Artificial Intelligence: Week #26 | 2021

This week in AI & Machine Learning: robots picking strawberries, GitHub Copilot, data augmentation in TensorFlow, deploy ML pipelines, why VCs are investing record amounts into AI startups, and more! 

🤖 Artificial Intelligence News: 

• Microsoft-Owned GitHub Is Trying To Read Software Developers’ Minds With AI  ← You can join the waiting list for GitHub Copilot here. Do you think it will change the way developers program software?

• With $8.4M raised, strawberry-picking robotics startup Traptic begins commercial deployment

• Soft Robotics raises another $10M, citing pandemic-related demand ← Both of these last two stories show how much interest there is in using robots to perform more complicated tasks!

🛠️ Developer Tools & Education:

• Quickly Training Game-Playing Agents with Machine Learning “One of the most fundamental challenges in applying ML to game development is bridging the chasm between the simulation-centric world of video games and the data-centric world of ML.”

• Habitat 2.0: Training home assistant robots with faster simulation and new benchmarks

• Data augmentation with tf.data and TensorFlow

• Build, Train, and Deploy ML Pipelines using BERT ← The latest course from deeplearning.ai is out on Coursera!

🎤 Interesting Podcasts & Interviews:

• NVIDIA’s Simon Yuen Talks About the Future Horizon of Digital Humans 

• Deep Unsupervised Learning for Climate Informatics with Claire Monteleoni

• Skip-Convolutions for Efficient Video Processing with Amir Habibian

• Mike Volpi on why VCs are investing record amounts into AI startups

📄 Notable Research Papers:

• Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better

• SCARF: Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning using Random Feature Corruption

• Segmentation with Multiple Acceptable Annotations: A Case Study of Myocardial Segmentation in Contrast Echocardiography

• A Survey on Neural Speech Synthesis

• Self-Contrastive Learning