Computer vision is helping people resell their used designer handbags. Rebag, a resale company for luxury handbags, watches, and jewelry, launched Clair AI, an app that automatically appraises second-hand bags from brands like Gucci, Hermes, and Prada.

Two new models show a surprisingly sharp sense of the relationship between words and images. OpenAI, the for-profit research lab, announced a pair of models that have produced impressive results in multimodal learning: DALL·E.

A pair of neural networks is helping to prioritize Covid-19 cases for contact tracing. The public health department of California’s Contra Costa County is using deep learning to sort Covid-19 cases reported via the pre-internet technology known as fax.

Can social media posts reveal early signs of mental illness? A new machine learning model shows promising results. Researchers developed a model that analyzes messages and images posted by Facebook users for indicators of psychological problems.

An AI-powered collar may help protect wild elephants from poachers, hunters, and other hostile humans. Ten ElephantEdge wireless tracking collars will be fitted onto African elephants next year, TechCrunch reported.

The secrets of history are locked in troves of handwritten documents. Now a machine learning platform is making them amenable to digital search. Transkribus is transcribing centuries-old records en masse and making them available to scholars worldwide.

The latest pretrained language models have shown a remarkable ability to learn facts. A new study drills down on issues of scale, showing that such models might learn the approximate weight of a dog or cost of an apple, at least to the right order of magnitude.

Many people worry that face recognition is intrusive, but wild animals seem to find it bearable. Melanie Clapham at University of Victoria with teammates of the BearID Project developed a model that performs face recognition for brown bears.

Social biases are well documented in decisions made by supervised models trained on ImageNet’s labels. But they also crept into the output of unsupervised models pretrained on the same dataset.

Will international rivalries fragment international cooperation in machine learning? Countries competing for AI dominance will lash out at competitors.

Will AI that discriminates based on race, gender, or economic status undermine the public’s confidence in the technology? Seduced by the promise of cost savings and data-driven decision making, organizations will deploy biased systems that end up doing real-world damage.

How does a convolutional neural network recognize a photo of a ski resort? New research shows that it bases its classification on specific neurons that recognize snow, mountains, trees, and houses.

Controversy erupted over the need for transparency in research into AI for medicine. Google Health introduced a system that purportedly identified breast cancer more accurately than human radiologists.

An AI-powered eye in the sky is helping firefighters control woodland blazes. California used maps drawn by neural networks to fight fires that threatened Yosemite National Park earlier this year.

Benchmarks provide a scientific basis for evaluating model performance, but they don’t necessarily map well to human cognitive abilities. Facebook aims to close the gap through a dynamic benchmarking method that keeps humans in the loop.