Best Things in AI — June 11th, 2018

The Vintra team has wide-ranging reading tastes when it comes to topics related to artificial intelligence. These articles, posts, and videos have been curated from suggestions made by the staff in the past week.

• A long, but interesting and entertaining read (or listen) on AGI (artificial general intelligence) and its potential futures. Of course, we at Vintra are not afraid of AI, but welcome it with open arms… unless, of course, T-800’s start roaming the streets of LA. How Frightened Should We Be of AI.

“Many people in tech point out that artificial narrow intelligence, or A.N.I., has grown ever safer and more reliable—certainly safer and more reliable than we are. (Self-driving cars and trucks might save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.) For them, the question is whether the risks of creating an omnicompetent Jeeves would exceed the combined risks of the myriad nightmares—pandemics, asteroid strikes, global nuclear war, etc.—that an A.G.I. could sweep aside for us.”

• Are you a fan of accelerated and high performance computing available in a public cloud? Yea, us too. Check out this enlightening webinar from Amazon.

“Researchers, scientists and IT organizations are looking to cost-effectively and rapidly develop, deploy and deliver machine learning and HPC workloads by leveraging the agility, scalability and availability of the public cloud.”

• This one is above this author’s pay-grade (see: intelligence level), so I’ll let our engineer’s words do the explaining… “Impressive paper. A great approach to unsupervised learning. I was thinking about super-sparse Variational Autoencoders as a general idea. Here they do something similar using quantization. Reconstruction results in Fig. 2 are just impressive.”
• Incredible dataset for autonomous driving and critical vision applications.
• And finally, Vegas anyone? Someone built a playing card detector, and it’s pretty impressive: Playing card detection with YOLO

Happy reading/watching/listening! Subscribe to our blog to stay up-to-date.