Focus AI #106, the latest AI news in 3 minutes
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This week:
🎭 Demoscene AI: arXiv adds interactive demo support
🧊 Real world reinforcement learning: DeepMind use RL to more efficiently cool buildings.
🎩 CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people
And about code:
[☁️ Library] SkyPilot: ML and Data Science on any cloud with massive cost savings
[🦘 Library ] Kangas: Explore Multimedia Datasets at Scale
[🎭 Library] NameMatch: linking the records of individual across datasets
== News ==
🎭 Demoscene AI: arXiv adds interactive demo support
arXiv has partnered with HuggingFace to incorporate live demos into the popular paper preprint repository. This means that when you browse papers on arXiv, you might scroll down and see an option to explore a demo of the model under discussion on 'Hugging Face Spaces'.
"Demos allow a much wider audience to explore machine learning as well as other fields in which computational models are built, such as biology, chemistry, astronomy, and economics," arXiv writes in a blog post. "The demos increase the reproducibility of research by enabling others to explore the paper’s results without having to write a single line of code."
🧊 Real world reinforcement learning: DeepMind use RL to more efficiently cool buildings.
DeepMind and building management company Trane have used a reinforcement learning agent to efficiently cool some buildings, yielding reductions in cooling energy use of between 9% and 13%. This is a real world application of reinforcement learning (along with other recent hits, like RL systems designing more efficient chips, and stabilizing the plasma in prototype fusion plants), and shows how a technology which ~ten years ago was most known for beating Atari games has matured to the point we're putting it in charge of buildings full of people.
The DeepMind system uses RL "to provide real-time supervisory setpoint recommendations to the chiller plant… in two commercial buildings". DeepMind constructs its approach in a similar way to the algorithm used to cool Google data centers and calls the algorithm 'BCOOLER'. BCOOLER does a daily policy re-optimization, so it continually improves. There's a lot of detail in the paper about the precise implementation details, so if you have a building and want to cool it, read the paper.
🎩 CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people
Facebook researchers have built CICERO, an AI system that can play the famous turn-friends-into-bitter-enemies game 'Diplomacy', and which can talk to players via a language model. CICERO builds on an earlier set of Facebook-built models named 'Diplodocus' which played Diplomacy at an expert level, albeit without conversing with humans.
"CICERO demonstrated this by playing on webDiplomacy.net, an online version of the game, where CICERO achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10 percent of participants who played more than one game," Facebook wrote.
== Code & Tools ==
[☁️ Library] SkyPilot: ML and Data Science on any cloud with massive cost savings
SkyPilot, an open-source framework for running ML and Data Science batch jobs on any cloud, seamlessly and cost effectively. Its goal is to make the cloud(s) easier and cheaper to use than ever before — all without requiring cloud infrastructure expertise.
[🦘 Library ] Kangas: Explore Multimedia Datasets at Scale
Kangas is a tool for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing large-scale multimedia data. It provides a straightforward Python API for logging large tables of data, along with an intuitive visual interface for performing complex queries against your dataset.
[🎭 Library] NameMatch: linking the records of individual across datasets
Name Match links records by learning a supervised machine learning model that is then used to predict the likelihood that two records "match" (refer to the same person or entity). To build this model the algorithm needs training data with ground-truth "match" or "non-match" labels.
#HuggingFace #DeepMind #SkyPilot
A big thanks to our sources: https://jack-clark.net/, https://www.actuia.com/, https://thevariable.com/news/, https://techcrunch.com/, https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/
What about you? Have you noticed something else?
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Have a good week-end,
Maxime 🙃 from Toulouse, France with 🌺