AIhub monthly digest: January 2022 – new voices in AI, bug bounties, and arXiv hits two million

Welcome to our first monthly digest of 2022! This is the place 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 new series New voices in AI, hear from an ACML award winner, and celebrate an arXiv milestone.

New voices in AI

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new series for AIhub: New voices in AI. Hosted by Joe Daly, this series will highlight the work of PhD students, early career researchers, and those in the field of AI with a fresh perspective. You can catch the first episode, with David Adelani, here. We plan to publish a new episode every other Wednesday, so stay tuned.

Maria Gini wins ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award

Congratulations to Professor Maria Gini on winning the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award for 2022. This prestigious prize recognises her research and leadership in the field of robotics and multi-agent systems. Her work has spanned both the design of novel algorithms and practical applications. Find out more here.

ACML award winner talks about analysing text documents

Chien Lu received a runner up award for best student paper at ACML 2021. The paper proposes a novel topic model to analyse text documents with sophisticated covariates. In this interview, he tells us about the implications of this research, the methodology, and plans for future work.

NeurIPS 2021

We’ve been watching and summarising the invited talks from NeurIPS. You can find our write-ups here:
#NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: part one – Duolingo, the banality of scale and estimating the mean
#NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: part two – benign overfitting, optimal transport, and human and machine intelligence
#NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: part three – the collective intelligence of army ants

You can find all of our NeurIPS 2021 content here.

Bug bounties for algorithmic harms?

Bug bounty programmes (BBPs) are mechanisms that incentivize hackers to identify and report cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) researchers Josh Kenway, Camille François, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, and Joy Buolamwini have released a comprehensive report on BBPs and how these might be applied beyond cybersecurity, to areas including algorithmic harm. This Twitter thread gives a summary of bug bounties, what the AJL have been investigating, and what can be learned from BBPs to address harms from algorithmic systems. You can read the full report here.

arXiv hits two million articles

On 4 January 2022, the hosts of arXiv, Cornell University, announced that research-sharing platform arXiv.org now hosts more than two million articles. Founded three decades ago, this resource is used extensively throughout the AI research community and is often the first port of call for researchers and practitioners when searching the literature for relevant work.

What is AI? Stephen Hanson in conversation

In the latest episode in the series, Stephen Hanson chats to NeurIPS President Terry Sejnowski about the history of neural networks, neural modelling, biophysics, explainable AI, language modelling, deep learning, protein folding, Limulus crab retina and more.

CLAIRE and HIPPO AI join forces to work towards open medical AI resources

The two organisations plan to mutually support projects of common interest, initiate joint research and development projects, and coordinate activities and messaging aimed at European policy makers in the areas of AI, data and health. Find out more here.

Paper on LaMDA published on arXiv

The Google team behind LaMDA (Language Models for Dialog Applications) have released the details of the model in this article on arXiv. LaMDA is a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialised for dialogue. The models have up to a whopping 137B parameters and were pre-trained on 1.56T words of public dialogue data and web text.

UK AI standards hub

The Alan Turing Institute will pilot a new UK government initiative with the goal of helping to shape global technical standards for artificial intelligence. This initiative, called the “AI Standards Hub” will be tasked with creating practical tools for businesses, bringing the UK’s AI community together through a new online platform, and developing educational materials to help organisations contribute, develop and meet global standards.

Can AI create good 80s synthwave music?

On their YouTube channel, Artificial Intelligence Music compare tracks composed by a human to AI-generated tunes. In this video they experiment with 80s synthwave.

Saying goodbye to 2021

In the midst of the festive period, you may have missed our 2021 round-up articles. We reviewed the AI year that was here. You can find out which were the most-tweeted papers on arXiv for each month in 2021 here. We also posted a collection of our favourite articles from our focus series on the UN sustainable development goals.

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.