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Machine Learnings

Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome
"Premature birth and its complications are the leading cause of death in infants. In the US, roughly one in 10 babies is born prematurely, or before 37 weeks, far higher than most other developed countries, and the rate is ticking upward...In Kentucky, Passport Health, a nonprofit Medicaid insurer, is testing an unlikely hypothesis: Whether artificial intelligence can make sense of the cacophony of risk factors and direct expecting mothers into more personalized care...Initial data indicates that, a year into the program, preterm births fell by about 13 percent." - Gregory Barber, Writer Learn More from WIRED >

#Not Awesome
"“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup...For Irani, there’s nothing special about AI in this story. In the US at least, prison labor has long been controversial, with some saying that it economically exploits workers while others argue that it can help rehabilitate them. To her, the public relations push around the collaboration is more surprising than the fact that digital work has become part of prison labor. “The hook is that we have this kind of hype circulating around AI so that we can masquerade really old forms of labor exploitation as ‘reforming prisons,’” Irani says. “They’re connecting social movements, reducing it to hype, and using that to sell AI.”" - Angela Chen, Reporter Learn More from The Verge >

What we're reading.

1/ YouTube's Chief Product Officer attempts to argue that the site's algorithms don't expose visitors to increasingly extreme content. Learn More from The New York Times >

2/ We can blame algorithms all we want, but blindly putting our trust in technology when we search for answers to questions that require "empathy, open-mindedness, and instinct" - is a failure of our own. Learn More from PBS >

3/ If you watch a movie that Netflix recommends to you, was it really your own choice or is the algorithmic nudge chipping away at your free will? Learn More from Knowledge @ Wharton >

4/ Stanford researchers are pitting autonomous vehicles against professional race car drivers on closed courses to see how they fare in "extreme" situations. Learn More from TechCrunch >

5/ Breakthroughs in machine learning make it possible for robots do seemingly simple (yet deeply complex) tasks like toss plastic bananas into a bin at a higher rate than a person. Learn More from The New York Times >

6/ There are so many databases with images of our faces that one can use to train facial recognition software because “unlike fingerprints, where there have long been rules on how and when they’re collected, there are no rules for face technology.” Learn More from Forbes >

7/ Three legends in the field of artificial intelligence win the Turing Award for their contributions to the advancement of neural networks. Learn More from The New York Times >

What we're building.

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Links from the community.

"How malevolent machine learning could derail AI" submitted by Avi Eisenberger (@aeisenberger). Learn More from MIT Technology Review >

"Can AI Be a Fair Judge in Court? Estonia Thinks so" submitted by Samiur Rahman (@samiur1204). Learn More from WIRED >

"Why AI needs social workers and “non-tech” folks" by Desmond U.Patton Learn More from Noteworthy >

"Whale Above the Stars" by Emma Bernstein. Learn More from Noteworthy >

"The Rise of Generative Adversarial Networks" by Kailash Ahirwar. Learn More from Noteworthy >

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31/03/19 View this email in your browser
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