Dec 25th — Myntra Applies AI to Clothing Design
Indian online fashion retailer Myntra is using algorithms to learn customers’ favourite styles and create patterns. The AI-designed merchandise is on sale through two in-house brands. Owned by India’s most prominent e-commerce company Flipkart, Myntra also uses augmented reality on mobile devices so customers can rate their purchases and retailers can provide them with more precise recommendations.

Dec 27th — San Jose Negotiates With Partners to Deploy Autonomous Vehicle Transit
Following a Request for Information (RFI) filed last year, the City of San Jose has entered into negotiations with six companies for its ambitious Level 4 automated car pilot project. The city hopes the democratization of autonomous transit will reduce traffic and greenhouse gas emissions.

Dec 31st — Can Google Street View Images See the Future?
AI researchers at Stanford University say they have found a way to predict demographics and even voting patterns by using a dataset of 50 million Google Street View images. Their vote predictions have been surprisingly close to the actual results.

Jan 2nd — Ctrip and Baidu Launch AI Pocket Chinese-English Translator 
Chinese online travel services provider Ctrip launches a real-time, palm-sized AI Pocket translator. The Baidu-powered device is able to process a Chinese-English translation as soon as the user finishes speaking. Ctrip aims to add more than 80 languages in the near future.

Jan 3rd — Canada To Use AI to Track Suicide Trends on Social Media 
Ottawa-based artificial intelligence services company Advanced Symbolics announces a pilot partnership with the Canadian government to predict suicide trends by monitoring activity on social media platforms. The three-month project will attempt to identify Canadian communities or regions that are susceptible to suicide spikes.

Jan 4th — Samsung’s Exynos 9810 Has Machine Learning Features Similar to Apple’s A11 Chips
Samsung has launched a new processor for mobile devices. The Exynos 9 Series 9810 supports features like depth-sensing face detection and deep learning capabilities. The new features allow the processor to recognize people or items in photos for fast image searching or categorization. Both Apple and Samsung are working to put advanced deep learning capabilities into mobile processors to enable more advanced and exciting mobile applications.

Jan 4th — Microsoft and Adaptive Biotechnologies Partner up for Human Immune System Decoding
Microsoft and Adaptive Biotechnologies announce a joint agreement to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to decode the human immune system. The goal is to create a global standard blood test that can detect a wide range of diseases through a patient’s immune system information.

Jan 4th — Volkswagen and Hyundai Build Partnerships with Aurora
Aurora, a start-up founded in 2016 by former Google autonomous driving experts, announces a partnership with Volkswagen and Hyundai. Aurora is working on an entirely autonomous driving solution. Hyundai will test the Aurora prototype on fuel cell SUVs this year. Volkswagen did not disclose any information about their test prototype vehicle.

Jan 5th — Google Cloud Announces Discounted Preemptible GPU Services
Google Cloud launches a price schema for preemptible GPUs. Customers can use the GPUs at about 50% of the regular price, but Google may shut them down when it needs the resources. Popular NVIDIA K80 and NVIDIA P100 GPUs support this price schema. The preemptible GPUs should fit any fault-tolerant machine learning workloads.

Jan 5th — Google Chrome to Use Machine Learning to Increase User Safety
Google begins using machine learning as an expansion of its abuse protection service to reduce harm to Chrome users. The browser will have the ability to examine each installation request for bad signals in ads and web pages and will selectively auto-disable any high-risk redirect or installation request.