Volume 1 Issue 4, April 2019

There is much to be gained from interdisciplinary efforts to tackle complex psychological notions such as ‘theory of mind’. However, careful and consistent communication is essential when comparing artificial and biological intelligence, say Henry Shevlin and Marta Halina.

Technology companies have quickly become powerful with their access to large amounts of data and machine learning technologies, but consumers could be empowered too with automated tools to protect their rights.

Humans infer much of the intentions of others by just looking at their gaze. Similarly, we want to understand how machine learning systems solve a problem. New tools are developed to find out what strategies a learning machine is using, such as what it is paying attention to when classifying images.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems may reproduce or amplify biases. The authors discuss the literature on biases in human learning and decision-making, and propose that researchers, policymakers and the public should be aware of such biases when evaluating the output and decisions made by machines.

Biomedical publications provide a rich and largely untapped source of knowledge. INtERAcT exploits word embeddings trained on a corpus of cancer-specific articles to estimate molecular interactions. The algorithm is able to reconstruct molecular pathways associated with ten cancer types, even in corpora of limited size.

Clustering groups of cells in single-cell RNA sequencing datasets can produce high-resolution information for complex biological questions. However, it is statistically and computationally challenging due to the low RNA capture rate, which results in a high number of false zero count observations. A deep learning approach called scDeepCluster, which efficiently combines a model for explicitly characterizing missing values with clustering, shows high performance and improved scalability with a computing time increasing linearly with sample size.

To accelerate the development of energy-efficient and intelligent machines, Yung-Hsiang Lu and organizers launched a challenge for low-power approaches to image recognition.