From exciting, new applications to electrifying tech innovations, the twin fields of artificial intelligence and automation are evolving every day. If you missed the latest developments making the news, we have you covered. Here’s a quick recap of the top three AI and automation stories worth knowing.
University of Maryland Creates AI “Invisibility Cloak”
“Most work on real-world adversarial attacks has focused on classifiers, which assign a holistic label to an entire image, rather than detectors which localize objects within an image,” the team explained. “Detectors work by considering thousands of ‘priors’ (potential bounding boxes) within the image with different locations, sizes and aspect ratios. To fool an object detector, an adversarial example must fool every prior in the image, which is much more difficult than fooling the single output of a classifier.”
With rising interest in “adversarial attacks”, it comes as no surprise that AI developers are fighting back. Several startups—and even some tech heavy hitters—are developing “hardened” algorithms against such attacks, according to VentureBeat. As visual detection plays an ever-larger role in our day-to-day lives, it is likely that such attacks—and their remedies—will continue for the foreseeable future.
AI-Led “Synthetic Party” Eyes Parliamentary Seat in Denmark
When “interviewed” by Motherboard on Discord, Leader Lars revealed its support for a basic income for all citizens and why it “believed” AI should determine the basic income level, as well as its stance on other issues. While technically ineligible to run for office as a machine, Leader Lars nevertheless sparked debate on the role of AI in government and even the democratic nature of the technology itself as a platform for the unrepresented voices in politics.
“We’re representing the data of all fringe parties, so it’s all of the parties who are trying to get elected into parliament but don’t have a seat, so, it’s a person who has formed a political vision of their own that they would like to realize, but they usually don’t have the money or resources to do so.”
Asker Staunæs, party creator and artist-researcher at MindFuture, interviewed by Motherboard.
AI and Automation Are Making Offsides Calls at FIFA 2022
According to The Hindu, this technology will replace the manual effort taken in poring over replays for minutes on end. “We are aware that sometimes the process to check a possible offside takes too long, especially when the offside incident is very tight,” says FIFA Referees Chairman Committee Pierluigi Collina. “This is where semi-automated offside technology comes in: to offer faster and more accurate decisions.”
However, FIFA is quick to stress that SAOT is not a substitute, but rather a complement, to human referees. “I know that someone called it ‘robot offside’; it’s not,” Collina states. “The referees and the assistant referees are still responsible for the decision on the field of play.”