AI News Roundup — February 2020. by Gabriella Runnels and Macon McLean
By: Opex Analytics
Tags: Analytics, News, AI, Data Science, Roundup

AI News Roundup — February 2020

The AI News Roundup provides you with our take on the coolest and most interesting Artificial Intelligence (AI) news and developments each month. Stay tuned and feel free to comment with any stories you think we missed!

_________________________________________________________________

Digital Authenticity… That Isn’t Blockchain?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Deepfakes and their dangers have been discussed ad nauseam, but the roadmap to safely coexisting with them remains unclear. Where the watermark once ruled as an inviolable marker of an item’s authenticity, digital sound and image manipulation have now made it look like the little lock on a child’s diary.

Jigsaw, a Google incubator (not the Saw villain), recently released Assembler, which they call “…an experimental platform… that hopes to make it easier to judge manipulated media and help prevent the spread of disinformation.” Assembler can help detect when images have been digitally manipulated via an “…ensemble model [that] can identify multiple image manipulation types.”

This Exposé is Really AI-Opening

Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash

OpenAI isn’t your typical Silicon Valley AI company. For starters, it was founded as a nonprofit organization, which makes the billions of dollars of investment from the likes of Elon Musk and Microsoft all the more intriguing. The mission of OpenAI is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the type of AI that can learn and think like human beings — in an ethical, responsible way that benefits humankind. Despite this noble goal, the organization has been plagued by accusations of secrecy — which kind of goes against the point of being an “open” AI company. This article from MIT Technology Review takes a deeper look at what’s going on behind the scenes at Silicon Valley’s most ambitious AI research company.

This AI Arrived on the Dot

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

You can’t check the news today without hearing an update on the recent coronavirus outbreak, which was first identified in Wuhan, China in December of last year. While the CDC and the WHO weren’t able to alert the public of the outbreak until early January, a Canadian health organization called BlueDot broke the news nearly a week earlier on December 31.

BlueDot’s primary directive is to alert its clients to potential infectious disease threats, and its impressive speed in the case of the coronavirus outbreak can be attributed to its use of artificial intelligence. BlueDot’s algorithm processes news reports from around the world to determine where outbreaks are occurring, even analyzing airline ticket data to predict where viruses will spread to next.

AI in Music, in Increasing Measures

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

AI in music isn’t just limited to holograms of long-deceased legends being rendered onstage at raucous music festivals — it’s actually in the music, too. While many musicians have toyed with text analytics for lyrics, some have gone as far as training algorithms on their catalog to come up with similar sounds, or used AI for radical musical experimentation that pushes the boundaries of the listening experience. This great piece in TIME breaks down music and AI’s ever-evolving relationship.

A-IRS

The IRS is finally bowing to public pressure and becoming what we’ve wanted them to be for so long: less human. Joining a host of other countries who’ve also recently implemented machine learning solutions at their own tax collection agencies, the IRS has joined forces with data science giant and frequent government partner Palantir to design and execute a host of revenue-generating initiatives. Whether using machine learning models to determine the effectiveness of tax collection measures or using advanced network graphs to identify likely tax evaders, just know that the folks at the IRS (or rather, servers with their data) are now watching you more closely than ever before.

That’s it for this month! In case you missed it, here’s last month’s roundup with even more cool AI news. Check back in March for more of the most interesting developments in the AI community (from our point of view, of course).

_________________________________________________________________

If you liked this blog post, check out more of our work, follow us on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook), or join us for our free monthly Academy webinars.