Some Pigsel

In COVID-related AI news, Andy and Dave discuss an effort from Google and Harvard to provide county-level forecasts on COVID-19 for hospitals and first responders. The National Library of Medicine, National Center of Biotechnology Information, and NIH provide COVID-19 literature analysis with interesting data analytic and visualization tools. In regular AI news, Elon Musk demonstrates the latest iteration of Neuralink, complete with pig implantees. The UK attempted a prediction system for Most Serious Violence, but found that it had serious flaws. Amazon awards a $500k "Alexa Prize" to Emory University students for their Emora chatbot, which scored a 3.81 average rating across categories. The Bipartisan Policy Center releases two reports on AI. And Russell Kirsch, inventor of the pixel and other groundbreaking technology, passed away on 11 August at the age of 91. In research, three papers tackle the problem of reconstructing 3D (in some cases, 4D) models of locations based on tourist photos taking from different vantage points and at different times: the NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) model and the Plenoptic model. The Human Rights Watch releases a report summarizing Country Positions on Banning Fully Autonomous Weapons and Retaining Human Control. Springer-Verlag releases yet-another-freebie with An Introduction to Ethics and Robotics in AI. And the Conference on Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition has posted the papers and videos from its June 2020 session.