Learning Dexterity

OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. They’ve trained a human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity.

Their system, called Dactyl, is trained entirely in simulation and transfers its knowledge to reality, adapting to real-world physics.

Dactyl learns from scratch using the same general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm and code as OpenAI Five. Their results show that it’s possible to train agents in simulation and have them solve real-world tasks, without physically-accurate modeling of the world.

Automatic Machine Learning (AML)

Automatic Machine Learning or “AutoML” is a field of Artificial Intelligence that is gaining a lot of interest lately. The idea is that doing any kind of task related to machine learning involves a whole lot of steps like cleaning a dataset, choosing a model, deciding what the right configurations of that model should be, deciding what the most relevant features are etc. The goal of AutoML is to automate all of that up to a point where all a data scientist would need to do is tell a machine to perform some task using a dataset and wait for it to learn how by itself. In this episode, i’m going to explain several popular AutoML techniques, then compare top AutoML frameworks like AutoKeras, Auto Sklearn, h20, Ludwig, etc. to help you decide which one will be the best for your needs.

How Blockchain Can Help Advertisers Navigate a Cookieless World

With Safari and Firefox now blocking third-party cookies by default, and Google tightening controls over cookie-based tracking on Chrome, advertisers are looking for solutions that will still let them identify their audiences as they’ve long been able to. Blockchain can be one piece of this puzzle says Jason Manningham, general manager of FreeWheel-owned Blockgraph, which uses blockchain among other tech for privacy-compliant data matching. In this interview Manningham describes how Blockgraph has ‘deconstructed’ blockchain to power its solution, and outlines some of its key use cases.

What the Heck is Quantum Computing?

Jeffrey Welser of IBM Research explains quantum computing and the big refrigerator next to him. Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat interviewed Welser about it at the Semicon West show in San Francisco, where IBM showed off its IBM Q System’s cooling unit for its quantum processor.