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Microsoft Releases Adversarial ML Threat Matrix To Fortify Attacks

Adversarial ML Threat Matrix

Along with the contributions from 11 organizations like IBM and NVIDIA, Microsoft and MITRE released the Adversarial ML Threat Matrix. The open-source framework will allow security analytic to identify, respond, and mitigate threats against artificial intelligence-based solutions. According to Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020, 30% of all AI cyberattacks will leverage training-data poisoning, AI model theft, and adversarial samples to attack ML solutions.

In another survey by Microsoft, 25 of the 28 organizations struggle to find the right tool or methodologies to address attacks on ML models. Such prevailing challenges among companies have raised concerns about using AI in sensitive and highly regulated business operations.

Mike Rodriguez, director of the computer vision research group of MITRE, said that the ML community needs to focus on security while making AI work for many applications. He further noted that, unlike the Internet, where there are numerous flaws because security was ignored in the 1980s, it is not too late with AI.

As the adoption of AI is increasing, there is a need for a framework to assist organizations in delivering secure AI models by eliminating security shortcomings. As a result, with the Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, Microsoft strives to mitigate flaws in AI.

What is Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, And Its Benefits?

“Unlike traditional cybersecurity vulnerabilities that are tied to specific software and hardware systems, adversarial ML vulnerabilities are enabled by inherent limitations underlying ML algorithms. Data can be weaponized in new ways which requires an extension of how we model cyber adversary behavior, to reflect emerging threat vectors and the rapidly evolving adversarial machine learning attack lifecycle,” notes in a blog post.

Also Read: GitHub Launches Code Scanning To Find Vulnerability In Your Code

Figure 1 – Adversarial ML Threat Matrix

Adversarial ML Threat Matrix is a curated set of prevalent attacks like model stealing, adversarial attack, data poisoning, and more. The above image (Figure 1) describes the categories of the framework, which are similar to the ATT&CK Enterprise standards. The benefit of adopting the blueprint of the existing framework–ATT&CK–is to avoid the change in security analysts’ workflows while working with AI models.

Read more here.

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AWS Launches Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) In India

NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC

AWS, in collaboration with NITI Aayog, launches Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) in India during a virtual launch event, making it first in the world for AWS to engage with a government agency at a national level. The idea behind the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC is to help educational institutes, startups, government agencies, nonprofits firms, and public sector organizations come together and solve critical societal challenges in the country.

Talents from different institutes and organizations can leverage AWS technologies and innovate to quickly bring products in the market. With the CIC, one can gain access to essential knowledge, skills, and resources to blaze a trail in a wide range of underserved sectors like agriculture, health and more. CIC will also act as a gateway for associating with government departments to include subject matter experts. 

“The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC will enable pace of innovation with rapid prototyping of applications, while lowering cost of experimentation with technology, and scaling quickly to deliver outcomes good for the public sector in India,” said Manav Sehgal, India lead of AWS CICs.

AWS has witnessed several benefits from CIC in countries like Australia, Bahrain, Germany, France, among others, as it is accelerating innovation and deployment of solutions. In India, CIC will empower companies to solve India-specific challenges by using the entire AWS technologies for ML, AI, AR/VR, storage, networking, IoT and more. 

Also Read: Amazon Is Offering Free AWS Training & Certificate Of Participation

“We invite public sector organizations in India to submit real-world challenges to the NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC. We will combine public sector knowledge of the community and use AWS technologies to address selected challenges. We will also share the prototypes and documentation that we create as open source with other communities facing similar challenges,” said Ben Butler, global lead for AWS CICs at AWS.

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Top AI News Of The Week [October 18, 2020]

AI news October 18

This week, artificial intelligence has touched more people than ever before. While Google is using ML to deliver superior and in-depth search results for most of the queries, Microsoft deployed its novel model in Azure that describes images better than humans. Besides, this year is becoming the “year of self-driving cars” as numerous autonomous ride-hailing services have obtained the permit for driverless vehicles. More recently, General Motors’s subsidiary got the approval for its pilot program. Of the many developments, we bring you the top AI news of the week (October 12 -18) to catch up with every growing AI landscape. 

Here is the top AI news of the week (October 12 -18):

GM’s Subsidiary Gets Approval For Driverless Raid-Hailing

Cruise–an autonomous driving subsidiary of General Motors–gets the permit from California DMV to offer driverless raid-hailing service without a safety driver. “We’re not the first company to receive this permit, but we’re going to be the first to put it to use on the streets of a major U.S city,” notes Dan Ammann, CEO of Cruise. Companies like Waymo, Zoox, Nuro, and AutoX have been earlier granted permission to test fully driverless vehicles. The rollout, similar to Waymo, will be gradual and will start in one of the San Francisco areas.

Google Integrates BERT In Google Search

Topic Understanding

While Google started leveraging BERT on October 25, 2019, for a few searchers to understand the context of queries, the company announced that BERT is being used for almost every search. According to Google, search with BERT will enhance drastically, as it will provide in-depth results. For instance, it can answer your questions with its feature snippets, provide articles related search’s subtopics, manifest videos for quick navigation, and more.

Read more.

Microsoft’s AI Surpasses Humans In Describing Image Caption

Microsoft introduces an AI that surpasses humans in image captioning with VIVO (VIsual VOcabulary). Post the release of the research paper on September 28, the company quickly integrated the model this in its Azure services on October 14. 

“Image captioning is one of the core computer vision capabilities that can enable a broad range of services,” said Xuedong Huang, a Microsoft technical fellow and the chief technology officer of Azure AI Cognitive Services in Redmond, Washington.

Describing images helps the visually impaired interact with the content on the web effectively. But, due to the absence of adequateimage captioning technique, they had to rely on inaccurate user generated descriptions. What made matters worse is that people usually ignore the importance of ‘Alt Text” while posting content on social media or the web. With VIVO, Microsoft can mitigate the challenge of manual entry with reliable AI.

Read more.

NSCAI’s Third Quarter Recommendations To Congress

Chaired by Dr Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) submitted third quarter recommendations to congress, asking them to implement immediately in various areas.

The committee suggested that the government should have Technology Competitiveness Council to device a roadmap for national technology leadership strategy and integrate relevant technological, economic, and security policies. Besides, it pinpointed the importance of nurturing an AI talent pipeline to democratize innovation by providing researchers with the necessary resources. Another essential recommendation by the committee was to collaborate with allies to ensure the responsible use of AI.

Read the complete report here.

Intel India Launches AI Research Center, INAI

Intel, in collaboration with the government of Telangana, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, and the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), introduced an AI research center, INAI. Primarily, it will focus on addressing India-specific challenges to deploy AI at scale. INAI will also curate data to allow researchers analyze and mitigate strenuous challenges associated with smart mobility and non-communicable diseases. By providing resources and other infrastructure to researchers, INAI also wants to lure talents from across the globe to join INAI and innovate.

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Intel India Launches An AI Research Center, INAI

INAI

Yesterday, Intel India hosted an artificial intelligence virtual summit — all.ai, where the company announced an applied AI research center, INAI. Given India’s diversity and population, the strategy to democratize AI demands a different approach than other nations. To address such challenges, the five-day conference is focused on democratizing AI for population-scale impact.

The AI research center will determine and solve India-specific challenges in the healthcare and smart mobility segment. For smart mobility, INAI will assist in analyzing and reducing road accidents. And in healthcare, it will work to enable solutions to extend health coverage and develop superior ML models for predicting non-communicable diseases.

Also Read: IBM Is Offering Free Year-Long Quantum Computing Course

The idea behind the initiative is to create national assets by curating datasets, providing computational resources, and tools and frameworks, to attract global talents in research work. 

Instilled in IIIT Hyderabad, INAI will become foundational for India to leverage artificial intelligence for social good. “The ultimate benchmark of the success of AI will be how far it leads to social improvement. Digital India should ensure digital inclusion, achieved through homegrown tech which are developmental in character,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, Electronics & Information Technology Minister of India, at the virtual event.

INAI will be a combined effort of Intel India, the government of Telangana, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, and the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). Collaborating with a wide range of institutions will enable the research center to innovate and deploy AI-based solutions to solve strenuous problems in India.

“The launch of INAI, the Applied AI Research Center in Hyderabad, is a key milestone in our digitalization journey,” said Sri K. T. Rama Rao, Hon’ble Minister for IT, Industries, MA & UD, the government of Telangana. “I strongly believe it is imperative for all ecosystem stakeholders to collectively work with a synchronous effort towards realizing our AI vision for enabling better governance and elevating quality of life for our people.”

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Top AI News Of The Week [October 11, 2020]

AI News October 11, 2020

AI news of the week (October 11, 2020), although overshadowed by announcements and opinions from the conferences like NVIDIA GTC and RAISE, was packed with other interesting developments by tech-giants like Instagram and Waymo. On the other side, the antitrust committee in the US finds that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple have a monopoly in the tech landscape, which hindered innovation.

Here are the top AI news from the week — October 11, 2020.

NVIDIA GTC 2020

The five-day NVIDIA GTC concluded on Friday had numerous announcements by Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. The GPU provider doubled down on enhancing cloud computing with its BlueField 2 DPU, which is powered by Arm cores. Since the cloud has become foundational for innovation, NVIDIA is striving in the field with its hardware products. Product releases, however, were not limited to improving the cloud’s performance. The company is building the world’s first Drug Discovery Lab to expedite the workflows of scientists for drug or vaccine discovery. NVIDIA GTC had several other announcements that you can read here.

Waymo Launches Its Self-Driving Cars To The Public

Waymo, on October 8, launched its self-driving cars for the public. Users can leverage the app, which is available on Google Play and the App Store to get their rides for friends and family. But, the service is currently limited to the Phoenix area and is only available for Waymo One members. The company, however, is committed to open up the service for others in the coming weeks. And later this year, Waymo will introduce vehicle operators in the vehicle to further expand rapidly by serving in a wider geographical area.

Instagram Will Block Offensive Comments

Instagram rolled a feature that will block offensive comments using machine learning. It is mostly similar to what Twitter does with hiding comments for potentially offensive comments. But, it varies in a way that Instagram will consider the type of comment a user has previously reported as offensive, thereby making it more personalized for the users. This feature is in beta for now.

In addition, Instagram is also using AI to recognize if a user is about to comment that can be against the guidelines of the platform. Following this, Instagram will nudge the user to avoid posting a comment.

NeurIPS 2020 Accepted Papers And The Response

Papers with Code on Twitter: "NeurIPS 2019 Implementations - get all the  papers with code in one place here: https://t.co/WmZUoc9xg2… "
NeurIPS 2020

NeurIPS has announced the list of accepted papers for its virtual conference, which will be held from December 6 to 12. A total of 1,903 papers were approved, outnumbering the acceptance count of 1,428 in 2019. Led by Google (169), Stanford (104), and MIT (98), 1,178 papers that got the approval were from the US.

There was a lot of criticism by researchers whose papers were not accepted, but Hima Lakkaraju, Assistant Professor of Harvard, in a series of tweets noted that there is a biased response from the students on Twitter. She mentioned that around 20% of the papers are accepted, and most (80%) of it rejected.

Antitrust

In a 450 page report, the antitrust panel pinpointed the monopoly of Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. These companies have worked towards eliminating competitions by either acquisition or cloning competitors’ products. 

“The Subcommittee’s series of hearings produced significant evidence that these firms wield their dominance in ways that erode entrepreneurship, degrade Americans’ privacy online, and undermine the vibrancy of the free and diverse press. The result is less innovation, fewer choices for consumers, and a weakened democracy,” noted the report.

The report also undermined the efforts of these companies in delivering benefits to the society by pointing that it has come at a cost. “These firms typically run the marketplace while also competing in it—a position that enables them to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another, or to engage in a form of their own private quasi regulation that is unaccountable to anyone but themselves,” the report said.

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NVIDIA NeMo: Develop Conversational AI Models In 3 Lines Of Code

NVIDIA NeMo

NVIDIA at GTC released NVIDIA NeMo (Neural Modules), an open-source toolkit to develop Conversational AI models on the fly. As per the company, you can make Conversational AI processing models in just 3 lines of code. The PyTorch-based NVIDIA NeMo consists of building blocks and pre-trained models, which can be leveraged to fine-tune or build upon with minimal effort.

Developers and researchers often go through complex processes: data pre-processing, modifying several networks, and verifying compatibility across input layers while developing NLP-based modes. To address such challenges, NeMo comes with domain-specific–automated speech recognition (ASR), NLP, and text-to-speech (TTS)–modules and building blocks.

NVIDIA NeMo caters to a wide range of Conversational AI workflows by bringing the entire dependencies in one place. Besides, NeMo models can be exported to NVIDIA Jarvis–an application framework for multimodal Conversational AI services that delivers real-time performance on GPUs–for high-performance interface with a single command. “You can expert models in ONNX, PyTorch, and TorchScrip,” noted in the NVIDIA blog.

Users will have access to state-of-the-art models like QuartzNet, Jasper, BERT, TRacotron2, and WaveGlow in just three lines of code from NVIDIA NGC. Most of the models available in NGC are trained for over 100,000 hours on NVIDIA DGX™ across a wide range of datasets. One can effortlessly modify these domain-specific modules according to their requirements and deploy with minimal clutters.

At the time when Conversational AI is proliferating in video calls for real-time transcripts and chatbots for customer services, NeMo can become an enabler for organizations in delivering superior customer experience. Companies can use NeMo and streamline their development and deployment of Conversational AI models in their products and services.

Also Read: A Glimpse At OpenAI’s GPT-3 Pricing

Building NLP models is very complicated as it requires enormous computing power to train the models. With NVIDIA NeMo, you can minimize the cost while ensuring you are deploying superior Conversational AI models.

You can read more about NeMo and check some of the tutorials here.

Credit: NVIDIA

Stay tuned for more announcement from NVIDIA GTC.

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IBM Is Offering Free Year-Long Quantum Computing Course

IBM Quantum Computing Course

In association with The Coding School, IBM is offering a free “Qubit by Qubit’s Introduction to Quantum Computing” course. The program is open for high school students or above; you can apply even if you are a working professional. A total of 5,000 learners will be able to enrol in this course for free. However, students from high school would be given priority while evaluating the applications.

The course will include weekly lectures and labs led by TAs, which will help learners to acquire right from the introduction of quantum computing to quantum mechanics and quantum algorithms. Students will also have the opportunity to run a program on a real quantum computer.

Also Read: Udacity Is Offering Yet Another Scholarship For AI, Data, & Cloud Track

“We don’t want education access to be the roadblock in the way of any passionate student, no matter their location or circumstances, to make a potentially groundbreaking impact,” authors noted in the IBM blog post.

Since IBM wants to ensure students are future-ready, aspirants do not need any pre-requisite, such as prior knowledge of quantum computing or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). While applying for the program, you will only be asked for necessary details like name, occupation, the country you live in, email id, university/school and grade, and other demographics.

Also ReadAmazon Makes Its Machine Learning Course Free For All

The applications are being reviewed and will be accepted on a rolling basis in two rounds: October 9 and October 15. The sooner you apply, the better. However, if you enroll late, you may have a chance to be accepted based on the course’s available capacity.

IBM Quantum and Qiskit team has become the enabler in the field by providing free programs for students. The team had earlier hosted the Qiskit Global Summer School for two-week to impart knowledge of quantum computing, which was attended by 4084 students from 101 countries.

As IBM is one of the leaders in quantum computing, the free Qubit by Qubit’s Introduction to Quantum Computing course is a must for students and professionals.

Apply for the course here.

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Udacity Is Offering Yet Another Scholarship For AI, Data, & Cloud Track

Udacity Scholarship

Udacity collaborates with Bertelsmann to offer yet another scholarship to more than 15,000 learners in the coming months. The scholarship is segmented into two parts, where learners will have to qualify the first phase to obtain the second part of the scholarship. Of the 15,000 learners who will be accepted for the first phase, only 4,800 will be offered advanced courses for AI, Data, and Cloud.

Learners will not have the option to choose among the three tracks–AI, Data, and Cloud–to apply for the scholarship. Udacity will be evaluating the right track based on the answers you provide while applying. Introduction to Azure Applications (cloud track), Introduction to Problem Solving and Advanced Analytics (data track), and Introduction to AI in Business (AI track) are the courses available for the first phase.

Also Read: Amazon Makes Its Machine Learning Course Free For All

However, not everyone completing the course will be offered an advanced course. Udacity usually considers various metrics to evaluate students, which they announce in the slack workspace as the first phase starts. Nevertheless, 1600 learners from each track will be promoted to the next step of the scholarship.

Unlike previous terms, this scholarship by Udacity doesn’t require you to go through a lengthy application phase. Udacity has removed the fields where you had to type in your response. 

The last day to apply for the scholarship is on November 16, 2020, and the first phase will start on December 3, 2020. Eventually, the advanced course will begin on March 15, 2020.

Also Read: A New Free Deep Learning Course By fast.ai

Anyone with age above 18 is eligible for the scholarship, but you would require some prerequisite knowledge to get started. In addition, if you can dedicate 5 hours of your time in a week, you will be able to qualify for the first phase. However, the advanced course will be a bit demanding and require you to spend up to 10 hours per week.

Read about the Udacity scholarship here and apply accordingly.

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NVIDIA GTC 2020: Key Announcements

NVIDIA GTC 2020

The first day of NVIDIA GTC 2020 was packed with major announcements by NVIDIA in the artificial intelligence landscape. In the AI conference’s keynote, Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, demonstrated NVIDIA’s effort in revolutionizing machine learning, data centers, autonomous vehicles, robotics, drug discovery, supercomputers, and more.

Here are the top announcements from NVIDIA GTC 2020:

1. NVIDIA BlueField 2 DPU

Today, when the world relies highly on cloud computing, cloud providers need a processor to handle the increased workloads effortlessly. Huang said that 20 to 30 percent of CPU cores are utilized to manage the data center’s infrastructure. To mitigate such challenges, NVIDIA released BlueField 2 DPU, a programmable processor powered with Arm cores, to effectively manage the cloud’s workloads.

Huang also mentioned that the successor of BlueField 2. The third and fourth generation of DPU would further enhance network management in the cloud. While the former is almost finished, the latter will be released in 2023 and will support CUDA parallel programming platform.

2. Jetson Nano 2GB

Announced at NVIDIA GTC 2020, Jetson™, an embedded system for next-generation autonomous machines, has a new member with Jetson Nano 2GB, which will be available for $59. Unlike other Jetson systems, Nano 2GB comes at a lower price; it is almost half of the Jetson Nano (announced last year). Focused at students and hobbyists, Jetson Nano 2GB is bundled with free online training and certification. Powered by 128-core NVIDIA Maxwell™, it is ideal for beginners to make AI-solutions.

You can pre-order Jetson Nano 2GB here.

3. Maxine A Video Call Platform

Due to the pandemic, there is a rapid increase–30 million web meetings every day–in video calls. Understanding the needs of users, NVIDIA at GTC 2020 announced Maxine, a video AI platform. It is not just any other video meeting application. Maxine is equipped with AI that reduces the bandwidth consumption of video calls by a factor of 10. Besides, it can align your face as if you are looking at the camera although you might be watching the other person on the screen.

4. NVIDIA Clara Discovery And World’s First Drug Discovery Lab

NVIDIA Clara Discovery is a suite of tools for scientists to discover drugs efficiently by leveraging artificial intelligence. Huang noted that drug discovery takes decades and costs over $2.5 billion in research. However, COVID-19 has brought the urge among scientists to discover drugs quickly. With NVIDIA Clara Discovery, the company wants to accelerate the workflows for scientists, thereby making the world future proof.

In addition, NVIDIA also collaborated with GSK to build the world’s first AI drug discovery lab. GSK will also get access to NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1–the most powerful AI supercomputer of the UK (announced at the NVIDIA GTC 2020)–to push the boundaries while discovering drugs.

5. NVIDIA EGX AI Platform

NVIDIA EGX AI platform will work in tandem with Ampere architecture GPU and BlueField-2 DPU on a single PCIe card. Using the EGX AI platform, organizations can quickly deploy and manage edge devices. Many firms like KION Group and Northwestern Memorial Hospital are already using EGX AI for supply chain solutions and IoT sensors. “This is the iPhone moment for the world’s industries — NVIDIA EGX will make it easy to create, deploy and operate industrial AI services,” said Huang at NVIDIA GCT 2020.

6. NVIDIA GPUs In Microsoft Azure For Microsoft Office

NVIDIA and Microsoft joined hands to bring its GPUs in Azure for smart experience for Microsoft Office users, including grammar correction and text prediction. Companies like Square, Twitter, eBay, GE Healthcare, and more are already using NVIDIA GPUs for inference.

Every cloud provider offers NVIDIA GPUs to support machine learning workflows. NVIDIA’s inference compute has exceeded all other cloud CPUs. It is envisioned that NVIDIA GPUs will represent 90% of the total cloud inference compute in the near future. The new collaboration with Microsoft Azure will further help NVIDIA gain extensive market share in the inference compute.

7. DOCA

DOCA, a programmable data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture, was yet another solution focused on data centers. “DOCA SDKs let developers write infrastructure apps for software-defined networking, software-defined storage, cybersecurity, telemetry and in-network computing applications yet to be invented,” Huang said.

Stay tuned for more stories from NVIDIA GTC 2020 announcements.

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