Dec 09, 2020

Helium balloons that beam internet service to hard-to-serve areas are using AI to navigate amid high-altitude winds. Loon, the Alphabet division that provides wireless internet via polyethylene blimps.

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.

A new consortium of companies, schools, and research labs is building open tools for next-generation machine learning. MLCommons aims to foster innovation in machine learning by developing new benchmarks, datasets, and best practices.

A computer vision system is helping to keep runners with impaired vision on track.What’s new: A prototype smartphone app developed by Google translates camera images into audio signals.

Labor unions aim to give workers more protection against the automated systems that increasingly rule the workplace. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) launched a task force to lobby for collective bargaining, increased transparency, and legal protections related to AI in the workplace.

Like many people in the AI community, I am saddened by the sudden departure from Google of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru. Timnit is a tireless champion of diversity and fairness in AI.