Xenadu

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news and research, including an update from the DARPA OFFSET (OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics) program, which demonstrated the use of swarms in a field exercise, to include one event that used 130 physical drone platforms along with 30 simulated [0:33]. DARPA’s GARD (Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception) program has released a toolkit to help AI developers test their models against attacks. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Heidi Shyu, announced DoD’s technical priorities, including AI and autonomy, hypersonics, quantum, and others; Shyu expressed a focus on easy-to-use human/machine interfaces [3:35]. The White House AI Initiative Office opened an AI Public Researchers Portal to help connect AI researchers with various federal resources and grant-funding programs [8:44]. A Tesla driver faces felony charges (likely a first) for a fatal crash in which Autopilot was in use, though the criminal charges do not mention the technology [12:23]. In research, MIT’s CSAIL publishes (worrisome) research on high scoring convolution neural networks that still achieve high accuracy, even in the absence of “semantically salient features” (such as graying out most of the image); the research also contains a useful list of known image classifier model flaws [18:29]. David Ha and Yujin Tang, at Google Brain in Tokyo, published a white paper surveying recent developments in Collective Intelligence for Deep Learning [19:46]. Roman Garnett makes available a graduate-level book on Bayesian Optimization. And Doug Blackiston returns to chat about the latest discoveries with the Xenobots research and kinematic self-replication [21:54].