Category: AI and Big Data

 

January the 15^th of year 2018 will be remembered in the history of human beings and robots. This day, two AI outscored human beings at the Stanford Questions Answering Dataset, which is a reading test designed by Stanford researchers where you have to answer more than 100.000 questions using 500 Wikipedia articles.

One of the two concerned AI was created by Alibaba’s researchers (Alibaba is a Chinese big store) and scored 82,44 at this test. The other one was developed by Microsoft’s researchers and scored 82,65. The human contestants scored 82,304.

This result is very significant in the sense that we all already know that computers have supremacy over human kind in the areas of memory (storage) and calculation (and they also can do multiple things simultaneously). From now on, as machines not only remember or access more resources than human beings, not only they read that faster, but they also understand it better!! From now on, human beings won’t ever be competitive against machines again, in many ways.

Click the link to read the original article.

 

Axelle loses her job in L’Oréal, or how big data and social networks catch you up! 

There are numerous similar cases. We cannot list all of them here, but we chose this one which is a little bit old on purpose, so it lets you imagine what can happen nowadays as the social networks have grown. Then remember that all that you publish on social networks stays on the Internet (despite you erased the content).

Axelle Despiegelaere, 17-year-old student, had got a contract with Professional L’Oréal to realize beauty tutorial videos.

But meanwhile, Axelle published on her Facebook page a photo of her, large smile, next to the corpse of an oryx, a rifle against her shoulder. The following legend accompanied the cliché: “To hunt is not only a question of life or death. It is more than that … This was one year ago, but today, I am ready to hunt Americans, hahaha”. The young woman posted this image just before a match between Belgium and the United States. Nowadays she has erased the image and deleted her Facebook page.

At that time, the Internet community felt deeply outraged by the photography published on the social networks. Axelle tried to calm things down by declaring “I did not want to offend anyone … it was a joke. Thank you for your understanding.” But too late: Professionnal L’Oréal Belgium immediately reacted by declaring in the newspaper ” The Independant ” that the video realized with Axelle would be the first one and the last one.

Read full article in French here.

 

 

The consequences for humanity are colossal… says the L’Express magazine.

A group compound of some of the best players of poker of the world did not succeed in beating a robot during a tournament marathon of 20 days. The program of artificial intelligence (AI) Libratus developed by the University Carnegie Mellon which participated in the marathon of poker “Heads Up (1 vs. 1) No-Limit Texas Hold’em'” against 4 of these champions of poker, took away 1 766 250 dollars.

It is not the first time when the world elite of a particular game is beaten by an AI. An IBM computer overcame the chessmaster Garry Kasparov already 20 years ago, whereas AlphaGo, developed by the subsidiary of Google, DeepMind, gained 4 parties of Go against the best player of go of the world, last year.

But this victory in the poker marks a new milestone, because this card game is more complex than other games as the chess or the Go, because we cannot see the game of the opponents, that means we do not have all the information.

And this is what can result from it:

The computer can deceive us!

« We can imagine that this technology could thwart financial markets, surpass the human researchers regarding inventions, manipulate the human leaders, and develop weapons which we cannot even understand.».

Furthermore, the boss of Tesla, Elon Musk announced repeatedly its concerns concerning the development of the AI, which he judges “more dangerous than nuclear weapons”, and he declared that it was about “the biggest existential threat”.

Read full article in French.

Go further:

 

Elon Musk is warning that artificial intelligence is a “fundamental existential risk for human civilization,” and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is looking into how states can respond.
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, made the remarks over the weekend at the National Governors Association meeting in Rhode Island.

 

He has long warned of the threats he believes artificial intelligence will pose, from automation to apocalypse. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and others have also sounded warnings over AI.

Full article HERE.

 

This event shows convincingly the actual influence of algorithms on people’s real life. And that’s just the beginning…

This article points on the consequences of that French scholar system:

1. Having very good results doesn’t make you sure to have the right to pursue further studies
2. APB can’t assure you a student place in higher education
3. We don’t know how the students in non-selective bachelor’s degrees are selected
4. The foreigner French high schools are favored
5. High schools have strategies to promote their students
6. There is no random draw for provinces’ high schools
7. APB has become a plan B
8. The situation will be worse next year
9. Students have no winning strategy against the software
10. APB isn’t the disease, it is the symptom

 Read the entire article from Challenges magazine (French)

 

 

 

Click to see real size…

 

IBM and the Air Force Research Laboratory are working to develop an artificial intelligence-based supercomputer with a neural network design that is inspired by the human brain.

The work involves building a supercomputer that behaves like a natural brain— in that these chips operate in a fashion similar to the synapses within a biological brain. The system is powered by a 64-chip array of the IBM TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System.

The scientist who works on it explain the idea in 2 minutes :

WHAT

Did you know you contribute to old books digitization by visiting websites?

WHY

I wanted to write this article to show you that even the daily and insignificant computing operations are in fact not insignificant… You doubtless already heard about “CAPTCHA”. It means “Completely Automated public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. It is a way to prove to the website that you want to visit,that you are a human being and not a robot (thus this device avoids websites to be spammed, or to see their data being massively downloaded, which would also slow down the internet traffic for the human visitors, or whatever).

The idea of reCAPTCHA¹ is to use the human authentication on websites via the CAPTCHA technology to meet a need which has nothing to do with human authentication at first sight, and which is… to OCRise old books!!! (OCR for “Optical Character Recognition” means the translation in “digital” characters (i.e.: UTF-8 character set) of characters printed on papers or scanned as images. In plain language, it means to turn an old and damaged (and perhaps even hand writed) piece of paper into a numeric file.

Actually, digitizing old books provides numerous cultural advantages (among them: everybody can reach the same document simultaneously, even though this one exists in a unique paper copy only, the consultation of this document will not damage it, etc.) and therefore, massive operations of digitization were undertaken from the early 21th century.

However, for old documents, the automatic OCRization is complicated: de facto machines have difficulty in recognizing the printed characters, because these are not regular (because of the deterioration of the paper and the ink due to the time)… like in a CAPTCHA…

HOW

Concerning visitors, captchas appears often as an image containing a series of slightly distorted alphanumeric characters, a text field in which the visitor of the website has to type the characters showed on the image and a button designed to validate the manual data entry. On the image, the characters are not much distorted in order to allow a human being to recognize these, but are distorted enough not to be recognized by a machine. Concerning the website’s administrator, the image is bound to its textual version,which is recorded in a database, and when the CAPTCHA is subjected to the visitor, the website compares his answer with the textual version of the CAPTCHA that is stored in the database: if both match, then the website authorizes the human being to visit it; otherwise, a new CAPTCHA is subjected to the visitor.

The idea of reCAPTCHA is all in all of a childish simplicity: it is about making translate old documents … by human beings (!!!) who authenticate themselves as human beings to visit websites!!!

The idea is made possible by the very large number of websites using CAPTCHAs and thus very significant number of daily human authentications, which allows, literally, to translate word by word old books. The mechanism is the following one: a reCAPTCHA consists of two words: the first one is a classical CAPTCHA, used to know if the entity passing the test is human or not (it is considered as human if it manages to solve the CAPTCHA), the second one is the image of a word taken from an old book. If the entity managed to translate the first word, it is authorized to visit the website, and the translation which it gives of the second word is stored in memory. If several “human beings” translate the same image of the old book in the same way, their translation is “validated” and the digitization of the book progressed².

WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH IT

In this way, over the only year of 2009, 20 years of archives of the New York Times were digitized³ with a reliability better than 99 %.¹

Here is a beautiful example of human and machine collaboration!

NOTES

1■ Luis von Ahn, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, David Abraham et Manuel Blum, « reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures », Science, vol. 321, no 5895,‎ 12 septembre 2008, p. 1465-1468 [Science mag’s article on reCAPTCHA]

2■ Journal du Geek

3■ ReCAPTCHA on Wikipedia

 

Back on top of the article

 

Lyrebird has just set up an incredible capacity of speech synthesis. I will never be tired of repeating: with the technological progress, it will be necessary to be more and more watchful on the reality of the images and the sounds which will be proposed to you …

You can listen to extracts HERE.

 

« Scientific American » talks about the technique HERE.