Tempus Fluit

In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss research from Texas &AM, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and SNY Binghamton, which demonstrates an automatic system for monitoring the physical distance and face mask wearing of construction workers; demonstrating how surveillance is rapidly becoming a widely available commodity technology. In regular news, the National Security Commission on AI releases its draft final report, which makes sweeping recommendations on AI as a constellation of technologies. The nominee for Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, mentions AI and the JAIC at several points during her testimony. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation releases a report on “Who Is Winning the AI Race,” using 30 different metrics to assess nations’ progress in AI. Amnesty International launches a campaign against facial recognition, dubbed “Ban the Scan.” And Scatter Lab pulls its Korean chatbot Lee Luda, after it started responding with racist and sexist comments to user inputs. In three “quick” research items, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School show that single neurons can encode information about others’ beliefs. Researchers at MIT and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria introduce a new class of time-continuous recurrent neural network models, which they dub liquid time-constant networks; the approach reduces the size of networks by nearly two orders of magnitude for some tasks. And researchers at the University of Toronto, Microsoft Research, and Cornell University show that Maia, a custom version of AlphaZero, can learn to predict human actions, rather than the most likely winning move. The report of the week looks at The Immigration Preferences of Top AI Researchers. And the book of the week contains almost 40 chapters and 60 authors on a variety of special operations-related topics, in Strategic Latency Unleashed.

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