NOVETTA NEXUS
Baseline – ML Newsletter

Welcome to the September 2020 BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This month we cover the following topics: Smaller NLP models Big developments for major hardware and cloud companies New model deployment options for AWS Better, faster, smaller NLP models As new Natural Language Processing (NLP) models boast performance gains over their predecessors, models continue to get larger. OpenAI’s GPT-3, empirically the current leader in NLP models, is comprised of 175 billion parameters, surpassing Microsoft’s T-NLG model (17.5 billion) and Google’s famous BERT model (340...

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Welcome to the August 2020 BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This month we cover the following topics: A faster implementation for object detection Better explainability tools for text models Advances in language models and related tasks PP-YOLO: An Effective and Efficient Object Detection Implementation PP-YOLO is a recently-released object detector that advances the state-of-the-art in object detector models, achieving faster, more accurate results on the COCO dataset than predecessors such as EfficientDet and YOLOv4. Striking a balance between accuracy and inference speed, PP-YOLO is...

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Welcome to the July 2020 BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This is another special month, as we invited additional members of our 2020 intern class to share their latest findings. They selected topics covering: Fairness and bias in ML New methods for interacting with tabular data Information extraction from forms Preprocessing for deepfake detection models Algorithmic Injustices As more questions arise concerning the ethical implications of machine learning (ML) usage, prominent conferences, such as NeurIPS, are beginning to ask contributors to evaluate and disclose...

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Welcome to the June 2020 installment of BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This is a special month, as we invited members of our 2020 intern class to provide their thoughts. They selected topics covering: New methods for training image models with less data Open source audio datasets A new approach for translating between programming languages Faster word embeddings Training GANs with Limited Data Training high-quality Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) typically requires a large number of images whose collection may be costly or time-consuming. To...

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Welcome to the May 2020 installment of BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This month’s topics include: New open source translation models Synthetic audio generation Resources for learning about advances in machine learning Open Source Machine Translation  To understand world events, analysts can’t rely solely on English-language news and social media. While the large cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) provide high-quality, easy-to-use translation APIs, the costs of API calls can add up. That is why we are excited about...

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Welcome to the April 2020 installment of BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This month’s topics include: Creative applications of synthetic data to improve model accuracy How deep learning may speed development of a COVID-19 vaccine A new deep learning approach to tabular data classification Kaggle Bengali competition winner  Kaggle is a data science competition site that often sees competitors advance the state-of-the-art in different domains. We have found that Kaggle is one of the best places to identify creative new approaches to problems, and...

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Welcome to the March 2020 installment of BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This month’s topics include: AdaptNLP, an open source framework for state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) A new competition for geospatial AI applications corresponding with the release of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) dataset A new and improved way of training language models StanfordNLP gets a new coat of paint Research into training large ML models with CPUs A new tool designed for rapid prototyping quantum machine learning models AdaptNLP  At Novetta, we...

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Welcome to the February 2020 installment of BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we discuss important advances in machine learning technologies and their potential impact on our IC / Defense customers. This month’s topics include: New breakthroughs in language models, including conversational AI Concise APIs that simplify model implementation Promising new approaches in computer vision and graph neural networks Meet Google’s Meena  Google’s Meena has raised the bar for open-domain chatbots, achieving near-human-like interactions. Meena is a conversational model designed to chat sensibly about nearly any topic while taking into account the context of the conversation. In addition to Meena,...

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Welcome to the January 2020 installment of BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This month’s topics include: New software tools that improve the process of developing machine learning models Improvements in language models, with some research showing that synthetically generated text can fool human reviewers The “What-If Tool” and Manifold While the primary goal for most machine learning models is high accuracy, we also need to understand why the model is making certain predictions. We’ve recently been working with the What-If Tool from the Google...

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Welcome to the December 2019 installment of BASELINE, Novetta’s Machine Learning Newsletter, where we share thoughts on important advances in machine learning technologies likely to impact our customers. This month we discuss the following areas: At AWS re:Invent, new services and features relevant to our data science, image processing, and IoT teams were announced. Netflix open-sourced a platform to simplify the engineering side of data science. Improvement in quality of deepfakes continues, while Facebook and Kaggle launched a competition to detect deepfakes. SageMaker Improvements and AutoML At AWS re:Invent, new Amazon SageMaker capabilities and features were announced intended to address...

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