GDPR, Cambridge Analytica, a fatal robot-car crash, and BERT

The costs of the technology became as visible as its promise. Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data and the killing of a pedestrian by a self-driving Uber in Tempe, Arizona, drew AI and data practices into ordinary political argument, while the European Union’s GDPR took effect and reset data-protection law well beyond Europe. Google employees forced their employer to drop a Pentagon drone-imagery contract and publish a set of AI principles. Inside the laboratories, OpenAI’s GPT-1 and Google’s BERT established the pretrain-then-fine-tune method that would govern language work for years, and DeepMind’s AlphaFold won the CASP13 protein-structure competition. Waymo began selling robotaxi rides, and an image made by a network sold at Christie’s for $432,500.

14 entries recorded

December

  1. Waymo One begins paid robotaxi rides near Phoenix

    Waymo opened Waymo One on 5 December 2018, a ride-hailing app offering trips in autonomous minivans around Phoenix, including Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler. A trained safety driver sat behind the wheel, and access was limited to members of an earlier rider program.

  2. AlphaFold wins the CASP13 protein-structure contest

    DeepMind’s AlphaFold placed first among entrants at the thirteenth Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction in December 2018, a blind test of methods for predicting how a protein folds. It did best on the hardest category, targets with no similar known structure.

November

  1. The NIPS conference renames itself NeurIPS

    The board of the Neural Information Processing Systems conference said in November 2018 that its short name would become NeurIPS, reversing an October decision to keep NIPS. Researchers had objected in a petition that the acronym doubles as a slur.

October

  1. AI-generated portrait sells for $432,500 at Christie’s

    “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy,” made by the Paris collective Obvious with a generative adversarial network trained on about 15,000 historical portraits, sold at Christie’s in New York on 25 October 2018 for $432,500, roughly 43 times its high estimate.

  2. Google publishes BERT, a bidirectional language model

    Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova published BERT on 11 October 2018, a transformer that pretrains representations of text by reading in both directions, then fine-tuned for particular tasks. Google released the code and weights the following month.

July

  1. Amazon Rekognition falsely matches 28 members of Congress

    The ACLU of Northern California ran photographs of every member of the US House and Senate against a database of 25,000 public mugshots against Amazon’s Rekognition, and reported 28 false matches on 26 July 2018. Members of color were 39% of the errors and 20% of Congress.

June

  1. OpenAI publishes the GPT-1 paper on pre-training

    Alec Radford, Karthik Narasimhan, Tim Salimans, and Ilya Sutskever published “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training” on 11 June 2018, describing a transformer pretrained on unlabeled text and then fine-tuned for particular tasks.

  2. Google publishes seven AI principles after Maven

    Sundar Pichai published seven principles for Google’s AI work on 7 June 2018, six days after the company said it would not renew Project Maven. They commit Google to avoid AI for weapons or mass surveillance and to assess projects for safety, fairness, and accountability.

  3. Google will not renew its Project Maven contract

    Google told employees on 1 June 2018 that it would not seek renewal of its contract supplying image-recognition tools to the Pentagon’s Project Maven program when it expired in 2019. More than 3,000 employees had signed a letter opposing the work, and about a dozen resigned.

May

  1. GDPR takes effect across the European Union

    Regulation (EU) 2016/679 became directly applicable in every member state on 25 May 2018, replacing the 1995 Data Protection Directive. It requires a lawful basis for processing personal data, mandates breach notification, and carries fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue.

  2. Google demonstrates Duplex placing phone calls at I/O

    At its I/O conference on 8 May 2018 Google demonstrated Duplex, an Assistant feature that telephones businesses to book appointments in a synthesized voice with pauses and filler words. Limited public testing followed in New York, Atlanta, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

March

  1. Tesla on Autopilot kills Apple engineer Walter Huang

    Walter Huang, an Apple engineer, died on 23 March 2018 when his Tesla Model X, with Autopilot engaged, accelerated into a highway crash barrier at the US-101 interchange in Mountain View, California. Investigators later found no collision warning sounded and no automatic braking.

  2. Uber test car kills Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona

    A modified Volvo XC90 run by Uber Advanced Technologies Group, driving autonomously with a safety operator aboard, struck and killed Elaine Herzberg as she walked a bicycle across Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona, on 18 March 2018 at roughly 38 mph.

  3. Reporting reveals Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data

    The Observer and The New York Times reported on 17 March 2018 that Cambridge Analytica had obtained data from up to 50 million Facebook profiles, collected through a personality-quiz app and used to build voter-targeting models. Facebook had suspended the firm a day earlier.