https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7e/0f/1c/7e0f1c323d6ebd17135090d86e1ac402.jpgIt Is Easier to Tear Down Than To Build... if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid
- Lucius Anneaus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91
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IBM Computer Stars in Cambridge Debate on the Dangers of AIhttps://www.cnn.com/2019/11/21/tech/ai-cambridge-university-debate/index.htmlIBM's fast-talking AI machine faces a huge new test: It's taking part in a Cambridge University debate on the merits of the emerging technology that will feature some of the world's best human minds.Project Debater, as the IBM machine is known, will participate Thursday in a debate at the Cambridge Union featuring both computers and humans. At issue is whether AI will bring more harm than good to the world.
The Cambridge Union has been been hosting debates for more than two centuries, but this is the first contest to feature AI, said society president Rachel Tustin.
The IBM machine, which was defeated by a human in a one-on-one debate nine months ago, will deliver each team's 4-minute opening speech using submissions sourced ahead of time from over 1,000 people.
The rebuttals by each side will be done by the human debaters, who will also deliver the closing arguments. A winner will be named based on which team persuades more audience members to its view.
The event will test
Project Debater's ability to work out whether submissions are for or against the motion, and assess which arguments are of better quality. It will also provide insight into whether the technology is able to detect redundancies, given that people will have made the same arguments using different words, said IBM engineer Noam Slonim.
... In the previous debate held in San Francisco in February, Project Debater failed to deliver convincing rebuttals in a debate about whether preschool should be subsidized.
Its arguments appeared out of order. For example, it saved its best counter punches for its closing statement. At that debate, Project Debater was given 15 minutes to process 400 million documents.
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New AI System Predicts Seizures With Near-Perfect Accuracyhttps://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/diagnostics/this-new-ai-system-can-predict-seizures-with-nearperfect-accuracyTwo researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have developed a new AI-powered model that can predict the occurrence of seizures up to one hour before onset with 99.6 percent accuracy.Detecting seizures ahead of time could greatly improve the quality of life for patients with epilepsy and provide them with enough time to take action, he says. Notably, seizures are controllable with medication in up to 70 percent of these patients.
The researchers developed and tested their approach using long-term EEG data from 22 patients at the Boston Children’s Hospital. Although this is a small sample size, the results proved exciting for the team. Not only is their model very accurate, at 99.6 percent, but it also has a low tendency for false positives, at 0.004 false alarms per hour.
Efficient Epileptic Seizure Prediction Based on Deep Learning-----------------------------------
Are Hiring Algorithms Fair? They're Too Opaque To Tell, Study Findshttps://techxplore.com/news/2019-11-hiring-algorithms-fair-theyre-opaque.htmlNew research from a team of Computing and Information Science scholars at Cornell University raises questions about hiring algorithms and the tech companies who develop and use them: How unbiased is the automated screening process? How are the algorithms built? And by whom, toward what end, and with what data?
They found companies tend to favor obscurity over transparency in this emerging field, where lack of consensus on fundamental points—formal definitions of "bias" and "fairness," for starters—have enabled tech companies to define and address algorithmic bias on their own terms.The researchers scoured available public information to begin to understand these tools and what measures, if any, companies have in place to evaluate and mitigate algorithmic bias. Shielded by intellectual property laws, tech companies don't have to disclose any information about their algorithmic models for pre-employment screenings—though some companies did choose to offer insight.
Very few vendors offer concrete information about how they validate their assessments or disclose specifics on how they mitigate algorithmic bias, researchers found.
"Plenty of vendors make no mention of efforts to combat bias, which is particularly worrying since either they're not thinking about it at all, or they're not being transparent about their practices," Raghavan said.
Even if they use such terms as "bias" and "fairness," these can be vague. A vendor can claim its assessment algorithm is "fair" without revealing how the company defines fairness.
It's like "free-range" eggs, Raghavan said: There is a set of conditions under which eggs can be labeled free range, but our intuitive notion of free range may not line up with those conditions.
Mitigating Bias in Algorithmic Hiring: Evaluating Claims and Practices------------------------------------
Rise of the Bots: Research Team Completes First Census of Wikipedia Botshttps://techxplore.com/news/2019-11-bots-team-census-wikipedia.htmlResearchers at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, N.J., have now completed the first analysis of all 1,601 of Wikipedia's bots, using computer algorithms to classify them by function and shed light on the ways that machine intelligences and human users work together to improve and expand the world's largest digital encyclopedia.
... In total, bots play nine core roles on Wikipedia, accounting for about 10 percent of all activity on the site, and up to 88 percent of activity on some sub-sections such as the site's Wikidata platform. Most of that activity comes from more than 1,200 fixer-bots, which have collectively made more than 80 million edits to the site. Advisor-bots and protector-bots, by contrast, are less prolific, but play a vital role in shaping human editors' interactions with Wikipedia."People don't mind being criticized by bots, as long as they're polite about it," ... "Wikipedia's transparency and feedback mechanisms help people to accept bots as legitimate members of the community."
... One thing is clear: Wikipedia's bots, and the governance and feedback systems that have sprung up around them, offer lessons for commercial bot-builders. "The things we're seeing on Wikipedia could be a harbinger of things to come in many different industries and professions,"
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Sony launches new AI unit for creation of robotic kitchenhttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/sony-launches-ai-unit-creation-robotic-kitchen-191120141006908.htmlJapanese electronics giant aims to change the ways we cook and eat, bringing AI and robotics to chefs' aid.Japanese electronics giant Sony launched a new artificial intelligence unit it hopes will change the way we cook and eat.
The new research arm, Sony AI, will operate in Japan, Europe and the United States and will also focus on the traditional areas of gaming, imaging and sensor equipment, as well as "gastronomy".
The firm that produced the PlayStation franchise and the Spider-man movie series is the latest multinational tech company wanting a piece of the pie in the food business, where data is increasingly driving new dishes to pique the palate.
"AI and robotics will not replace chefs. We are aiming to offer new tools to expand their creativity with AI and robotics," Sony spokesman Shinichi Tobe said on Wednesday.
"The field of food requires a study of molecular structures. By using AI and its analytical capacity we can create new things," Tobe said.
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Deutsche Bank Says Robots are Already Replacing Workers as it Ramps Up a Plan to Axe 18,000 Jobshttps://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/deutsche-bank-replacing-18000-jobs-with-ai-machine-learning-fn-report-2019-11-1028696144- Deutsche Bank is using robots to replace some of the 18,000 staff it cut earlier this year.
- Financial News spoke to the bank's head of operations for Deutsche's corporate and investment bank, who said that using AI "massively increased productivity" in certain sectors of the business.
- So far "680,000 hours of manual work" has already been saved, he said.
- In July, Deutsche Bank announced a massive restructuring, axing thousands of jobs, and dissolving its equities sales and trading unit.
- The bank has axed over 4,000 jobs since last year, and about 1,000 since July.
... The London-based news organization said that Deutsche is pushing to "automate large parts of its back-office" via a new strategy called "Operations 4.0," as part of its $6.6 billion savings initiative over the next three years.
Matthews told FN that the machine learning tools helped to save "680,000 hours of manual work" and that it "so far used bots to process 5 million transactions in its corporate bank and perform 3.4 million checks within its investment bank."
