I’ve become more and more interested in machine learning during last year. This is my way of collecting and sharing interesting reads on the topic I stumble upon. I publish those posts every Friday. They are divided into few categories and the format is constantly evolving. Last few weeks were a bit hectic, due to hosting changes, but I’m back to regular posting.
News
In this part, I share interesting news from machine learning and artificial intelligence world. Those are mostly not very scientific articles about interesting applications, predictions and controversies that AI causes.
Algorithms aren’t racist. Your skin is just too dark.
In this article, Joy shares her story on how facial recognition algorithms fail to recognise darker skin tones. You can also watch it in her Ted talk. This issue doesn’t cause just minor problems, like cameras not finding somebody’s face. With a widespread use of facial recognition by law enforcements, it can put innocent people into trouble. It’s part of the bigger problem, that algorithms can inherit human’s biases. She also calls to action She wants to collect example cases of biased algorithms to find a way to fix the problem.
Is China outsmarting American in A.I.?
China is rapidly increasing its support for AI-related projects, while the US is decreasing government spending in that area. The article looks how those changes can impact future of the technology. The problem for China may be its traditional top-down management and lack of open information exchange culture. But those things are also changing.
Software is Eating the world, but AI will eat software
Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, shares his opinion about industries that will be impacted by AI developments. Apart from obvious examples like automotive or healthcare, paradoxically he mentions software.
Apple is working on a dedicated chip to run AI on devices
Just another company is building custom designed chips to accommodate new processing needs of machine learning algorithms. But in contrast to Microsoft or Google, whose chips power their data centres, Apple is rumoured to plan to put a dedicated AI chip in their devices.
The next big leap in AI could come from warehouse robots
Kindred is a company, that has a different approach towards AI usage. In opposition to most of the tech companies that focus on software and build chatbots or recommender systems, they believe that the true AI innovation will come in a physical form of robots.
Learning materials
This week I have a little bit less technical and a bit more visual content here.
A visual introduction to machine learning
It’s a very nice visual presentation, which shows the process of building Machine Learning models. Starting with data analysis, through finding relevant features up to constructing the model. The algorithm used here is decision trees, which is pretty basic ML method but can be very effective with certain datasets. This looked like a website with a great educational potential, unfortunately, this “part 1” has no new follow ups.
A neural network playground
It’s another visualisation tool, that shows basic inner workings of neural networks. As input, you get to choose several datasets and you have control over the construction of the network. You get to set parameters like a number of hidden layers, a number of neurons or activation functions and see how they impact results. It puts a bit of light into rather mysterious ways, how neural networks work.
This is it for today, thanks for reading. If you liked the post, let me know and please check other parts of the series.