AIhub monthly digest: February 2022 – AAAI 2022 in progress, the life of a dataset, and AI valentines

Welcome to our February 2022 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, get the low-down on recent events, and much more. This month, we cover our latest New voices in AI interview, hear from a NeurIPS award winner, and get stuck into AAAI 2022.

New voices in AI

You may have seen the launch of our new series last month. In New voices in AI, host Joe Daly chats to PhD students, early career researchers and those with a fresh perspective on the field. In the latest episode, Isabel Cachola talks about how she got into AI and her work on interpretability of NLP models.
Catch the first episode, with David Adelani, here.

Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research

In this interview, Bernard Koch tells us about research that won him, and co-authors Emily Denton, Alex Hanna and Jacob Foster, a best paper prize at NeurIPS 2021. In this chat, Bernard covers the advantages and disadvantages of benchmarking, the findings of the paper, and plans for future work.

AAAI 2022 underway

The 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2022) started on Tuesday 22 February and runs until Tuesday 1 March. You can find out about some of the events on offer here. We’ve rounded up some thoughts from participants on social media here.

During the opening ceremony, the winners of the outstanding paper, outstanding student paper, distinguished paper, and best demonstration awards were announced. You can find out who won what here. We’ll be bringing you further articles about the various talks, sessions and events, so stay tuned.

Hub of African language resources launched

Lanfrica, a centralised hub for African language resources, launched this month. Lanfrica’s mission is to catalogue and link these resources in order to mitigate the difficulty encountered in discovering African works. One useful part for natural language processing (NLP) researchers is the collection of resources for each African language. Researchers can also contribute their own datasets and papers.

USA internal revenue service (IRS) and facial recognition

Towards the end of January, The Atlantic published an article by Joy Buolamwini entitled The IRS Should Stop Using Facial Recognition. Joy outlines the risks of private firm ID.me providing facial recognition technology to the IRS, and other government agencies. She explains more in this video. Thanks to such advocacy from Joy and others, on 7 February, the IRS announced that it would transition away from use of third-party verification involving facial recognition.

Boosting skills and diversity in AI jobs

In the UK, up to £23 million in government funding will finance up to 2000 scholarships for masters AI conversion courses, which enable graduates to do further study courses in the field even if their undergraduate course is not directly related. The aim is to help young people from underrepresented groups join the AI industry.

Outracing champion Gran Turismo drivers with deep reinforcement learning

Researchers have trained agents for Gran Turismo that can compete with the world’s best e-sports drivers. The Sony AI team combined deep reinforcement learning algorithms with mixed-scenario training to learn an integrated control policy that combines speed with tactics. You can hear RoboCup president Peter Stone talking about the work in this interview.

Indigenous AI with Michael Running Wolf

In this episode of the Augmented Humanity podcast from New Mexico Humanities Council, Michael Running Wolf talks about methods and approaches, ecology, partnerships and trust, avoiding language Darwinism, and more.

AI in five levels

In this engaging video, Balaraman Ravindran explains AI in five levels, with the help of five IIT Madras students and alumni.

#AIcademiaEurope for new job postings

Do you have an open position in academia in Europe? Then, use #AIcademiaEurope when tweeting the call.

AI valentines

You may have seen these fun AI-generated valentine’s cards winging their way around cyberspace. These were created by Janelle Shane. She trained GPT-3 on ten real cards, including the message and a text description of the image. Then, she illustrated the new suggestions generated by GPT-3. Find out more about this project here.

The weird and wonderful world of AI art

Jack Morris has written an interesting article about the weird and wonderful world of AI art. He catalogues the different methods and tools that have been used to generate art and links to some useful resources if you are keen to get creating yourself.

AI Song Contest returns for 2022!

Good news for fans of AI-generated pop: the AI Song Contest will return for 2022! The AI Song Contest is all about collaborating creatively with AI, and anyone can take part. The organisers have announced that the deadline for entries for this year’s competition is 1 June 2022. Teams must register by 15 March 2022. If you are in need of some inspiration, you can listen to all of last year’s entries here.

Our resources page
Forthcoming and past seminars 2022
Articles in our UN SDGs focus series

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.