Microsoft and Netflix have joined forces to launch three data science modules to help you plan a moon mission with real-world data collected by NASA. The three modules are inspired by the new Netflix Original, Over the Moon, the lessons will guide you through data science and machine learning concepts and practices.
In Over the Moon, Fei Fei–a star character–builds a rocket to reach the moon all on his own. Just like she used science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, you will do the same with Python and Visual Studio Code, and Azure Cognitive Services.
Looks interesting, right? But, what skills would you require to start this intimidating course? If you know Python and are familiar with the Pandas library, you should take these project-based modules and learn while analyzing and building simple machine learning models with real-world data.
The Microsoft Over The Moon modules covers topics right from data wrangling to creating hypothesis and computer vision techniques. You can also learn more from Learn with Dr. G live episodes to gain exciting insights into the Moon Missions as this will help you get a real picture of the modules.
“Netflix is excited to partner with Microsoft to bring some of the challenges of space travel that Fei Fei overcame in ‘Over The Moon’ to life with real world technical application in this new Microsoft Learn path.” says Magno Herran, head of UCAN Marketing Partnerships, Netflix.
Since the announcements of Microsoft’s Global Skills Initiative, a mission to inspire 25 million people to acquire the new age technologies, in summer, Microsoft has taken numerous initiatives to accomplish its target. For instance, Microsoft AI Classroom Series, Microsoft Learn For NASA, and more were released to allow enthusiasts to learn from experts.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazon will provide a free step-by-step AWS training of compute, storage, database, and networking on November 4, 2020. Aspirants will also get certificates of attendance. As per AWS, this training is for beginners who want to learn how to get started with the AWS platform.
“AWSome Day Online is ideal for IT managers, business leaders, system engineers, system administrators, developers and architects who are eager to learn more about cloud computing and how to get started on the AWS Cloud,” notes AWSome in FAQs. Although it requires a business email address to sign up, you can use your personal email id too.
As cloud computing knowledge has become more critical than ever due to the work from home culture, organizations expect professionals to be familiar with cloud platforms. Consequently, you should know how to leverage these platforms to streamline your workflows. And what can get better than experts from AWS delivering the training for free and explaining key features, best practices, technical demos, and more? Besides, you will have a one-on-one with the AWS experts to clear your doubts.
The course is segregated into five modules: Introduction to the AWS cloud, Getting started with the cloud, Building in the cloud, Secure your cloud applications, and AWS pricing, support and architecting. This is a complete walk over the AWS platform. You will learn about cloud services and acquire knowledge of essential practices of scaling applications, automation, and content delivery, among others.
The free AWS training by Amazon is a part of AWSome–an online conference–which will be held on November 4, 2020. The idea behind providing free training is to upskill people with the new age technology that is witnessing an unprecedented adoption due to pandemic. Over the past few months, AWSome has trained thousands of learners worldwide, thereby bridging the gap between organizations and cloud technology.
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.
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.
In his address at #allAI Virtual Summit, @rsprasad stated that 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. pic.twitter.com/gEy5aTAiYf
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.”
AI news of the week (October 11, 2020), although overshadowed by announcements and opinions from the conferences like NVIDIA GTC and RAISE, was packedwith 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
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.
Twitter might seem like a not-so-kind place especially if you are a young student who just had your paper rejected by #NeurIPS2020. You might be seeing all your peers/professors talking about their paper acceptances. Let me shed some light on the reality of the situation [1/N]
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
