New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says authorities will reassess the NYPD's use of facial recognition technology after police used it to investigate a Black Lives Matter activist. Derrick Ingram, who turned himself in to police on Aug. 8, faces a misdemeanor assault charge after police claim he shouted into an officer’s ear during a June protest.

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• On Monday, de Blasio said the city needs to be careful and limit its use of facial recognition. The standards of how it's used "need to be reassessed," he said.
• On Aug. 7, dozens of officers in riot gear conducted an hours-long raid of Ingram’s apartment in Hell's Kitchen. In a video, an officer can be seen holding a report from the NYPD's Facial Identification Section.
• The department later confirmed that it used AI facial recognition in its investigation of Ingram, 28, the co-founder of activist group Warriors in the Garden. The city uses technology from Clearview AI.
• The NYPD says it uses facial recognition as a "limited investigative tool" and has never arrested someone solely because of the technology.
• Amid ongoing protests against police, de Blasio signed the Police Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act last month that forces the NYPD to share more about its surveillance abilities.

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• Facial recognition technology used by Detroit police has falsely linked at least two men to crimes they didn't commit.
• Michael Oliver, who is Black, was improperly flagged and later charged as a suspect in a phone-damaging incident, despite no resemblance to the perpetrator.
• This comes after police wrongfully arrested Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who also is Black, after a face recognition service falsely matched him to a shoplifter.

Elon Musk says Tesla is still developing its AI neural computer network known as "Dojo," which would train its vehicles' Full Self Driving AI. In a tweet, the CEO said Dojo can process large amounts of video data. He asked anyone interested in the project to consider joining Tesla's AI or computer/chip teams.

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• Musk first spoke about Dojo during 2019's Autonomy Day, where he said the goal is to take vast amounts of data and train at a video level.
• The supercomputer would be optimized for training computer vision AI on videos. Musk said the computing power would be an exaFLOP, which is 1,000 petaFLOPS.
• Tesla will hire software engineers and developers to work on Dojo. Those positions will be based in Palo Alto, Austin, and Seattle, although "exceptional" applicants could work remotely, according to Musk.
• Dojo translates to “place of the way” in Japanese.
• From Twitter: @PPathole wrote that Tesla's "cars are great, but the AI innovations are game changers."

New funding for AI/ML startups:

• Gong (San Francisco, CA), AI-based customer interaction insights platform: $200M D led by Coatue, participation from Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Thrive Capital, Battery Ventures, NextWorld Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital. The round valued the company at $2.2B.
• mPulse (Los Angeles, CA), conversational AI healthcare platform: $16M C led by Optum Ventures, participation from HLM Venture Partners, OCA Ventures, SJF Ventures, Echo Health Ventures, Rincon Ventures.
• Root AI (Boston, MA), produce-picking robots: $7.2 Seed from PJC, First Round Capital, Jason Calacanis, Austin McChord...

Purdue University computer scientists plan to use AI to uncover patterns in criminal behavior and predict recidivism. A proposed project, led by professor Marcus Rogers and assistant professor Umit Karabiyik, would track parolees recently released from prison using smartphones and biometric wearables. The resulting data would be used to train an AI algorithm to find patterns linked to regression of criminal behavior.

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• Rogers said the goal is to find opportunities to intervene earlier and assist criminals in their reintegration back into society.
• The plan is to recruit 250 volunteer parolees from Indiana. Half will wear bracelets that monitor health data, like heart rate and stress levels, and agree to share data like a location from their smartphones. The other half will be the control group and not be monitored.
• An AI system would analyze their data in chunks, searching for patterns related to criminal behavior. It would not evaluate the data in real-time.
• The project has received criticism. Liz O’Sullivan of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project told VentureBeat that there’s scant evidence that AI could "infer emotional state from biometrics."

IBM revealed its Power10 chip, which is up to 20x faster at AI computing tasks that the Power9. The new processor chip is expected to be available in the second half of 2021 for businesses to deploy inside their data centers.

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• The Power10 processor is half the size of the 14nm Power9 and can handle up to 3x the workload capacity and container density. It houses 18b transistors on the size of a postage stamp.
• Its processor developments can better support AI and ML applications. IBM says it can achieve an up to 20x AI inferencing improvement over the Power9.
• Samsung will manufacture the chip using its 7-nanometer chip manufacturing process. IBM has a semiconductor R&D collaboration with the electronics giant.
• Three of the world's fastest supercomputers, including Summit, use IBM chips. Intel remains the dominant provider of central processor chips for data centers.

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• Intel says data bandwidth and sparsity are the biggest challenges for AI chips.

A software developer created a YouTube channel that shares an AI version of Sir David Attenborough's voice. The videos feature a computerized Attenborough, 94, narrating text from Reddit posts.

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• Redditor and software developer Garett MacGowan said he designed the YouTube channel after seeing other automated channels with voices from text-to-speech software.
• The AI scrapes subreddits like r/Relationships and r/AskReddit and automatically uploads an algorithmically-generated version of Attenborough's voice reading their posts.
• MacGowan, who describes himself as a machine learning specialist on GitHub, said he tied open-source libraries together in Python and scraped Reddit's API for the text.
• He said the larger goal is to teach people about AI-generated technologies. Deepfakes, which include fake AI-generated video and audio, was rated as the most concerning AI crime in a new UCL report.

QUICK HITS

• Singapore's DBS Bank is offering online tutorials for its employees to learn AI and ML, which will help them develop their own autonomous race cars.
• A Reddit post explains why models like GPT-3 or BERT don't have overfitting problems.
• Stanford researchers developed an AI that can generate realistic tennis matches with actual players.
• Amazon fixed a security flaw in its Alexa smart home devices that could enable an attacker to eavesdrop on users' conversations and steal data.
• Vidyard and Hubspot have partnered to create an in-depth guide with proven video scripts and email templates for selling remotely.*

*This is a sponsored post.

Tweet of the Day: Artist and Apple researcher Sterling Crispin shared artworks he created with GPT-3. Read our Inside Business deep dive into how GPT-3 could change the major industries and even your job here.