Bits & Bytes

Microsoft made headlines last week when it formally added AI to its corporate vision statement, dropping references to “mobile-first” “Our strategic vision is to compete and grow by building best-in-class platforms and productivity services for an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with AI.”
BuzzFeed trains a random forest ML algorithm to identify instances of spy planes in flight tracking data in “BuzzFeed News Trained A Computer To Search For Hidden Spy Planes. This Is What We Found.” Very interesting read, despite the characteristically clickbaity title.
The FastText team at Facebook AI Research release a new set of pre-trained word vectors trained on Wikipedia, news and web crawl data.
Facebook also announced that they were transitioning entirely to neural networks for language translation, from a phrase-based statistical system. The new system uses sequence-to-sequence LSTMs with attention. Stay tuned for a deep dive into LSTMs coming later this month!
OpenAI released RL-Teacher, an open-source interface for training reinforcement learning based AIs via occasional human feedback rather than mathematically expressed reward functions.
As a New Yorker, I consider sarcasm to be somewhat of an art form. A group of researchers from MIT Media Lab and elsewhere published a paper on DeepMoji [PDF], a deep learning model that can detect sarcasm, sentiment, and emotion from emoji.