November 2018 Summaries

The Lambda NeurIPS 2018 Ticket Contest aims to provide three additional registrations for the conference track at NeurIPS. The contest is open to the community and offers a chance for individuals who were unable to purchase tickets due to them selling out quickly to attend the conference. Applicants will be judged on their ability to make a sound argument for why they want to attend, with selected applicants notified via email or phone and required to confirm flight purchases or hotel reservations before attending. The contest is only open for 48 hours, and Lambda is encouraging community members to share it with others to increase the chances of selection.

Google is investigating the possibility that its reCAPTCHA system uses "adversarial noise" to improve its security, a technique commonly used in artificial intelligence to mislead machine learning models. Researchers have found evidence suggesting that adding noise to images can make it difficult for neural networks trained on ImageNet to recognize them correctly, while also increasing their confidence in the wrong answer. The study proposes to test this hypothesis by comparing the performance of three different neural networks on a set of images with and without "mystery noise" or Gaussian RGB noise added to clean images. If the results support the theory, it could indicate that reCAPTCHA has become more secure by incorporating adversarial examples into its system.

Many deep learning teams have software that depends on Ubuntu 16.04 (and not 18.04), which has some quirks with the TensorBook, requiring a tutorial to install from scratch. To start, download an ISO of Ubuntu 16.04.5 or greater and burn it onto a USB drive, then boot off the USB drive by pressing [Del] during the boot sequence. Select Install Ubuntu in the GRUB menu and modify the linux line with specific settings before hitting F10 to boot. Perform a normal installation of Ubuntu 16.04.5, followed by installing Lambda Stack using a command that updates the repository and installs necessary packages. With these steps complete, you should now have a working TensorBook installed with Ubuntu 16.04.5 and Lambda Stack.