Brief notes

The day started at 6am PST with the Black in AI workshop, and the fascinating posters at 9pm PST included GPT-3 and Big Bird šŸ˜Ŗā˜•

One of the prominent members in the community, who won the Turing award for his contributions herein, saw a super-resolution algorithm turn a pixelated presidential portrait of Obama into a generic white guy, and said it was biased data, and the first invited talk took an hour to refute that.

  • AI as a community needs to be software engineers and language nerds and ethnographers as well

Thereā€™s an unfathomably wide array of applications (even avian note segmentation!)

The ergonomics of using quick convenient at-hand devices over expensive ā€œbest practicesā€ is interesting

  • Kwame (by Jojo Boateng) is NLP for question answering for SuaCode (coding mostly by phone)
  • Denoising ultrasounds that can plug into phones by Muyinatu Bell
  • Apima(?): efficient malaria dataset generation (via images from an iPhone 6s+ (5 y/o in 2020!) of stained blood in a microscope)
  • Deploying webapps straight from Jupyter notebooks

Major NLP advances!

  • huge prompt contexts, 3K tokens in Big Bird
  • GPT-3, with those 175B parameters
  • Lesan translates English to Amharic better than Google Translate
  • transfer learning Zulu via Xhosa and Shona
  • long models for molecular representation learning

AR Clip Drop started as a weekend prototype, and Cyril Diagne had projects for the weekend after lol but those got delayed after trying to productionize the solo-type-of-prototype