WHATS IMPORTANT
📍 2021 AI Index released
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) has published the latest edition of its annual report on the impact and progress of AI. Explore the full report at Shark website. Looking back on 2020, they find that:
- The number of AI hires continued to rise worldwide, despite the pandemic.
- In the US, however, there was a decline in AI hiring for the first time, which indicates that the industry is maturing.
- China overtook the USA for the first time in the number of AI-related citations in scientific journals.
Stanford also updated their Global AI Vibrancy Tool with interactive visualizations that enable a cross-national comparison for up to 26 countries in the areas of AI research, business and inclusion.
📍 OpenAIS CLIP has multimodal neurons
“Fifteen years ago, [neuroscientists] discovered that the human brain has multimodal neurons. These neurons respond to clusters of abstract concepts that revolve around a common overarching theme, rather than a specific visual feature. The most famous of these neurons was “Halle Berry” neuron, a neuron — which has been reported in both Scientific American and the New York Times — that reacts to photographs, sketches, and the text “Halle Berry” (but not to other names). CLIP has these multimodal neurons too!“
In the January issue of the newsletter We have pointed out the importance of OpenAIS CLIP. The research team has now published their detailed disassembly of the model and presents a Spider-Man Neuron, which reacts to images of a spider, an image of the text “Spider” and the comic character “Spider-Man” both in costume and illustrated. Read more on the OpenAI blog.
THINGS WE FOUND WORTH SHARING
🎨 1. ML type - BigGan from Google DeepMind can 'realistic' Create images from random noise. OpenAI's CLIP, on the other hand, is perfect for matching an image with given text descriptions. In January, combined Ryan Murdock, a doctoral student from Utah, CLIP with BigGAN to get a Text-to-image generator called The Big Sleep to create. The system iterates through the images generated by BigGAN and tries to optimize CLIP scoring with a given text description.
The author has a Colab Notebook published with a code implementation so you can try it out for yourself.
Just a few days later, Big Sleep became a Poem to video-Operationalized generator. Will Stedden published Story2Hallucination, which creates multiple images based on a series of descriptions. By feeding the system with poetry, he created mesmerizing visualizations of the works of poet William Wordsworths (see linked video below). Others have used Story2Hallucination to create music videos of their favorite acts, such as the recently disbanded DJ Duo Daft Punk. Try it out for yourself with this Colab Notebook.
Visualizations for Wordsworth's poems. (Video: Will Stedden)
🗞 2nd news - ICLR, one of most important AI conferences, has published the first list of invited speakers. Among them is Timnit Gebru, who was recently fired from Google for raising discrimination issues. Die List of speakers See the ICLR blog.
📄 3rd paper - A recent study by Google researchers compared Transformers modifications with the original from 2017, in their paper titled “Do Transformer Modifications Transfer Across Implementations and Applications?” (arXiv), they find that “surprisingly [...] most modifications do not significantly improve transformer performance.” Read a summary of the study on Synced.
💙 4. We are Hiring! - We are looking for German speakers Data Engineers. Take a look at the positions in our Enterprise AI team at AMAI career page on.
💡 5th use case - MyHeritage, an online genealogy platform, has brought old family photos back to life. thousands of users used DeepNostalgiato turn old black and white photos of great-grandparents into vivid photos. An excellent marketing stunt that certainly brought MyHeritage a lot of publicity. Under the Twitter hashtag #DeepNostalgia find impressive results and astonished user responses. The technology was provided by D-ID's AI face platform, which is included in its blog Go into more detail.
Picture: MyHeritage/D-ID via The Verge
🎙 6th interview - DeepMind Software Engineer Julian Schrittweiser Stop by the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about the muZero paper and what the DeepMind Lab is working on next. Listen on the Stackoverflow blog pure.
👁 7. Miscellaneous - In the subreddit r/Machine Learning was recently discussed about non-reproducible research. A researcher complained that several of his attempts to reproduce results from prominent machine learning papers had failed. Others on the platform then shared similar stories and posted more such work.
Days later, the original Redditor released ContributionSecure14 Papers Without Codeto collect a centralized list of work that other researchers were unable to reproduce. While some authors withhold their code implementations for valid reasons, such as to protect user data or intellectual property, Papers Without Code wants to save researchers time and disincentivize non-reproducible work. Read more on The Next Web.
📄 8. paper - Currently, image recognition systems require large quantities of labeled images. Facebook's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun hopes that “in the long term, progress in AI will come from programs that simply watch videos all day and learn like a baby.” With a new approach called SEER, short for self-supervised, Facebook wants a”A new era for computer vision“initiate.
Read more on WIRED and in Facebook AI blog. The paper “Self-supervised Pretraining of Visual Features in the Wild” is available at arXiv available.
UPCOMING EVENTS
🇩🇪 March 25 (online, 10:00 CET) — Case study of AI in SMEs:
KI Lab Nordschwarzwald - internal search engine - The amount of internal company data is growing daily. Employees spend many unnecessary minutes searching for processes, operating instructions, process documentation, customer specifications or similar information in the company's own filing systems. The inefficiency in the search for relevant information is constantly increasing with the volume of data. Woldemar Metzler from AMAI GmbH will show you how to remedy this situation using specific examples of internal search engines.
Such a project often offers a perfect introduction to the world of AI — especially for SMEs, as the implementation effort is manageable and the results are convincing. — Register Here you on podio.com.
📅 April 12 (online, 16:30 CET) - NVIDIA CEO & Godfathers of AI
To kick off the GTC conference (April 12-16), Nvidia founder Jensen Huang invites Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for a joint keynote. Registration is free and is not required to watch the keynote. - The live stream is on nvidia.com be available.
