AI Technology & Industry Review
The opportunities for studying AI at Chinese higher learning institutes have never been better or more varied. More than 70 Chinese universities and colleges have introduced AI-related majors, and 283 universities are licensed to offer data science programs.
The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2018 will be held July 10 – 15 in Stockholm, Sweden. Yesterday, from more than 600 accepted papers, the prestigious conference announced its Best Paper Awards.
OneClick.ai, a startup founded by two former Microsoft engineers in Seattle, is on a mission to make AI more accessible to businesses. “We design, build and deploy custom AI models as a scalable API that can be accessed from anywhere. Just prepare your data, and we’ll take care of the rest,” says co-founder and CTO Ning Jiang.
A business data search firm is bombarding China’s subways and business centres with ads. TianYanCha — literally SkyEye Search — has become the “go to” source for governments, consulting agencies, legal service providers, and media outlets who want to perform comprehensive business background checks.
China’s prestigious Tsinghua University is opening a dedicated AI research centre. The Tsinghua University Institute for Artificial Intelligence will be led by Dean Bo Zhang (张钹) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua Director of Academic Committee Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (姚期智), a Turing Award Laureate. The announcement was made at today’s Tsinghua-Google AI Symposium in Beijing.
IBM today announced it will release the world’s largest facial attribute dataset in order to fight bias in artificial intelligence systems used to recognize human faces. The dataset was built by IBM research scientists and contains one million images, five times the image count of the current largest facial attribute dataset. It will be publically available this fall.
The Tencent Academic and Industrial Conference (TAIC) will be held in Stockholm, Sweden on July 14th, gathering top AI researchers and young professionals from around the world. Synced is organizing the conference, where Tencent’s seven core business groups and invited academics and industry professionals will share insights on the current state of AI technologies.
Suzhou City-based AI and speech technology company AISpeech announced today it had raised CN¥500 million (US$76 million) in Series D Funding led by Oriza Holdings and China Minsheng Investment Group. Chinese media reports the company is also planning an IPO on a local stock exchange.
Salesforce announces a deeper data sharing partnership with Google. Consumer insights from Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 will be merged into one dashboard for either platform. Marketing Cloud data can be used to create a more customized web experience.
Chinese search engine company Sogou announced today that COO Liyun Ru will leave his position on June 30th for personal reasons. Dr. Jingfang Xu will now lead the company’s Search Division and oversee AI smart search development.
Cainiao, the logistics arm of leading Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba Group, hosted the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit (GSLS) in Hangzhou on May 31st. Speaking at the event, Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma called for tens of billions of US dollars in investment to build a national internet-based intelligent logistics backbone in China.
In a new video posted by IEEE Spectrum, a 7.38-kilogram red robot composed of 12 interlinking modules swiggles through a 60 cm gap before rising and floating in mid-air like the mythical Dragon it is named after.
Founded in 2014, ROOBO received US$100 million in Series A financing from iFlytek, and in September 2017 announced B Round financing of US$53 million led by Seven Seas Capital.
The NVIDIA DeepStream Software Development Kit (SDK) was originally released in 2017 to simplify the deployment of scalable intelligent video analytics (IVA) powered by deep learning. Developers can use DeepStream to process, understand and categorize video frames in real time and within stringent throughput and latency requirements.
The 2018 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) opened today in Salt Lake City, USA. The CVPR organizing committee used the occasion to announce its coveted Best Paper and Best Student Paper selections.
Cambricon Technologies announced today that it has secured hundreds of million dollars in its Series B funding round, with investments from China’s State-owned Capital Venture, SDIC Venture Capital, China Capital Investment Group, TCL Capital, CITIC Securities, Alibaba VC, Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group and others.
The Baidu Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Lab has released a paper which proposes a neural conditional random field (NCRF) process for cancer metastasis detection on Whole Slide Images (WSIs).
Once upon a time, a cephalopod in Oberhausen, Germany named Paul the Octopus captured human hearts by picking football match winners at the Euro 2008 and 2010 FIFA World Cup with a success rate of 85.7 percent.
We tend to notice the AI that’s in our smartphones, powering our home assistants or piloting self-driving cars. But there is another tech revolution going on — out of sight for most of us — wherein AI and robotics are reinventing entire factories and industrial processes.
The paper Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks, published last week on arXiv by researchers from DeepMind, Google Brain, MIT and University of Edinburgh, has stimulated discussion in the artificial intelligence community.
The university launched the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute this April, pooling 8 affiliated research centers, 23 labs, and some 100 faculty members into a new Canadian AI supercluster with a focus on operational AI research.
Earlier this week the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2018 announced its Best Two Short Papers, neither of which had yet been published. Today the AI community got its first look at one of the winners when Know What You Don’t Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD was released on arXiv.
Last Saturday night a thief and a document forger went to see Cheung perform in Jinhua City, but instead ended up in handcuffs. They were the latest of five criminal suspects to be apprehended at Cheung concerts over the past two months.
Google today announced it is opening its first-ever AI research centre in Africa. The internet giant aims to gather machine learning researchers and engineers in Accra, the capital of Ghana, to facilitate local AI development.
Chinese computer vision company Yitu announced today that is has secured US$200 million in its C+ funding round, with investments from GC Capital, ICBC International, and SPDB International.
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will hold its 56th Annual Meeting July 15 – 20 in Melbourne, Australia. Yesterday, the ACL 2018 organising committee announced its three best long papers and two best short papers.
Microsoft is working on a bias-detecting tool which can alert people if an AI algorithm might be treating them unfairly based on their race or gender. As more and more decisions are being made by or based on AI, the detection of unfair biases has become an important public issue.
At the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit (GSLS) in Hangzhou on May 31st, Alibaba’s Cainiao and RoboSense jointly announced the G Plus, which they say is the world’s first unmanned logistics vehicle integrated with solid-state LiDAR.
The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee today introduced the world’s fastest supercomputer Summit, whose computing power reaches 200 petaflops or 200 million billion calculations per second.
Over the past three months, criticism and protests have been mounting over Google’s participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program to build machine learning models to detect and categorize objects in drone footage provided by the US Department of Defense.
At the Computing Conference 2018 Shanghai Summit today, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of its AI program ET Agricultural Brain, a step towards the interactive automation of pig farming, aiming at continuously embedding AI technologies into modern agriculture.
The galloping progress in artificial intelligence has stirred up widespread public concern over unemployment and displacement. One can see however that humans have a surprisingly long history of fearing intelligent machines and their potential societal impacts.
Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba announced in April that it would launch Alibaba Law School, integrating big data teaching methods with legal education. As we await updates, law programs around the world have already begun re-designing their curriculums to better fit the age of big data and AI.
GcForest, a decision tree ensemble approach that is much easier to train than deep neural networks, has received a lot of attention from researchers since it was introduced by Prof. Zhihua Zhou and his student Ji Feng last year. Based on their previous work, Zhou, Feng and Nanjing University colleague Yang Yu have now proposed Multi-layered Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (mGBDTs).
Today it was Apple’s turn to unveil new machine learning tools and software at its 2018 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which runs June 4-8 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California..
Synced recently spoke with Delian Capital Senior Vice President Xuesong Fan about the current status of automated driving startups. Fan graduated from Harbin Engineering University and worked for years on Chinese satellite engineering. In 2015 came down to earth, applying his experience to self-driving car investments.
Each spring, tech hobbyists visit Alibaba for its annual open tour. This May 10, Synced toured the company’s acoustic lab, which is dedicated to R&D for its voice assistant Tmall Genie.
New York-based AI startup LexSet.ai wants to make furniture shopping as simple and fun as playing a kid’s video game, with an AI-powered plug-in interior designer that “analyzes your home…
UC Berkeley’s Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) has open-sourced their newest driving database, BDD100K, which contains over 100k videos of driving experience, each running 40 seconds at 30 frames per second.