Artificial Intelligence #17

Hey! In this issue: an AI that verifies that people wear masks, identifies opioid sellers online, and converts brain waves to English and a human to an animation; a big update to the resource "Papers with Code," a guide to choosing the right online NLP course and a tutorial to building NLP models, and even more.

This issue of the newsletter is sponsored by Lambda Labs and contains a sponsored message marked as [Sponsored].

• France is using AI to check whether people are wearing masks on public transport
• Pose Animator: a web animation tool that brings SVG illustrations to life with real-time human perception TensorFlow.js models (video, demo, github)
• A big update to the "Papers with Code" database of results from papers, now with 2500+ leaderboards and 20,000+ results (paper)
• Choosing the right course for a practical NLP engineer
• A curated list of machine learning and artificial intelligence courses with video lectures
• Generate handwriting with an in-browser recurrent neural network (demo, paper, github)
• [Sponsored] Lambda — Deep Learning Workstations & Servers

Save on deep learning GPU workstations, laptops, and servers. TensorFlow, PyTorch, and CUDA? preinstalled. See up to 20% savings vs traditional hardware and 50% savings vs cloud.

• AI's hardest problem? Developing common sense
• Deep learning illustrated: building natural language processing models
• [Tool] Advbox: a toolbox to generate adversarial examples that fool neural networks
• [Tool] Manifold: a model-agnostic visual debugging tool for machine learning 
• [Research] Teaching robots to navigate through complex, unfamiliar real-world environments to reach a specified destination — without a pre-provided map
• AI can help find illegal opioid sellers online. And wildlife traffickers. And counterfeits
• An encoder-decoder neural network translates brain waves to English text (Nature, preprint)
• [Tool] A Faster CNN based tool Newspaper Navigator uses object recognition to index photos, ads, and other images in 16 million pages of newspapers dating back to 1789
• By using a video game-type simulation, Salesforce used reinforcement learning to develop a tax policy aimed at optimizing worker productivity and income equality
• During the pandemic, machine-learning models trained on normal behavior are showing cracks — forcing humans to step in to set them straight

Book recommendation of the week:

In this smart, often hilarious introduction to AI — probably the most interesting science of our time — Dr. Janelle Shane shows how these programs learn, fail, and adapt—and how they reflect the best and worst of humanity.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is the perfect book for anyone curious about what the robots in our lives are thinking.

If you work for an AI or data science company or a team, recommend your employer to sponsor one of the next newsletter issues and help to promote, among the AI professionals and enthusiasts, the awesome product or service you are working on. Contact True Positive Inc. for more details on sponsorships.

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Have a nice weekend! See you next week. — Andriy