Digest #2020.02.03 – AI-Created Medicine All Set for Human Trials

Artificial intelligence-created medicine to be used on humans for first time – For the first time, a drug created by AI and Machine Learning has been approved for human trials. The drug was created by British start-up Exscientia in collaboration with Japanese pharmaceutical firm Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma. While typical drug development takes five years to get to trials, this drug took 12 months! The molecule AKA DSP-1181 was created by using algorithms that sifted through potential compounds, checking them against a huge database of parameters. The drug will be used to treat patients who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

DIY object tracking system with TensorFlow – Thinking of a great machine learning project on your spare Raspberry Pi(s) + some DIY hardware? Check out this interesting tutorial to build a real-time object tracker using TensorFlow. The article walks you through setting up the hardware and the TensorFlow libraries needed to get you started with machine learning; it’s gonna be a fun weekend project!

Hyperparameter tuning with Keras Tuner – If your ML projects have struggled with hyperparameter tuning you need to try Keras Tuner. This article is a great way to get started with Keras Tuner with a step-by-step walkthrough. Also, it’s an open-source project so check out their Github repo if you’d like to report issues, changes or contribute.

OpenAI goes all-in on PyTorch – Elon Musk’s AI research firm announced that it will be moving to PyTorch for its new machine learning projects. Many of the projects and engineers at OpenAI are transitioning to PyTorch as their main framework.  “Going forward we’ll primarily use PyTorch as our deep learning framework but sometimes use other ones when there’s a specific technical reason to do so.” OpenAI is also expected to open-source its PyTorch binding for blocksparse kernels in the coming months.