Human Language Technologies Research Center

If you haven't done so already, go check Quote—Unquote - a new interdisciplinary platform active in Bucharest.

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Quote—Unquote is an interdisciplinary platform that investigates the mechanisms, uses and effects of (public) speech in contemporary society through artistic practice and its intersection with other fields of activity. By observing the educational and performative turns of the last few decades and the growing importance of the discursive act in the field of visual arts, this initiative proposes a dialogic turn and rhizomic formats. Quote—Unquote follows and provokes the juxtaposition of various practices in order to create new productions and an understanding of the event in itself as a process of transformation and co-creation.

Quote—Unquote is conceived by Infinite Conversation, an independent curatorial unit founded in Bucharest by Dan Angelescu, Irina Radu and Cristina Vasilescu.

Quote—Unquote Platform on public speech, initiated by Infinite Conversation

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602094/ais-language-problem/

Creating machines that understand language is AI’s next big challenge Machines that truly understand language would be incredibly useful. But we don’t know how to build them.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610278/why-even-a-moths-brain-is-smarter-than-an-ai/

Why even a moth’s brain is smarter than an AI A neural network that simulates the way moths recognize odors also shows how they learn so much faster than machines.

ai bias strikes again

'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth An ex-YouTube insider reveals how its recommendation algorithm promotes divisive clips and conspiracy videos. Did they harm Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency?

Black box machine-learning models are already having a major impact on some people’s lives. A system called COMPAS, made by a company called Northpointe, offers to predict defendants’ likelihood of reoffending, and is used by some judges to determine whether an inmate is granted parole. The workings of COMPAS are kept secret, but an investigation by ProPublica found evidence that the model may be biased against minorities.

Google’s AI chief says forget Elon Musk’s killer robots, and worry about bias in AI systems instead John Giannandrea, who leads AI at Google, is worried about intelligent systems learning human prejudices.

Program – Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Natural Language Processing Program Date: Sunday, July 30th, 2017.Location: Vancouver, CanadaProgram:  Full-day event including: Three invited speakers Oral presentations and posters A mentoring & recruiting lunch Invited speakers Pascale Fung Ndapa Nakashole Bonnie Webber                       Schedule 07:30 - 08:30ACL regist...

https://medium.com/towards-data-science/memory-attention-sequences-37456d271992

Memory, attention, sequences – Towards Data Science – Medium We have seen the rise and success of categorization neural networks.

Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligence (RAAI)
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We invite you to join us at our AI conference that will take place Monday and Tuesday, 1st floor in Stoilow Hall, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.
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Proudly organized by The Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, Facultatea de Matematică şi Informatică, Universitatea din Bucureşti and Human Language Technologies Research Center, and sponsored by Bitdefender
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http://unibuc.ro/~conference/raai2017/ -ajenda

RAAI 2017 The main goal of the conference is to bring together active researchers in various fields of Artificial Intelligence, presenting state of the art research topics and projects (published or ongoing work) as well as reports concerning the up to date technologies related to their fields of study. In ad...

http://moralmachine.mit.edu

Moral Machine A platform for public participation in and discussion of the human perspective on machine-made moral decisions

There is the question of how the world looks as a screen, and another, more important I think, is how we look as objects of perception from the position of the machines with which we co-occupy that world. Seeing ourselves through the “eyes” of this machinic Other who does not and cannot have an affective sense of aesthetics is a kind of disenchantment. We are just stuff in the world for “distributed machine cognition” to look at and to make sense of. Our own sapience is real and unique, but as we are things-to-observe-that-just-happen-to be-sapient, this doesn’t really matter to machine vision. This disenchantment is more than just like hearing the recorded sound of your own voice (“that’s not me”) it is potentially the clearing away of a closely guarded illusion. This uncomfortable recognition in the machine’s mirror is a kind of “reverse uncanny valley.” Instead being creeped out at how slightly inhuman the creature in the image appears, we are creeped out at how un-human we ourselves look through the creature’s eyes. This is something to continue to research further, but in and out of “art”.

http://dismagazine.com/discussion/73272/benjamin-bratton-machine-vision/

Benjamin Bratton | Machine Vision From planetary scale computation to the limits of cloud-based sovereignty, Benjamin Bratton talks to about his current research.