ポケモンGOの大型イベント『Pokémon GO Tour：ジョウト地方』が始まりました。期間は2月26日(土)9時から21時まで。

毎日新聞と博報堂が若年層をターゲットとする「毎日新聞×Z世代プロジェクト」を21日から開始したそうだ。博報堂の研究機関である「UNIVERSITY of CREATIVITY（UoC）」が開発した誰でも簡単にラップ音楽を作成できる「AIラッパーシステム」を利用、新聞記事をラップ調にし、動画をTikTokなどのSNSに投稿するという。毎日新聞が創刊150年を迎えたことから行われる事業であるとのこと（毎日新聞社、ITmedia）。リリースによれば、

日本で最も長い歴史を持つ新聞社が、これまでにない取り組みに挑戦し、新たな一歩を踏み出します。

としている。

すべて読む | テクノロジー | 人工知能 | ニュース | 変なモノ | 論説 | 音楽 |

関連ストーリー：
UberやLyftといったライドシェアサービスは都市の交通渋滞を増加させているという分析 2020年02月20日
MSの元女子高生AIりんな、エイベックスからAIアーティストとしてデビュー 2019年04月05日
YouTube、ロンドン警察の要請によりラップ動画を削除 2019年02月19日
米バーガーキング、すべてをAIが作ったという触れ込みの広告キャンペーン 2018年09月30日

Microsoft has revealed it operates a planet-scale distributed scheduling service for AI workloads that it has modestly dubbed "Singularity." The Register reports: Described in a pre-press paper [PDF] co-authored by 26 Microsoft employees, Singularity's aim is described as helping the software giant control costs by driving high utilization for deep learning workloads. Singularity achieves that goal with what the paper describes as a "novel workload-aware scheduler that can transparently preempt and elastically scale deep learning workloads to drive high utilization without impacting their correctness or performance, across a global fleet of AI accelerators (e.g., GPUs, FPGAs)." The paper spends more time on the scheduler than on Singularity itself, but does offer some figures to depict the system's architecture. An analysis of Singularity's performance mentions a test run on Nvidia DGX-2 servers using a Xeon Platinum 8168 with two sockets of 20 cores each, eight V100 Model GPUs per server, 692GB of RAM, and networked over InfiniBand. With hundreds of thousands of GPUs in the Singularity fleet, plus FPGAs and possibly other accelerators, Microsoft has at least tens of thousands of such servers! The paper focuses on Singularity's scaling tech and schedulers, which it asserts are its secret sauce because they reduce cost and increase reliability. The software automatically decouples jobs from accelerator resources, which means when jobs scale up or down "we simply change the number of devices the workers are mapped to: this is completely transparent to the user, as the world-size (i.e. total number of workers) of the job remains the same regardless of the number of physical devices running the job." That's possible thanks to "a novel technique called replica splicing that makes it possible to time-slice multiple workers on the same device with negligible overhead, while enabling each worker to use the entire device memory." [...] "Singularity achieves a significant breakthrough in scheduling deep learning workloads, converting niche features such as elasticity into mainstream, always-on features that the scheduler can rely on for implementing stringent SLAs," the paper concludes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ポケモンGOが「そらとぶピカチュウプロジェクト」コラボイベントを発表しました。 3月19日より、「かりゆしウェア」をまとったピカチュウが沖縄で出現するほか、5月3日から8日には全世界のプレーヤーが参加できるイベントを、5月7日と8日には沖縄でチケット制のリアルイベントを開催予定です。

Scientific American reports on a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA on the effectiveness of deep fakes. "The results suggest that real humans can easily fall for machine-generated faces — and even interpret them as more trustworthy than the genuine article." "We found that not only are synthetic faces highly realistic, they are deemed more trustworthy than real faces," says study co-author Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The result raises concerns that "these faces could be highly effective when used for nefarious purposes." The first group did not do better than a coin toss at telling real faces from fake ones, with an average accuracy of 48.2 percent... The group rating trustworthiness gave the synthetic faces a slightly higher average rating of 4.82, compared with 4.48 for real people... Study participants did overwhelmingly identify some of the fakes as fake. "We're not saying that every single image generated is indistinguishable from a real face, but a significant number of them are," says study co-author Sophie Nightingale.... The authors of the study end with a stark conclusion after emphasizing that deceptive uses of deepfakes will continue to pose a threat: "We, therefore, encourage those developing these technologies to consider whether the associated risks are greater than their benefits," they write. "If so, then we discourage the development of technology simply because it is possible." Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the link!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tThe Washington Post reports: Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure "almost everyone in the world will be identifiable," according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post. Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world. And the company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor "gig economy" workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar. The 55-page "pitch deck," the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor. The document was made for fundraising purposes, and it is unclear how realistic its goals might be. The company said that its "index of faces" has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month. With $50 million from investors, the company said, it could bulk up its data collection powers to 100 billion photos, build new products, expand its international sales team and pay more toward lobbying government policymakers to "develop favorable regulation." The article notes that major tech companies like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have all limited or ended their own sales of facial recognition technology — adding that Clearview's presentation simple describes this as a major business opportunity for themselves. In addition, the Post reports Clearview's presentation brags "that its product is even more comprehensive than systems in use in China, because its 'facial database' is connected to 'public source metadata' and 'social linkage' information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ピクミン ブルームの月例イベント コミュニティ・デイ、2月は梅をテーマに開催中です。2月19日中に計1万歩歩くことで、梅のフラワーバッジが獲得できます。

ポケモンGOのナイアンティックと任天堂が共同開発するアプリ『ピクミン ブルーム』に、プライバシー対策の新機能「プライバシーゾーン」が加わりました。

The Google-backed firm taught a reinforcement learning algorithm to control the fiery plasma inside a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. From a report: The inside of a tokamak -- the doughnut-shaped vessel designed to contain a nuclear fusion reaction -- presents a special kind of chaos. Hydrogen atoms are smashed together at unfathomably high temperatures, creating a whirling, roiling plasma that's hotter than the surface of the sun. Finding smart ways to control and confine that plasma will be key to unlocking the potential of nuclear fusion, which has been mooted as the clean energy source of the future for decades. At this point, the science underlying fusion seems sound, so what remains is an engineering challenge. That's where DeepMind comes in. The artificial intelligence firm, backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has previously turned its hand to video games and protein folding, and has been working on a joint research project with the Swiss Plasma Center to develop an AI for controlling a nuclear fusion reaction. In stars, which are also powered by fusion, the sheer gravitational mass is enough to pull hydrogen atoms together and overcome their opposing charges. On Earth, scientists instead use powerful magnetic coils to confine the nuclear fusion reaction, nudging it into the desired position and shaping it like a potter manipulating clay on a wheel. The coils have to be carefully controlled to prevent the plasma from touching the sides of the vessel: this can damage the walls and slow down the fusion reaction. (There's little risk of an explosion as the fusion reaction cannot survive without magnetic confinement). But every time researchers want to change the configuration of the plasma and try out different shapes that may yield more power or a cleaner plasma, it necessitates a huge amount of engineering and design work. Conventional systems are computer-controlled and based on models and careful simulations, but they are, Ambrogio Fasoli, director of the Swiss Plasma Center at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. says, "complex and not always necessarily optimized." DeepMind has developed an AI that can control the plasma autonomously. A paper published in the journal Nature describes how researchers from the two groups taught a deep reinforcement learning system to control the 19 magnetic coils inside TCV, the variable-configuration tokamak at the Swiss Plasma Center, which is used to carry out research that will inform the design of bigger fusion reactors in the future.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ソニーが完全ワイヤレスヘッドホンの新製品『LinkBuds』(リンクバッズ)を発表しました。特徴はドーナツのように穴の空いたドライバー。 耳栓型イヤホンのように耳をふさぐことなく、周囲の音を自然に聴きながら音楽や音声コンテンツを重ねて楽しむ新しいリスニングスタイルを提案する製品です。

ソニーが完全ワイヤレスヘッドホンの新製品『LinkBuds』(リンクバッズ)を発表しました。特徴はドーナツのように穴の空いたドライバー。 耳栓型イヤホンのように耳をふさぐことなく、周囲の音を自然に聴きながら音楽や音声コンテンツを重ねて楽しむ新しいリスニングスタイルを提案する製品です。

ソニーが完全ワイヤレスヘッドホンの新製品『LinkBuds』(リンクバッズ)を発表しました。特徴はドーナツのように穴の空いたドライバー。 耳栓型イヤホンのように耳をふさぐことなく、周囲の音を自然に聴きながら音楽や音声コンテンツを重ねて楽しむ新しいリスニングスタイルを提案する製品です。

Netflix がゲーム『BioShock』(バイオショック)の映画化を発表しました。製作は『IT』『呪怨』シリーズなどホラーで知られるVertigo Entertainment (ヴァーティゴ)、および原作ゲームの開発元 2K。

マーベルがディズニープラス向け新作TVシリーズ『Moon Knight』(ムーンナイト)の新たな映像を公開しました。

Scientific American reports: To hurtle around a corner along the fastest "racing line" without losing control, race car drivers must brake, steer and accelerate in precisely timed sequences. The process depends on the limits of friction, and they are governed by known physical laws — which means self-driving cars can learn to complete a lap at the fastest possible speed (as some have already done). But this becomes a much knottier problem when the automated driver has to share space with other cars. Now scientists have unraveled the challenge virtually by training an artificial intelligence program to outpace human competitors at the ultrarealistic racing game Gran Turismo Sport. The findings could point self-driving car researchers toward new ways to make this technology function in the real world. Artificial intelligence has already conquered human players within certain video games, such as Starcraft II and Dota 2. But Gran Turismo differs from other games in significant ways, says Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and co-author of the new study, which was published this week in Nature. "In most games, the environment defines the rules and protects the users from each other," he explains. "But in racing, the cars are very close to each other, and there's a very refined sense of etiquette that has to be learned and deployed by the [AI] agents. In order to win, they have to be respectful of their opponents, but they also have to preserve their own driving lines and make sure that they don't just give way." To teach their program the ropes, the Sony AI researchers used a technique called deep reinforcement learning. They rewarded the AI for certain behaviors, such as staying on the track, remaining in control of the vehicle and respecting racing etiquette. Then they set the program loose to try different ways of racing that would enable it to achieve those goals. The Sony AI team trained multiple different versions of its AI, dubbed Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy), each specialized in driving one particular type of car on one particular track. Then the researchers pitted the program against human Gran Turismo champions. In the first test, conducted last July, humans achieved the highest overall team score. On the second run in October 2021, the AI broke through. It beat its human foes both individually and as a team, achieving the fastest lap times.... "The lines the AI was using were so tricky, I could probably do them once. But it was so, so difficult — I would never attempt it in a race," says Emily Jones, who was a world finalist at the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2020 and later raced against GT Sophy.... "Racing, like a lot of sports, is all about getting as close to the perfect lap as possible, but you can never actually get there," Jones says. "With Sophy, it was crazy to see something that was the perfect lap. There was no way to go any faster." The article notes that Sony AI is now working with Gran Turismo's developer (the Sony Interactive Entertainment subsidiary Polyphony Digital) to potentially incorporate a version of their AI into a future update of the game. "To do this, the researchers would need to tweak the AI's performance so it can be a challenging opponent but not invincible..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious," OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever tweeted Wednesday. Futurism says that after republishing that remark, "the responses came rolling in, with some representing the expected handwringing about sentient artificial intelligence, but many others calling bull." "Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation back to the more realistic opportunities and threats posed by AI," UNSW Sidney AI researcher Toby Walsh chimed in.... Independent sociotechnologist Jürgen Geuter, who goes by the pseudonym "tante" online, quipped in response to Sutskever's tweet that "it may also be that this take has no basis in reality and is just a sales pitch to claim magical tech capabilities for a startup that runs very simple statistics, just a lot of them...." Leon Dercynski, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, ran with the same idea. "It may be that there's a teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere between Earth and Mars," he bantered. "This seems more reasonable than Ilya's musing, in fact, because the apparatus for orbit exists, and we have good definitions of teapots...." These critics, it should be noted, are not wrong to point out the outlandishness of Sutskever's claim — it was not only a departure for OpenAI and its chief scientist, but also a pretty unusual comment to make, given that up to this point, most who work in and study AI believe that we're many years away from creating conscious AI, if indeed we ever do. Sutskever, for his part, seems unbothered by the controversy. "Ego is (mostly) the enemy," he said Friday morning.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ピクミン ブルームがバレンタインのイベントを告知しました。期間は2月14日終日、主な内容はビッグフラワーのバラが咲いたり、エキスでピクミンとの「なかよし度」(ハート)が2倍増えるなど。

ポケモンGOの月例イベント「コミュニティ・デイ」が始まりました。大量発生するのは「わたくさポケモン」ことハネッコ。

ポケモンGOのNianticと任天堂が共同開発した「歩くことを楽しくするアプリ」ピクミン ブルームで、新たに梅の花が咲き始めました。 2月19日(土)には、梅のフラワーバッジと各種ボーナスを用意した月例イベント コミュニティ・デイを開催します。

オリジナルアニメ『地球外少年少女』（前編上映中、2月11日(金)より後編、新宿ピカデリー他にて各2週限定劇場上映。Blu-ray＆DVDが2月11日（金）発売、Netflixにて世界同時配信中（全6話一斉配信））の磯光雄監督のインタビューをお届けします。...続きを読む