co-trained with tetraplegics to control avatars in a racing-game. Finally, they round out the discussion with a mention of ZAK Inc and its purported general AI, a book on How People and Machines are Smarter Together, and a video on deep reinforcement learning.
- 00:35:10
AI with AI: Shiny Heart Reflecting in the Dark Lights Up (SHRDLU)
AI with AI addIn breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss a few cracks seem to be appearing in Google’s Duplex demonstration; more examples of the breaking of Moore’s Law; a Princeton effort to advance the dialogue on AI and ethics; India joins the global AI-sabre-rattling; the UK Ministry of Defence launches an AI hub/lab; and the U.S. Navy dissolves its secretary-level unmanned systems office. Andy and Dave then discuss a demonstration of “zero-shot” learning, by which a robot learns to do a task by watching a human perform it once. The work reminds Andy of the early natural language “virtual block world” SHRDLU, from the 1970s. In other news, the research team that designed Libratus (a world-class poker-playing AI) announced they had developed a better AI that, more importantly, is also computationally orders of magnitude less expensive (using a 4-core CPU with 16 GB of memory). Next, research with Intel and the University of Illinois UC has developed a convolutional neural net to significantly improve low-ISO image quality while shooting at faster shutter speeds; Andy and Dave both found the results for improving low-light images to be quite stunning. Finally, after yet-another-round of a generative adversarial example (in which Dave predicts the creation of a new field), Andy closes with some recommendations on papers, books, and videos, including Galatea 2.2 and The Space of Possible Minds.
- 00:40:06
AI with AI: Super-AI Reveals Answer to Everything: IDK, LUL
AI with AI addIn a review of the latest news, Andy and Dave discuss: the White House’s “plan” for AI, the departure of employees from Google due to Project Maven, another Tesla crash, the first AI degree for undergraduates at CMU, and Boston Dynamics’ jumping and climbing robots. Next, two AI research topics have implications for neuroscience. First, Andy and Dave discuss AI research at DeepMind, which showed that an AI trained to navigate between two points developed “grid cells,” very similar to those found in the mammalian brain. And second, another finding from DeepMind on “meta-learning” suggests that dopamine in the human brain may have a more integral role in meta-learning than previously thought. In another example of “AI-chemy,” Andy and Dave discuss the looming problem of (lack of) explainability in health care (with implications for many other areas, such as DoD), and they also discuss some recent research on adding an option for an AI to defer a decision with “I Don’t Know” (IDK). After a quick romp through the halls of AI-generated DOOM, the two discuss a recent proof that reveals the fundamental limits of scientific knowledge (so much for super-AIs). And finally, they close with a few media recommendations, including “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect.”
- 00:36:53
AI with AI: Better Lying Through Alchemy
AI with AI addIn a review of the most recent news, Andy and Dave discuss the latest information on the fatal self-driving Uber accident, the AI community reacts (poorly) to Nature’s announcement of a new closed-access section on machine learning, on-demand self-driving cars will be coming soon to north Dallas, and the Chinese government is adding AI to high school curriculum with a mandated textbook. For more in-depth topics, Andy and Dave discuss the latest information from DARPA’s Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) project, which has announced its initial teams and topics, which seek to generate “paradigm-changing approaches” as opposed to incremental improvements. Next, they discuss an experiment from OpenAI that provides visibility into dialogue between two AI on a topic, one of which is lying. This discussion segues into recent comparisons of the field of machine learning to the ancient art of alchemy. Dave avoids using the word “alcheneering,” but thinks that “AI-chemy” might be worth considering. Finally, after a discussion on a couple of photography-related developments, they close with a discussion on some papers and videos of interest, including the splash of the Google’s new “Turing-test-beating” Duplex assistant for conducting natural conversations over the phone.
- 00:26:16
AI with AI: Nuclear War and/or Better French Fries
AI with AI addAndy 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.
- 00:25:06
AI with AI: Human-Machine Teaming with Major General Mick Ryan
AI with AI addThis 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.
- 00:33:37
AI with AI: Moments in Time, Humans Are Underrated, and Hugging Robots
AI with AI addAndy 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.
- 00:32:16
AI with AI: Unmanned Systems, AI, and the U.S. Navy, with CAPT Sharif Calfee, Part II
AI with AI addAnna 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.
- 00:30:12
AI with AI: Unmanned Systems, AI, and the U.S. Navy, with CAPT Sharif Calfee, Part I
AI with AI addAnna 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.
- 00:34:36
AI with AI: Pushback on AI, Meta-learning, and Robot Expressions
AI with AI addAndy 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!
- 00:29:18
AI with AI: A Turing Test, the GAN Zoo, and Dreaming of Electric Sheep
AI with AI addDave 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.
- 00:35:07
AI with AI: Driverless Vehicles, Digital Yeast, and Montezuma’s Revenge
AI with AI addWith 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.
- 00:33:53
AI with AI: Hawking, Measuring “AI Capability” to the 9th Decimal Point, AI & Legal Liability, and Digital Creativity
AI with AI addLarry 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).
- 00:35:08
AI with AI: Common Sense, Black Boxes, and Getting Robots to Teach Themselves
AI with AI addLarry 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.
- 00:25:45
AI with AI: Can Anything Stop the Malicious AI??
AI with AI addAndy and Dave discuss a recently released report on the Malicious Use of AI: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation, which describes scenarios where AI might have devious applications (hint: there’s a lot). They also discuss a recent report that describes the extent of missing data in AI studies, which makes it difficult to reproduce published results. Andy then describes research that looks into ways to alter information (in this case, classification of an image) to fool both AI and humans. Dave has to repeat the research in order to understand the sheer depth of the terror that could be lurking below. Then Andy and DAve quickly discuss a new algorithm that can mimic any voice with just a few snippets of audio. The only non-terrifying topic they discuss involves an attempt to make Alexa more chatty. Even then, Dave decides that this effort will only result in a more-empty wallet.
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