Originally published in Wired, Oct 5, 2021 Drills involving swarms of drones raise questions about whether machines could outperform a human operator in complex scenarios. Last August, several dozen military drones and tanklike robots took to the skies and roads 40 miles south of Seattle. Their mission: Find terrorists suspected of hiding among several buildings. So many robots were involved
Originally published in Rest of World, Oct 7, 2021 The Indian food delivery giant changed riders’ beats without warning, crashing their earnings and exposing some to crime. On September 30, around 60 delivery riders wearing the red...
Originally published in The Washington Post, Oct 26, 2021. Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds. Five years ago, Facebook gave its users five...
Originally published in Eugeneyan. Applying machine learning effectively is tricky. You need data. You need a robust pipeline to support your data flows. And most of all, you need high-quality labels. As a result, most of the...
Originally published in United AI, Sept 24, 2021. According to new research, one of the largest Natural Language Processing (NLP) datasets available has been extensively ‘filtered’ to remove black and Hispanic authors, as well as material related to gay...
Originally published in IEEE Spectrum, Oct 4, 2021. Imagine you’re a farmer in the northern United States. It’s early spring, and nighttime temperatures are just starting to rise above freezing. You need to fertilize your newly-planted crops,...
Originally published in Nature, Sept 22, 2021. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, countries relied on a variety of ad-hoc border control protocols to allow for non-essential travel while safeguarding public health: from quarantining all travellers to restricting entry...
Originally published in IEEE Spectrum, Sept 24, 2021. Deep Learning is now being used to translate between languages, predict how proteins fold, analyze medical scans, and play games as complex as Go, to name just a few applications of a technique...
Originally published in The Markup, Sept 30, 2021. A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’s movements. Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your...
Originally published in MIT Technology Review, Sept 28, 2021. Government use of face ID systems exploded during the pandemic—but tying it to critical services has left some people locked out at the moment they needed help the...
