You asked for more, here’s newsletter four!
To 2025 and back
What is AI and what role will it play in society in 2025? This was the question that my friends Charlie Oliver, Kathryn Hume and I explored with a group of Torontonians at a workshop last week. At a time when AI hysteria in the media is getting pretty ridiculous (“Facebook pull plugs on AI after bots develop their own language,” see Bits & Bytes below for more on this), it was refreshing to be a part of the opposite: helping a bunch of “regular folk” understand and think critically about artificial intelligence and its implications. We need more of this! If you’d like to run one in your town, get in touch with Charlie via the Tech 2025 website.
Speaking of meetups—we were, weren’t we?—our very own TWIML online meetup is starting to take shape and I’m super excited about it. The focus of the TWIML meetup will be discussing machine learning and AI research, as well as techniques, implementations and case studies. Keeping up with the latest research can be an important way to advance your ML & AI knowledge, and discussing those papers as part of a group can help by exposing you to a variety of papers and perspectives.
For our inaugural meetup, Joshua Manela will be presenting one of the Best Paper award winners from last week’s CVPR conference: Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training. I’m looking forward to starting with this one for a bunch of reasons:
- First, the paper explores a method for training neural networks using simulated data, and refining that data in an unsupervised matter. This is important because the collection of labeled data sets can be very time-consuming and expensive.
- Second, the general area of GANs, or generative adversarial networks, is a promising one that’s the focus of a lot of attention right now, so it’ll be good to dig into an application of the technique.
- And finally, the paper was authored by a research team at Apple, who’s really just getting started with publishing research papers—I’m curious to see what they’ve been up to.
The meetup is happening Wednesday, August 16th at 11 am Pacific Time, and a recording will eventually make it’s way to our YouTube channel.
To join us, RSVP here.
