In November, NYU media professor Charlton McIlwain (opens in new tab) joined fellow scholars Safiya Noble, Ruha Benjamin, and André Brock for a virtual discussion on anti-Blackness and technology hosted by the University of California Santa Barbara. The conversation was an engaging one, and McIlwain…
Editor’s note: In recent years, telecommunications operators have faced a growing challenge to meet surging global demand for immersive online services and collaboration tools. Upgrading their proprietary networks to prepare for 5G and beyond would require major capital expenditures, even as competition was driving down…
The ability to reason about causality, and ask ``what would happen if…?’’ is one property that sets human intelligence apart from artificial intelligence. Modern AI algorithms perform well on clearly defined pattern recognition tasks but fall short generalizing in the ways that human intelligence can.…
For many years AI researchers have sought to build upon traditional machine learning, which trains technology to process facts and learn from them, and develop machine reasoning, in which programs apply logic to data and solve problems – comparable to the way humans think. For…
The increasing use of personal assistants and messaging applications has spurred interest in building task-oriented dialog systems (or task bots) that can communicate with users through natural language to accomplish a wide range of tasks, such as restaurant booking, weather query, flight booking, or IT…
A Generative adversarial network, or GAN, is one of the most powerful machine learning models proposed by Goodfellow et al. (opens in new tab) for learning to generate samples from complicated real-world distributions. GANs have sparked millions of applications, ranging from generating realistic images or…
AI agents capable of understanding natural language, communicating, and accomplishing tasks hold the promise of revolutionizing the way we interact with computers in our everyday lives. Text-based games, such as the Zork series, act as testbeds for development of novel learning agents capable of understanding…
Last month, the DeepSpeed Team announced ZeRO-Infinity, a step forward in training models with tens of trillions of parameters. In addition to creating optimizations for scale, our team strives to introduce features that also improve speed, cost, and usability. As the DeepSpeed optimization library evolves,…
Accessibility and inclusion represent a growing space in the technology landscape, and how research and development are being used to empower people across abilities is expanding in exciting ways. Instead of treating disabilities as conditions in need of solutions—as has been the case over the…
The genetic sequence for COVID-19 was first published in January 2020. Before the end of the year, new vaccines—which typically take five to ten years to develop—were approved for emergency use in multiple nations. This astounding achievement is emblematic of a “reset” in the relationship…
Understanding video is one of the most challenging problems in AI, and an important underlying requirement is learning multimodal representations that capture information about objects, actions, sounds, and their long-range statistical dependencies from audio-visual signals. Recently, transformers have been successful in vision-and-language tasks such as image…
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, some truths about the nature of work have been underscored: it is uniquely complex, quickly shifting, and increasingly technology-mediated. Teaching, medicine, mental health, and other professions—previously thought to be near-impossible to do remotely—have all abruptly moved to online…
