This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How the AI industry profits from catastrophe It was meant to be a temporary side job—a way to earn some extra money. Oskarina Fuentes Anaya signed up for Appen, an AI data-labeling platform,…
It was meant to be a temporary side job—a way to earn some extra money. Oskarina Fuentes Anaya signed up for Appen, an AI data-labeling platform, when she was still in college studying to land a well-paid position in the oil industry. But then the economy tanked in Venezuela. Inflation skyrocketed, and a stable job,…
Posted by Zifeng Wang, Student Researcher, and Zizhao Zhang, Software Engineer, Google Research Supervised learning is a common approach to machine learning (ML) in which the model is trained using data that is labeled appropriately for the task at hand. Ordinary supervised learning trains on independent and identically distributed (IID) data, where all training examples…
My husband and I love to eat and to learn about history. So shortly after we married, we chose to honeymoon along the southern coast of Spain. The region, historically ruled by Greeks, Romans, Muslims, and Christians in turn, is famed for its stunning architecture and rich fusion of cuisines. Little did I know how…
The economy is being transformed by digital technologies, especially in artificial intelligence, that are rapidly changing how we live and work. But this transformation poses a troubling puzzle: these technologies haven’t done much to grow the economy, even as income inequality worsens. Productivity growth, which economists consider essential to improving living standards, has largely been…
Students in the MIT course 6.036 (Introduction to Machine Learning) study the principles behind powerful models that help physicians diagnose disease or aid recruiters in screening job candidates. Now, thanks to the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) framework, these students will also stop to ponder the implications of these artificial intelligence tools, which…
Posted by Andreas Steiner and Basil Mustafa, Research Software Engineers at Google Research, Brain team The ability to classify images into categories has been transformed by deep learning. It has also been significantly accelerated by transfer learning, whereby models are first pre-trained on large datasets, like ImageNet, to learn visual representations that are then transferred…
MIT graduate student Fernanda De La Torre, alumna Trang Luu ’18, SM ’20, and senior Syamantak Payra are recipients of the 2022 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. De La Torre, Luu, and Payra are among 30 New Americans selected from a pool of over 1,800 applicants. The fellowship honors the contributions of immigrants…
Cities are loud places. Traffic, trains, and machinery generate a lot of noise. While it’s a mere inconvenience much of the time, it can become a deadly problem when it comes to detecting earthquakes. That’s because it’s difficult to spot the telltale signal of an approaching earthquake in seismic sensor data amid the general human-generated…
Aimed at driving diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence, the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is launching Break Through Tech AI, a new program to bridge the talent gap for women and underrepresented genders in AI positions in industry. Break Through Tech AI will provide skills-based training, industry-relevant portfolios, and mentoring to qualified…