Data Science Insider: July 9th, 2021

In this week’s Super Data Science newsletter: Nvidia Launches UK Supercomputer Cambridge-1. British Army Uses AI on Operation for the First Time. The Future of Deep Learning. GitHub's Programming AI May be Reusing Code without Permission. New Cheat Software Claims to Work on ‘Any Console’ Via ML. Cheers, - The SuperDataScience Team P.S. Have friends and colleagues who could benefit from these weekly updates? Send them to [this link]( to subscribe to the Data Science Insider. --------------------------------------------------------------- [Nvidia Launches UK Supercomputer Cambridge-1]( brief: The UK’s most powerful supercomputer, which its creators hope will make the process of preventing, diagnosing, and treating disease better, faster, and cheaper, is operational. Christened Cambridge-1, the supercomputer represents a $100m investment by Nvidia. The UK has already made strides with massive datasets such as the UK Biobank which encompasses anonymised medical and lifestyle records from half a million middle-aged Britons. Cambridge-1’s first projects will be with AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust, King’s College London, and Oxford Nanopore. They will seek to develop a deeper understanding of diseases, design new drugs, and improve the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes. AI for healthcare is booming in the UK, with a range of startups and larger pharmaceutical companies mining the vast quantities of data available to discover potential drugs, pinpoint why some people are susceptible to certain diseases, and improve and personalise patient care. Why this is important: The UK has the ingredients to take advantage of this computing ability because of its huge resources of data. As well as large structured datasets like the UK Biobank, it has access to a wide range of clinicians via the NHS. According to GSK, no such comparable infrastructure exists at such a size elsewhere. [Click here to find out!]( [British Army Uses AI on Operation for the First Time]( brief: AI has been used by the British Army for the first time during a live-firing drill in Estonia. Soldiers from the 20th Armoured Infantry Brigade used an AI engine during Exercise Spring Storm as part of Operation Cabrit, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said. Operation Cabrit is a Nato exercise that involves British service members working to tighten Euro-Atlantic security, in conjunction with French, Danish, and Estonian forces. During the annual Nato event, the technology was used by soldiers to carry out live-fire drills. The MoD said the AI technology can be used via the cloud or operate in an independent mode. The engine can rapidly cut through masses of complex data to provide efficient information on the environment and terrain, allowing the Army to plan better. Major General John Cole, the Army’s director of information, said: “The deployment was a first of its kind for the Army.” Why this is important: Here at SuperDataScience, we’ve covered the use of AI by military forces extensively. This has often been via the US and China, which are engaged in an artificial intelligence arms race, or with concerns over human rights. This story shows that the use of AI is becoming widely used across all nations, potentially further raising concerns. [Click here to read on!]( [The Future of Deep Learning]( In brief: Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton are recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for breakthroughs that have made Deep Neural Networks a critical component of computing. In a paper published in the July issue of the Communications of the ACM journal, they have published their thoughts on the future of DL and argued that the challenges it faces are significantly different from those experienced by humans or in the animal kingdom. The paper is called ‘Deep Learning for AI’ and it takes the premise of imagining a future where DL models can learn relatively autonomously from humans, are adaptable to environmental changes, and have the ability to solve a wide range of reflexive and cognitive problems. In the paper, they claim: “[T]he performance of today’s best AI systems tends to take a hit when they go from the lab to the field.” Why this is important: Bengio, LeCun, and Hinton are pioneers in the field of deep learning. Their insights into the current challenges of DL and what the future might hold for our industry make for vital reading. [Click here to discover more!]( [GitHub's AI May be Reusing Code without Permission]( In brief: A Microsoft-owned tool powered by AI is designed to make life easier for programmers, but some developers say it may be repurposing some of the billions of lines of code it was trained on without permission. The tool, called CoPilot, was released by GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary that is used by millions of people to share source code and organise software projects. CoPilot uses powerful neural network tools developed by OpenAI, using their Codex ML model to build and train services that work in the code editor and suggest the next steps as you work. GitHub describes it as an “AI pair programmer” and it is trained in millions of lines of code in public repositories. However, the use of repurposed code may leave GitHub in a legal quagmire, with copyright being difficult to ascertain and no legal precedent, despite a ‘fair-use’ policy being widely accepted in the ML community. Why this is important: This story has implications far beyond GitHub. AI algorithms only function due to the vast amounts of data that they analyse, much of which comes from the open internet. ImageNet would be a prime example, as perhaps the most influential AI training dataset, which is entirely made up of publicly available images. If these images were deemed to have been obtained illegally it would result in making training AI systems less transparent and significantly more expensive. [Click here to see the full picture!]( [New Cheat Software Claims to Work on ‘Any Console’ Via ML]( In brief: A new piece of cheat software claims to utilise ML to allow players to use auto-aim on “any console”. The software, which was highlighted by anti-cheat group ACPD, reportedly utilises PC passthrough via network streaming or a capture card to bypass console platform security. A promotional video suggests that it then uses AI to detect elements of the video feed passing through the PC software, such as enemy movement and specific weapons being used, in order to activate the auto-aim and auto-shoot cheats. ACPD explained: “The cheat uses Machine Learning and sends input to your controller whenever it sees a valid target. all you have to do is aim in the general area and the machine will do the work for you.” While cheat software can still be detected by Sony and Microsoft, it would be far more difficult to do so than traditional cheats. Why this is important: In recent years, cheating has been a big problem for many popular PC games, but console players have been relatively protected by the closed nature of those platforms. Software like the above, however, could in theory make cheats such as auto-aim far more common on PlayStation and Xbox because it bypasses console security by passing through a PC. [Click here to find out more!]( [Super Data Science podcast]( In this week's [Super Data Science Podcast](, Doug Eisenstein joins us for a deep dive into the world of financial data engineering and how his companies help financial institutions find data-driven solutions. --------------------------------------------------------------- What is the Data Science Insider? This email is a briefing of the week's most disruptive, interesting, and useful resources curated by the SuperDataScience team for Data Scientists who want to take their careers to the next level. Want more conversations like this? Are you either a data professional or an executive trying to implement AI technologies in your organization? We’re sure you’re always exploring some upskilling opportunities for yourself or your team. Please share your experience with corporate and self-education [right here](. All it takes is 10 minutes of your time to help us create unique programs to make you and your businesses grow. 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