DataDownload: Fei-Fei Li has a national vision for AI & Nvidia lets you transform your pet with GANimals

It’s November — boy, that happened fast!

As we zoom toward the end of the year, this week brings the daunting alarm that AI is a national emergency in the making. Yikes. Deep breath.

Also, now that Twitter has thrown down the gauntlet, we re-watched the AOC/Zuckerberg face off.

In happier news — check out a new curated podcast app from an MTV alum, and for a pallet cleanser — how about digital dogs.

So, read away, and please reach out and share any cool links or projects we should know about. DataDownload is written each week for you!

Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read

We Need a National Vision for AI

Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy, co-directors at Stanford’s recently-launched Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence institute, say that AI is a national emergency in the making. The US — and really, almost everybody — isn’t prepared for the risks or benefits of the technology. Li and Etchemendy stress the need for a human-centered AI framework to guide national policy and reap the rewards of a $15.7T market by 2030.

The authors lay out a bold plan: a national AI strategy that builds an ecosystem across education, research, and entrepreneurship, with a proposed $120B investment funding the initiative over the next decade.

Google’s Got a Chief Decision Scientist. Here’s What She Does
Cassie Kozyrkov, Google’s new chief decision scientist — a title that’s likely to spread across the tech sector in the coming years — does a few things different from your run-of-the-mill data scientist: she bridges departments “that usually keep to themselves, all the way from research to the teams that apply algorithms to business functions.” Her role isn’t just cross-functional — it’s multidisciplinary: “by bringing psychology into data science, [Kozyrkov] hopes to reduce bias in algorithms.”

For the Media

New Podcast Listening App SPKR Introduces Curated Podcast Singles

We’re big on curation here (check out Curation Nation — it’s a longtime passion of ours) so we were very excited to see Andy Schuon’s curated podcast project Sprk. Behind the project is longtime Apple wunderkind Alan Cannistraro — the creative force behind Rheo TV.

Schuon, former programming head at MTV and VH1, has been thinking about listening behavior for a while now. The problem he sees with current podcast apps is they don’t connect creators with audiences all that well — Schuon likened it to going to a bookstore, when it should be more like radio.

To bridge the disconnect, the Sprk app welcomes listeners with manually curated snippets of various podcasts in a genre (or channel) of their choice. If they like something, they can listen to the full podcast and subscribe.

3 min read

Nvidia’s New AI Lets You Know if Your Pet Would Look Cuter as a Different Animal
Nvidia researchers might have come up with the best permutation of GAN we’ve seen yet (at least in name): GANimals. They used something called Few-shot, UNsupervised Image-to-image Translation (FUNIT), an algorithm that relies on just a few target images for training. Once trained, the algorithm needs only one source image and one target image to produce results. You can play around with GANimals here.

Leveling Up: DeepMind’s AlphaStar Achieves Grandmaster Level in StarCraft II

“Wait, didn’t AlphaStar beat a few StarCraft 2 pros back in Janurary?” you might be asking. True, but it wasn’t a balanced match — AlphaStar used the surgical precision of an API to issue commands instead of a human interface. In a new paper released in Nature, DeepMind researchers have addressed these issues, and the AI is now able to achieve Grandmaster level for all three of the game’s races.

Mastery of a dynamic environment with limited information and which requires real-time decision-making (read: life) translates well to use cases such as autonomous vehicles, personal assistants, and manufacturing robots. (Image source: The Verge.)

What We’re Watching

AOC takes on Mark Zuckerberg
This week Twitter threw down the gauntlet with Jack Dorsey announcing they would be banning political advertising, with a timing that was inspiring. Employees are breaking rank and posting public letters about their discomfort with Facebook’s political advertising policies, while Mark Zuckerberg is busy trying to have a quippy response to Aaron Sorkin’s New York Times op-ed.

Things are moving fast, and it all makes this exchange between AOC and Mark Zuckerberg last week feel all the more relevant.

Events & Announcements

Event: NewsLab ‘20
Event Date: January 24–25, 2020
Application Deadline: December 5
Hosted by NYC Media Lab with support from Knight Foundation, NewsLab ’20 is a participant-led, interactive event for 150 technologists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and newsroom innovators focused on defining the challenges faced by local newsrooms. Travel stipend available for out-of-town attendees. Learn more and apply here.

Opportunity: RLab Accelerator
This 12-week accelerator for XR startups includes a residency at RLab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (from March 9 to May 22) and potential equity
investment from Super Ventures. Learn More. Note: there is a corresponding Info Session on November 14, 5PM-6PM (Stick around after Q&A for NYVR Meetup, starting at 6pm!). RSVP Here.

Event: The State of Platform Cooperativism
Dates: November 7–9
Location: The New School
Who owns our data, our cities, the world? This multi-day event brings speakers and attendees from over thirty countries to meet, co-design, and learn about topics such as worker power in the platform economy, antitrust, misogyny and racism, ecological sustainability, and best practices. RSVP Here.

Data Council New York City 2019
Date: November 12–13
Location: Columbia University
Data Council is the first community-powered data-platforms, science, & analytics event for software engineers, data scientists, deep learning researchers, and technical founders who want to discover tools & insights to build AI-based products. Register Here.

Event: Natural Language, Dialog and Speech (NDS) Symposium
Date: November 22, 9AM-6PM
Location: The New York Academy of Sciences
NDS2019 will convene leading researchers from academia and industry to discuss cutting-edge methodologies and computational approaches to applied and theoretical problems in dialog systems, spoken and natural language understanding, natural language generation, and speech synthesis. Register Here.

Job: RLab Producer
Deadline: November 15
RLab is seeking a Producer to prepare a special report on the future of human-computer interaction, including VR, AR, and spatial computing. This project-based position is ideal for a current or recent graduate student with a background in multimedia journalism and a strong grasp of the digital meia sector. Apply Here.

A Deeper Look

Beyond Deep Learning With Gary Marcus
In this HBR podcast, Azeem Azhar interviews NYU’s Gary Marcus on Exponential View. You will learn:

• What newborn ibexes can teach us about intelligence and learning.
• How deep learning widens the gap between big companies and startups.
• What we need for a breakthrough in AI.

Using AI to Eliminate Bias From Hiring
We wouldn’t say cognitive neuroscientist and co-founder of AI-based hiring software pymetrics Frida Polli harbors an unpopular opinion, but there is a divide between companies like HireVue and pymetrics, and researchers worried about the ethics of using AI to choose job candidates. In this HBR piece, Polli calls the status quo of (human) hiring a (sometimes) “deeply flawed” and “dystopian” practice, and believes neuroscience and AI can help eliminate unconscious bias.

Meanwhile, Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute, noted that “it’s a profoundly disturbing development that we have proprietary technology that claims to differentiate between a productive worker and a worker who isn’t fit, based on their facial movements, their tone of voice, their mannerisms.” (She was speaking about HireVue, a software with a similar goal to pymetrics’.) The sentiment was echoed in a Guardian piece on the UK developing “welfare robots.”

Transactions & Announcements

Stampli Raises $25M in Series B to Bring AI to Invoice Management

Israeli Seed Fund Remagine Is Financing Media’s AI Revolution

Signal AI Taps $25M for Public Data-Based Market Intelligence That Spots Trends and Risks