TIME SERVED

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 300/ 5th July 2019 07:51:08

My 300th column is a milestone that deserves a meaty subject, and luckily the recent CogX 2019 festival provides a perfect one. I reckoned I’d served my time in the purgatory that is the computer show: for 15 years I spent whole weeks at CeBIT in Hannover, checking out new tech for Byte magazine; I’ve done Comdex in Vegas (stayed in Bugsy Siegel’s horrendous Flamingo where you walked through a mile of slots to get to your room); I’ve flown steerage to Taipei to help judge product awards at Computex. I thought I was done, but CogX had two irresistible attractions: it brought together the world’s top AI researchers for three days of serious talk, and it was in King’s Cross, a short walk down the canal from my house, in what’s now called ‘The Knowledge Quarter’ - British Library, Francis Crick Institute, Arts University (Central and St Martins rolled into one brand-new campus), YouTube HQ, with Google’s still under construction.

CogX was the first proper show to be held in the futuristic Coal Drops Yard development and it was big – 500 speakers on 12 stages, some in large geodesic tents. It was also silly expensive at £2000 for three-days-all-events or £575 per day (naturally I had a press pass). Rain poured down on the first day causing one wag to call it ‘Glastonbury for nerds’, but it was packed with standing-room-only at every talk I attended. A strikingly young, trendy and diverse crowd, most I imagine being paid for by red-hot Old Street startups. Smart young people who don’t aspire to be DJs or film stars now seem to aim at AI instead. This made me feel like an historic relic, doffing my cap on the way out, but in a nice way.

Perhaps you suspect, as I did beforehand, that the content would be all hype and bullshit, but you’d be very wrong. It was tough to choose a dozen from the 500. I went mostly for the highly techy or political, skipping the marketing and entreprenurial ones, and the standard of talks, panel discussions and organisation was very impressive. This wasn’t a conference about how Machine Learning (ML) or deep learning work, that’s now sorted. These folk have their supercomputers and ML tools that work, it’s about what they’re doing with them, and whether they should be and who’s going to tell them.

David Ferrucci (formerly IBM Watson, now Elemental Cognition) works on natural language processing and making ML decisions more transparent, using a strategy that combines deep-learning and database search with interactive tuition. Two women buy mint plants: one puts hers on her windowsill where it thrives, the other in a dark room where it doesn't. His system threw out guesses and questions until it understood that plants need light, and that light comes through windows. Second story: two people buy wine, one stores it in the fridge, the other on the windowsill where it spoils. More guesses, more questions, his system remembers what it learned from the mint story, deduces that light is good for plants but bad for wine. To make machines really smart, teach them like kids.

Professor Maja Pantić (Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College, head of Samsung AI lab in Cambridge) told a nice story about autism and a nasty one about supermarkets. They’ve found that autistic children lack the ability to integrate human facial signals (mouth, eyes, voice etc), become overwhelmed and terrified. An AI robotic face can separate these signals into a format the child can cope with. On the other hand supermarkets can now use facial recognition software to divine the emotional state of shoppers and so change the prices charged to them on the fly. Deep creepiness.

Eric Beinhofer (Oxford Martin School) and César Hidalgo (MIT Media Lab) gave mind-boggling presentations on the way AI is now used to build colossal arrays of virtual environments – rat mazes, economic simulations, war games – on which to train other ML systems, thus exponentially reducing training times and improving accuracy. Stephen Hsu (Michigan State) described how ML is now learning from hundreds of thousands of actual human genomes to identify disease mutations with great accuracy, while Helen O’Neill (Reproductive and Molecular Genetics, UCL) said combining this with CRISPR will permit choosing not merely the gender but many others traits of unborn babies, maybe within five years. A theme that emerged everywhere was, ‘we are already doing unprecedented things that are morally ambiguous, even God-like, but the law and the politicians haven’t a clue. Please regulate us, please tell us what you want done with this stuff’. But CogX contained way too much for one column, more next month about extraordinary AI hardware developments and what it’s all going to mean.

Link to YouTube videos of my choices: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL4ypMaasjt-_K14PNE6YQRQIlmBhHoZE

[Dick Pountain found the food in King’s Cross, especially the coffee, more interesting than Hannover Messe or Vegas, somewhat less so than snake wine in Taipei ]