Smaller Is Better: Lightweight Face Detection For Smartphones
Much of the compute for such services is done on the cloud, but ideally these applications would be light enough to run directly on devices without an Internet connection.
Year: 2019
Google Introduces Huge Universal Language Translation Model: 103 Languages Trained on Over 25 Billion Examples
Synced invited Graham Neubig, an Assistant Professor from Carnegie Mellon University to share his thoughts on Google’s universal neural machine translation (NMT) system trained on over 25 billion examples that can handle 103 languages proposed.
Yoshua Bengio on Human vs Machine Intelligence
“We’ve made huge progress, much more than even my friends and I expected a few years ago. But (the progress) is mostly about perception, things like computer vision and speech recognition and synthesis of some things in natural processing. We’re still far from human capabilities.”
‘ChineseGLUE’ – New NLU Benchmark for Chinese NLP Models
Now, a group of NLP researchers and enthusiasts, including graduates from Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Zhejiang University, have introduced ChineseGLUE, a benchmark designed to encourage the development and assessment of Chinese language models.
ICCV 2019 Best Papers Announced
ICCV 2019 received 4,303 papers — more than twice the number submitted to ICCV 2017 — and accepted 1,075, for a reception rate of roughly 25 percent.
A Researcher Is Sheathing Smart Devices in ‘Skin’
A new paper from researchers at the University of Bristol, Telecomm ParisTech and Sorbonne University introduces a multi-layer, silicone “SkinOn” membrane that mimics the layers of human skin.
Can a Smart Light Bulb Steal Your Personal Data?
In a new paper, researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) design and implement attacks that leverage characteristics of the light emitted by modern smart bulbs to “steal” users’ private data and preferences from other nearby devices.
Google’s Big Week: Quantum Supremacy, Boosting Search With BERT, Exploring Transfer Learning
Synced Global AI Weekly October 27th
Running an Industrial Robotics Software Startup Is Not Getting Easier
After running the industrial robot operating system startup “Cobot” for three years, founder Miao Li has decided to axe 98 percent of the company’s “fancy services” and just focus on drug logistics and sorting mushrooms.
Milestone: BERT Boosts Google Search
In what the company calls “the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search,” Google today announced that it has leveraged its pretrained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries.
Google AI Targets Video Understanding With Speedy ‘TinyVideoNet’ and Other Approaches
Google’s latest contribution came last week with “Tiny Video Networks (TVN),” a new method for reducing the runtime of neural networks when analyzing videos that is significantly faster than existing models.
Get a Grip! MIT Boosts Robot Grasping
The MIT researchers’ novel method can speed up the grasp-planning process from more than 10 minutes to less than a second.
Alibaba Open-Sources Its MCU to Boost AI Research
Alibaba’s chip subsidiary Pingtouge (平头哥) has become the first Chinese company to open-source its Microcontroller (MCU) design platform.
Harvard & Google Seismic Paper Hit With Rebuttals: Is Deep Learning Suited to Aftershock Prediction?
With deep learning emerging as something of a panacea in the world of science, AI researchers and seismologists alike are leveraging the tech in pursuit of better aftershock forecast solutions.
Can Pretrained Language Models Replace Knowledge Bases?
The recent rapid development of pretrained language models has produced significant performance improvements on downstream NLP tasks.
Robots to Handle Rubik’s Cube, Push Stuff Around, Build a Lunar Base
Synced Global AI Weekly October 20th
AI In Wildlife Conservation
Image recognition technology in particular has come to play a valuable role in wildlife conservation, where endangered species are tallied and tracked so their numbers and migrations can be more accurately measured and understood.
Smooth Exclusion: New Adobe Algorithm Aces Video Inpainting
Purging your favourite photos or videos of an unsightly trash pile, a parked car or even an ex-partner has never been easier, thanks to the rapid progress of AI models designed for such tasks.
Kaldi Creator Daniel Povey Joining Xiaomi in Beijing
Daniel Povey, the main developer of the widely used open-source speech recognition toolkit Kaldi, tweeted today that he is likely joining Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi at its Beijing headquarters to work on a next generation “PyTorch-y Kaldi.”
Sotabench: Benchmarking Open Source Models Directly From GitHub
Machine learning research resource Papers with Code last week introduced Sotabench, a free and open website created to benchmark and rate the performance of state-of-the-art open source models from GitHub.
Using Conditional GANs to Build Zelda Game Levels
A team of researchers has proposed a Generative Adversarial Network based model tasked with creating playable and aesthetically appealing game levels for popular action-adventure video game series The Legend of Zelda.
OpenAI Robot Hand: Today Rubik’s Cube, Tomorrow the Real World?
We’ve lost the brain race, but humans still have unmatched dexterity, right? Wrong. OpenAI’s humanlike five-fingered gripper Dactyl just single-handedly solved a Rubik’s cube.
Shake Your Booty: AI Deepfakes Dance Moves From a Single Picture
Do you have two left feet? Do you avoid the dance floor out of fear of embarrassment? If you’ve ever secretly wished you could move your body like Joaquín Cortés — well, at least in a video — a new AI-powered 3D body mesh recovery module called Liquid Warping GAN can give you a leg up.
PyTorch 1.3 Released; News From Arm TechCon 2019; Are Deepfakes More Dangerous Than Imagined?
Synced Global AI Weekly October 13rd
How AI Is Modernizing Chinese Agriculture
In recent years frontier technologies such as AI, big data, IoT, and 3S technology (RS remote sensing technology, GIS geographic information systems, and GPS global positioning systems), have been aggressively deployed to accelerate the modernization of Chinese agriculture.
OpenCV-Inspired Kornia Is a Differentiable Computer Vision Library for PyTorch
Inspired by OpenCV, Kornia is based on PyTorch and designed to solve generic computer vision problems.
Facebook Debuts PyTorch 1.3 With PyTorch Mobile, Quantization, TPU Support and More
The latest version, PyTorch 1.3, includes PyTorch Mobile, quantization, and Google Cloud TPU support. The release was announced today at the PyTorch Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Open Source Hardware Trends, Arm Takes a Different Tack
Although the term “open source” conveys sentiments such as research sharing and community building, leading semiconductor IP provider Arm, which supports 95 percent of smartphone embedded processors, is not a fan.
Is NVIDIA Doubling Down On RISC-V?
The US chip giant now appears to be exploring the terrain beyond GPU architecture, raising the stakes on other dedicated electronic circuits.
Watch Out, MIT’s New AI Model Knows What You’re Doing Behind That Wall
For better or worse, AI can now figure out what you’re doing even without “seeing” you. The MIT Computer Science & AI Lab (CSAIL) has unveiled a neural network model that can detect human actions through walls or in extremely dark places.
ChipGAN Style Transfer Masters Chinese Ink Wash Painting
In the paper ChipGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Chinese Ink Wash Painting Style Transfer, a team of researchers from Peking University and Tsinghua University propose an end-to-end GAN-based architecture that can transfer input photos into the style of Chinese ink wash paintings.
Huawei’s TinyBERT Is 7X Smaller and 9X Faster Than BERT
Researchers from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab have introduced TinyBERT, a smaller and faster version of Google’s popular large-scale pre-trained language processing model BERT.
TensorFlow 2.0 Released; Google’s Large Scale Multilingual Speech Recognition; AI Responds to Climate Change
Synced Global AI Weekly October 6th
Can AI Assist in Suicide Prevention?
Figures from nonprofit organization Mental Health America show the severe depression rate for US youth increased from 5.9 to 8.2 percent over the last five years. The numbers provide a sobering glimpse of the shortcomings in mental health care, and some researchers are suggesting AI might be able to address the problem.
Google Accelerates Quantum Computation with Classical Machine Learning
Tech giant Google’s recent claim regarding quantum supremacy created a buzz in the computer science community and got global mainstream media talking about quantum computing breakthroughs.
Hugging Face Implements SOTA Transformer Architectures for PyTorch and TensorFlow 2.0
NLP-focused startup Hugging Face recently released a major update to their popular “PyTorch Transformers” library which establishes compatibility between PyTorch and TensorFlow 2.0.
NVIDIA & ORNL Researchers Train AI Model on World’s Top Supercomputer Using 27,600 NVIDIA GPUs
A research team from NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and Uber has introduced new techniques that enabled them to train a fully convolutional neural network on the world’s fastest supercomputer, Summit, with up to 27,600 NVIDIA GPUs.
DeepMind Uses GANs to Convert Text to Speech
DeepMind researchers are expanding GANs to audio, with a new adversarial network approach for high fidelity speech synthesis.
‘AI in Action’ | Toronto Hosts AI Squared Forum 2019
On September 22 about 300 artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning enthusiasts gathered at the University of Toronto Bahen Centre for Information Technology for the AI Squared Forum 2019.
GitHub Releases Dataset of Six Million Open-Source Methods for Code Search Research
In a bid to help software developers and foster innovative code search research, GitHub last week announced the CodeSearchNet Challenge in a joint effort with California-based machine learning development tools startup Weights & Biases.