Article Overview
Science Stories
Better Understanding the Monsoons and the El Niño
Bedartha Goswami’s goal is to build a bridge between machine learning and climate science. It’s not easy: when new methods in machine learning are developed, the ways that they can be applied in the climate sector is often not considered. Goswami is a team player, so his solution has been to put together a group with the interdisciplinary expertise needed for real breakthroughs in climate science.
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Latest Research
Do humans and algorithms learn alike?
When children develop into adults, how they learn changes a lot. While children show a lot of random behaviour, adults perform more goal-directed actions. An influential theory describes these changes as being similar to the behaviour of an optimisation algorithm commonly used in machine learning. This empirical test shows that there are striking similarities but also important differences between human development and machine learning algorithms.
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Debate
New Directions in Science Communication: The Themed Channel “AI and Sustainability”
“AI and Sustainability” – Since April 4th, 2023, the science and debate platform te.ma has offered the public a discussion forum, a place to ask questions, or simply to inform themselves about the topic. With this new approach, te.ma and the Cluster of Excellence "Machine Learning" aim to provide new impulses in the complicated thicket of science communication that are focused on dialogue with the public.
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Science Stories
Making the world a little bit better with AI
With a PhD in machine learning, the world seems to lie at your feet. But what to do afterwards: academia, the IT-sector, or something else entirely? For Poornima Ramesh, the answer is clear: she wants to use machine learning to improve people’s lives in places where the problems are most urgent. To further this goal, she joined a global advisory, data analytics, and research organization.
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Debate
Developing Data Science and Machine Learning in Africa
Research in machine learning and data science in and from Africa has the potential to play a more significant global role and faces unique challenges. The pan-African network of AIMS (African Institute for Mathematical Sciences) and its postgraduate programmes prepare young Africans to contribute towards this goal.
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Latest Research
Opening the Black-Box of Deep Learning in Image Classification
Deep learning algorithms are very good at recognizing specific objects (e.g. a dog, a car) within an image (known as image classifiers). But how do they actually do that? Most often the mechanisms underlying an algorithm’s decision remain opaque. What if we could explain any such black-box algorithm intuitively and, by doing so, even learn from it?
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Latest Research
Escaping Plato’s Cave: Teaching machines the 3D nature of our world
Understanding the 3D nature of our world is key to many applications in augmented and virtual reality and simulation. But 3D training data is difficult to obtain. Hence, we develop an algorithm to create 3D graphics that can be trained with 2D images alone. By designing our algorithm such that it can represent 3D data efficiently, we keep the computational cost manageable while moving from 2D images to 3D graphics.
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Science Stories
Predicting future energy supply
We can’t change how much the sun shines or how hard the wind will blow. But if we want to utilise renewable energy better, we need to take into account how weather and climate will change over time. Nicole Ludwig, an expert in machine learning and renewable energy systems, develops models that do just that.
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Debate
Rooting Democracy in the Digital Age
Artificial intelligence (AI) and democracy have many touchpoints. What is unclear, however, is whether AI will strengthen or weaken democracy in the long run. It is about time that we, as researchers and citizens, get more involved and develop ideas for a digitally competent democracy together.
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Latest Research
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Should it explain itself?
We are no longer baffled by all the tasks algorithms can perform. And apparently, they are now even able to ‘explain’ their output. But is that something we really want?
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