Huawei Introduces Kirin 980: 7nm & Many World Firsts
At the IFA 2018 in Berlin today Huawei unveiled the new Kirin 980, the world’s first 7nm smartphone SoC (system-on-a-chip) with a dual-core NPU (Neural Network Processing Unit).
Month: August 2018
MIT PixelPlayer “Sees” Where Sounds Are Coming From
The “cocktail party effect” describes humans’ ability to hold a conversation in a noisy environment by listening to what their conversation partner is saying while filtering out other chatter, music, ambient noises, etc.
Chinese AI Startup Brings Diabetes Prediction to Shanghai Hospital
Leading Chinese AI startup 4Paradigm has announced a strategic partnership with Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital on AI application in healthcare, especially chronic health conditions.
Google’s AI-Powered Navlekha Boosts Indian Language Online Content
At the Google For India 2018 conference in New Delhi yesterday Google launched its AI platform Navlekha, which enables publishers to make offline Indian language content fully editable and streamlines the online publishing process.
Brown University Paper Shows Research Robot Vulnerability
Google Brain Research Scientist Ian Goodfellow has tweeted an alarm about IoT hacking of a particularly nightmarish type, after Brown University security researchers were able to remotely access and control a robot in a university research lab. The research also showed that many robotic labs worldwide may be vulnerable to such a takeover technique.
Silicon Night Fever: Berkeley AI Gets Down
Electrifying an entire dance club is easy if you have killer moves like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. But for the rest of us, not so much. We may shake our butts and swing our arms, but let’s face it: some people just can’t dance. But now there’s hope, thanks to AI.
Busting Moves with DanceNet AI
Inspired by STEM-focused YouTuber carykh, Indian developer Jaison Saji has produced a deep network system, DanceNet, that can automatically generate dance moves. Synced used DanceNet to produce a short clip (below) with code published on Github.
How AI Generates a “Furry Dog Silhouette”
CGI is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary culture. Filming for example a battle scene between warriors and mystic creatures in Wakanda involves much more than just dressing and directing actors.
Waymo Slips into Shanghai
Synced has discovered that Alphabet self-driving subsidiary Waymo has set up an office in China.
On August 23, Synced found an entry in the National Enterprise Information Publicity System indicating that the limited liability company (solely foreign invested – 外国法人独资) Huimo Business Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. had been incorporated in Shanghai.
Revenge of the Nerds! Humans Beat Bots at Dota 2 International
Last August at the Dota 2 International tournament in Seattle, OpenAI introduced an AI bot that upset the world’s top 1v1 human player. The San Francisco-based AI research institute is now at the International 2018 in Vancouver, where their team of state-of-the-art bots is battling professional human teams in a highly anticipated best-of-three 5v5 Dota 2 showdown.
Intel and ByteDance Partner on AI Lab
At a press conference in Beijing today US chipmaker Intel and Chinese tech pioneer ByteDance announced they will collaborate on setting up an AI research lab, talent training, and development of AI applications.
KDD 2018 Announces Best Paper & Other Awards
The 24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) opened on August 19 at the Excel Center in London, UK. Best Paper Awards go to a Technical University of Munich team for “Adversarial Attacks on Classification Models for Graphs (Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks for Graph Data)” in the Research Track; and “Real-time Personalization using Embeddings for Search Ranking at Airbnb”, by a team from Airbnb, in the ADS Track.
NVIDIA & MIT CSAIL Open-Source Video-to-Video Synthesis Method
Nvidia and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have open-sourced their video-to-video synthesis model. By using a generative adversarial learning framework, the method can generate high-resolution, photorealistic and temporally coherent results with various input formats, including segmentation masks, sketches, and poses.
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from August W2 – W3
Blockchain hardware, software, and services company Bitmain confirms it will build a data center in Rockdale, Texas and invest US$500 million in the United States over the next seven years. Bitmain will launch a local training program and hire more than 400 employees.
The New Nvidia GeForce RTX: A Gamer’s Dream
Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang today unveiled the company’s long-waited next-generation graphic processing unit (GPU) cards for games, Geforce RTX.
Building DIY Human Action Detectors With Matroid
Computers are now excellent at recognizing images of human faces, cats and dogs — but struggle when it comes to detecting continuous actions, for example determining if a character in a video might be “dancing the tango.” Computers also fall short in detecting nuanced expressions of human emotions.
Pedro Domingos Will Lead New D.E. Shaw Machine Learning Group
New York-based investment corporate D. E. Shaw Group yesterday announced that esteemed University of Washington Professor of Computer Science Pedro Domingos will join the firm as a Managing Director and lead its new Machine Learning Research Group.
Google Brain Plays Games With GANs
A Google Brain research group has published a paper proposing a new method for evaluating generative models by using insights from competitive games between human players.
AI’s Role in a $2.5B Q&A Site
On August 8th Chinese Q&A website Zhihu — named after the Mandarin phrase “Do You Know?” — announced it had raised US$270 million in its Series E funding round. With 180 million registered users and 110 million answered posts, China’s biggest Q&A website and fourth-largest social media platform’s total valuation now stands at US$2.5 billion.
TensorFlow 2.0 Will Be a “Major Milestone”
Google Brain Software Engineer Martin Wicke says a preview version of TensorFlow 2.0 will be released later this year. To cope with dramatic changes in both users and use-cases, TensorFlow 2.0 will shift its focus to “ease of use.” Wicke made the announcements yesterday in a Google Groups post.
Former Baidu Executive and AI Master Qi Lu Joins Y Combinator China As CEO
Three months after Chinese Internet giant Baidu announced that COO Qi Lu will step down in July due to “personal and family reasons”, Lu today unveiled his new adventure: Chief Executive Officer of Y Combinator China.
Revolutionising Graphics: Nvidia Unveils Turing Architecture With Real-Time Ray Tracing
At the prestigious SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) conference in Vancouver yesterday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Turing, an eighth-generation GPU architecture introducing ray tracing and AI capability to real-time graphics.
The Eyes Have It: DeepMind’s AI 3D OCT Scans
Artificial intelligence can now match or outperform human experts in diagnosis and referral on eye diseases, suggests a new paper from DeepMind. The UK-based, Google-owned research institute today released joint research results with the UK’s Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, which present a new AI technique in the context of OCT imaging. The paper was published on Nature Medicine’s website.
MORE Health Co-Founder & UCSF Physician Robert Warren On AI in Health
Robert S. Warren, MD is a Professor of Surgery and a specialist in gastrointestinal and liver cancer. Dr. Warren joined UCSF Medical Center in 1988. Highly respected by his peers, Dr. Warren was named to the list of U.S. News “America’s Top Doctors,” a distinction reserved for the top 1% of physicians in the nation for a given specialty.
Where No Doctor Has Gone Before: AI Takes Telemedicine to Underserved Areas
MORE Health is a Silicon Valley-based company that provides access to top international physicians for patients faced with critical illnesses such as cancer or heart disease. The company was founded in 2013, and recently took a leap forward by partnering with Houston-based Melax Technologies…
The Golden Age of HD Mapping for Autonomous Driving
The market for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles (AV) will rise from US$3 billion in 2015 to US$96 billion by 2025, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
Julia 1.0 Released
MIT-developed Julia has become one of the world’s fastest-growing programming languages. Last year it teamed with a supercomputer to catalogue 200 million astronomical objects within 15 minutes — one thousand times faster than the previous rate.
New Nvidia Paper Accelerates Large-Scale Language Modelling
Nvidia’s paper Large Scale Language Modeling: Converging on 40GB of Text in Four Hours introduces a model that uses mixed precision arithmetic and a 32k batch size distributed across 128 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs to improve scalability and transfer in Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for Natural Language tasks.
Harvard & University of Toronto Researchers Apply Deep Generative Models to Inverse Molecular Design
Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling from Harvard University and Alán Aspuru-Guzik from the University of Toronto have successfully applied machine learning models to speed up the materials discovery process. Their paper Inverse molecular design using machine learning: Generative models for matter engineering was published July 27 in Science Vol. 361.
Suiyuan Technology Gets $50M to Build Cloud-Based Deep Learning Chips
Chinese AI maker startup Suiyuan Technology announced today that it has completed its Series Pre-A funding with nearly CN¥340 million (US$50 million). Funding was led by Tencent Holdings Ltd, Zhen Fund, Delta Capital, Yunhe Partners and Summitview Capital.
CycleGAN Bikini Fix for Nudes
The Internet is woven into our everyday lives. We access massive amounts of data through our laptops, smartphones and tablets. This free flow of information however has prompted attempts to filter content which may not be appropriate for example for young people. One such new effort from Brazil puts virtual bikinis on nudes.
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from July W4 – August W1
Google teams up with New York distributed ledger solutions startup Digital Asset. In a Google blog post the company says it is exploring new ways to use distributed ledger technology.
Tianrang Intelligence Gets $26 Million in Series A Funding
Shanghai-based Tianrang Intelligence announced today that it has secured over US$26 million in Series A funding led by CMB International Capital and Gaorong Capital, with Ziniu Fund and Wacai Technology also participating. The two-year-old startup is working on general artificial intelligence solutions and will use the new funding to create a “City Brain Lab.”
Remaking Human Skin: Neurobotics at Gordon Cheng’s ICS Lab in Germany
The Technical University of Munich (TUM) had lured Cheng from a Japanese research institute. At TUM he founded the Institute of Cognitive Systems (ICS). With eight employees in a central office on Karlstraße 45, Cheng set to work on his arduous task: recreating the complexities of human skin and wiring it all to a brain.
Google Brain TensorFuzz Debugs Neural Networks with Coverage-Guided Fuzzing
Neural networks can be notoriously difficult to debug, but a Google Brain research team believes it may have come up with a novel solution. A paper by Augustus Odena and Ian Goodfellow introduces Coverage-Guided Fuzzing (CGF) methods for neural networks. The team also announced an open source software library for CGF, TensorFuzz 1.
EV Startup Xpeng Gets CN¥4 Billion in Series B+
Guangzhou-based Xiaopeng Motors (Xpeng) announced today that it had scored CN¥4 billion (US$585 million) in its Series B+ funding round. This is the largest 2018 single-round funding total among Chinese Electric Vehicle startups (NIO, Byton, WM Motor, etc.), and pushes Xpeng’s valuation to CN¥25 billion (US$3.66 billion).
AI Drives Baidu Q2 Profits, but Stock Falls on Google Chinese Search Engine Speculation
On the same day Baidu was announcing another quarter of strong earnings, the Chinese search engine giant’s stock prices suddenly tumbled on a report American rival Google is planning to launch a new search engine for the Chinese market.