While COVID-19 is dominating headlines across the world, it’s important to note that in the world of machine learning, many companies are operating business as usual. Of course almost everyone by now has taken some measures to fight the spread of the Coronavirus. However, many researchers are working hard to keep up progress and innovation in the world of AI.

This list will feature some of the recent work and discoveries happening in machine learning, as well as guides and resources for both beginner and intermediate data scientists.

Machine Learning News

1. Google launches Cloud AI Platform Pipelines — This article explains the beta release of Google’s Cloud AI Platform to aid in machine learning development. The company has described their platform as a simple and easy-to-install environment for machine learning workflows.

2. AI Implant Gives Amputees Control Over Prosthetic Hands — From the MIT Technology Review, this article gives an overview of an amazing study to help amputees have better control over movements of their prosthetic limbs. Professor Paul Cederna (who co-led the study) claims that after initial calibration “There was no gap between thought and movement.”

3. AI is Changing the Video Game Industry — An Era of Augmentation and Synthetic Media — As the title suggests, this article explains the state of AI and the gaming industry. It goes into detail about the sectors of AI that have great potential to improve video games, such as augmented reality and generative AI models.

4. AI Breakthrough Could Significantly Improve Oculus Quest — One of the pioneers in the VR consumer market, Oculus has grown significantly since Facebook acquired them in 2014. A large part of their growth is likely thanks to the Oculus Quest, one of the first-ever cordless standalone VR gaming systems. This article explains how an AI breakthrough could improve the graphical capabilities of the Quest by up to 67% with no hardware changes.

ML Guides and Feature Articles

5. Intro to FastAI — In this guide, data science student Dario Radečić gives a great overview of Fast AI, a widely used library for machine learning. This guide explains how to use Fast AI to handle the MNIST dataset in detail, going through the process step by step.

6. What is the Difference Between CNN and RNN? — This machine learning basics guide gives a brief introduction to convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks. It explains how they are used in computer vision and NLP and the fundamental differences between the two types of artificial neural networks.

7. The Future of Data Analytics — How will companies farm our data? Can we use data to improve the education system? From the moral ethics of prescriptive analytics to education and virtual assistants, this article gives a quick glimpse into the future of data analytics.

8. Social Media Data Mining Techniques — Data mining and data collection are very broad areas of research that are being used in many businesses today. This article gives a brief introduction to data mining in social media, and how it can be used to grow online businesses.

Resources for Machine Learning

9. Google Dataset Search — While this dedicated search engine for datasets has been in Google’s development calendar for awhile, it finally came out of beta early this year. As reported in Towards Data Science, Google Dataset Search gives you access to over 25 million open datasets.

10. Coronavirus Datasets from Every Country — With COVID-19 on virtually everyone’s mind, this dataset aggregator is updated weekly, with new datasets being added as they become available. Many datasets on this list are updated daily.