AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from Dec (Pt 1)

November 26th – NVIDIA Strides Into Healthcare Industry by Collaborating with GE Healthcare

At the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), NVIDIA announces a collaboration with GE Healthcare and Nuance to enhance medical imaging with AI. Through this collaboration, NVIDIA and GE Healthcare will deepen their 10-year partnership and deploy AI technology in 500,000 globally distributed GE medical devices in order to accelerate healthcare data processing.

November 28th – Intel Introduces a Safety Model for Self-Driving Cars

Intel introduces the Responsibility-Sensitive Safety model (RSS) as its autonomous vehicle driving strategy. To formalize human judgement under comprehensive road situations, RSS will mathematically express driver errors and process the most appropriate move without human intervention. Intel says RSS might not strictly drive obey the law: it will sometimes break the rules — depending on the actual situation — in order to reduce the rate of accidents.

November 29th – Amazon Adds Translation Feature on AWS

Amazon announces a new translation service as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is competing with Google and Microsoft for dominance in speech recognition and natural language processing. AWS Translate will provide text translations for supported languages. Amazon is pitching the new translation service as a way for businesses to expand products and services. The technology is based on language pairing models represented in neural networks. Amazon hopes to integrate the translation tool with other services.

November 30th – Google Home Gets a Little Smarter With New Multitasking Feature

Google’s Smart Speaker recently added a multitasking feature that makes it possible for the device to accomplish two different tasks at the same time (only two though). To initiate this feature, user have to verbally separate tasks into individual commands, as the device won’t understand two tasks crammed into the same sentence. The new feature comes as the company readies Home Max, a premium addition to the Home line due next month.

December 4th – Shenzhen Bus Group Road Tests Self-Driving Alphabus

On December 2nd, four unmanned buses running on the “Alphabus Smart Drive Bus System” performed a series of road tests in Futian, Shenzhen. This road test attracted a great amount of attention, with some media coverage negatively emphasizing the job loss potential. Shenzhen Bus Group (SBG) characterizes Alphabus as a support system for drivers, with limited real-world application at present. To deploy Alphabus in the future on a specific route, government approval will be required.

December 5th – SalesForce Claims AI Is Too Advanced for Business

According to Salesforce’s recent “Small & Medium Business Trends Report”, many small and medium businesses are still manually inputting data: 56% of businesses are not ready for AI technology; 40% find AI too complex for their needs; and 37% don’t have enough knowledge about how AI can help the businesses. As for the evaluation of new technology, 95% of business owners considered “ease of use” an important factor; 94% chose “price”; and 91% chose “trustworthy vendors”.

December 6th – Ikea to Collaborate with Sonos on Smart Home Products

Ikea and Sonos want to make it easier to play music anywhere in the home. Together with Sonos, Ikea hopes to democratize music and sound in the home, creating products designed for listening to music. The collaboration is somewhat surprising, as Sonos is a premium brand and Ikea is a budget home furnishing company. But in order to add IoT capability, this is the a logical third step for Ikea’s Home Smart Division — which launched wireless charging in some of their furniture in 2015, and smart lighting products in 2016.

December 6th – Amazon Echo and Fire TV Will Lose YouTube Access in 2018

Amazon Echo and Fire TV users will no longer be able to access YouTube from those devices starting January 1, 2018. The move from Google comes amid growing tensions with Amazon, and is being framed as rebuttal for not allowing Google Home and Nest devices for sale on the e-commerce giant’s site. This is not a sudden move. Earlier this fall, Google threatened to remove YouTube amid heated negotiations with Amazon, and this seems to have escalated into a fight between the two tech giants.

December 7th – NVIDIA Unveils its Latest GPU Product at NIPS

At NIPS, NVIDIA unveils the Titan V GPU, which can be used on desktop machines and targets machine learning applications. The new GPU will feature NVIDIA Volta architecture, which is widely used by researchers, developers, and data scientists for accelerating machine learning applications. Hosting the GPU on a local machine will be convenient for researchers who want to run workloads anytime without having to use a cloud service.

December 8th – Qualcomm and Baidu’s Strategic Cooperation on Optimizing DuerOS

Qualcomm and Baidu announce their strategic cooperation on optimizing DuerOS on mobile devices at the second Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit. This will help bring speech-based AI solutions to the next generation of Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platforms, enabling users to utilize their voice (through the DuerOS voice service) at any time to wake their smartphones and IoT devices with minimal power consumption.

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