Google Health Data Backlash; Microsoft Head of AI and Research Splits; Bengio vs Marcus in Christmas Debate
Synced Global AI Weekly November 17th
Author: Synced
Machine Intelligence | Technology & Industry | Information & Analysis
AI Struts Down the Japanese Fashion Runway
Although Japan’s declining and aging population has done little to stimulate the domestic fashion industry, AI is getting very positive reviews from the country’s still massive JP¥9 trillion (US$83 billion) apparel market.
DeepMind Research Lead Doina Precup On Reinforcement Learning
Precup discussed the latest developments in the field: “Reinforcement learning allows autonomous agents to learn how to act in a stochastic, unknown environment, with which they can interact.”
Baidu PaddlePaddle Releases 21 New Capabilities to Accelerate Industry-Grade Model Development
Featuring 100+ models, new mobile inference engine, and frameworks for graph & federated learning
Weekly Papers | EMNLP 2019 Best Paper; Facebook XLM-R and More!
Synced surveyed last week’s crop of machine learning papers and identified seven that we believe may be of special interest to our readers.
Japanese Scientist Insists His Robot Twin Is Not Creepy
In an exclusive interview with Synced, the 56-year-old professor shared his thoughts on humanoids, human nature, human-robot interaction, knowledge and intelligence.
Intel AI Summit 2019 | Chip Giant Accelerates AI at the Edge
The new Intel products strengthen the company’s growing portfolio of AI solutions, which is expected to generate more than US$3.5 billion in revenue in 2019.
Head of Microsoft AI and Research Harry Shum Is Leaving the Company
Microsoft Executive Vice President Harry Shum (Shen Xiangyang), the head of Microsoft AI and Research, will leave the tech giant in early 2020.
AAAI 2020 Reports Record-High Paper Submissions
AAAI-20 welcomes submissions on mainstream AI topics and related areas and reported a record-high number of over 8,800 submissions — a thousand more than last year.
Synced Machine Intelligence Awards 2019: ‘The Power of Industry’
The Synced Machine Intelligence Awards 2019 focus is “the power of industry” and the selection process will key in on AI companies’ products, application cases and industry landings — with the most noteworthy companies chosen based on real and objective industry performance.
Texas A&M and Simon Fraser Universities Open-Source RL Toolkit for Card Games
A team of researchers from Texas A&M University and Canada’s Simon Fraser University have open-sourced a toolkit called “RLCard” for applying RL research to card games.
Extreme E-Commerce: Shipping 2.8 Billion Singles’ Day Parcels
China’s National Post Bureau forecasts some 2.8 billion parcels will be shipped between November 11-18th. While robots will do much of the heavy lifting, an average human warehouse worker will cover 42 kilometers per day, equivalent to a full, sweaty marathon.
OpenAI Releases Full GPT-2; Baidu Q3 Revenues Rise; EMNLP Announces 2019 Best Papers
Synced Global AI Weekly November 10th
2020 AI Residency Guide
As global AI development and deployment continues, the demand for AI talents is growing faster than ever. A number of industry leaders and reputable institutions offer AI residency programs designed to help nurture promising AI talents.
Microsoft Ignite 2019 | Project Cortex AI Builds Enterprise Knowledge Networks
The message from Microsoft is clear: the company is investing in knowledge, which it believes will become one of the most important assets of any organization.
Google T5 Explores the Limits of Transfer Learning
Synced invited Samuel R. Bowman, an Assistant Professor at New York University who works on artificial neural network models for natural language understanding, to share his thoughts on the “Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer” (T5) framework.
ProtoPNet Recognizes Birds and Shows Us How in Real Time
Exciting new research from Duke University introduces ProtoPNet, a deep learning network that can explain how it distinguishes a pigeon from a partridge in real time.
OpenAI Releases 1.5 Billion Parameter GPT-2 Model
In a blog post today OpenAI today announced the final staged release of its 1.5 billion parameter language model GPT-2, along with all associated code and model weights.
Microsoft Ignite 2019 | From Office to Cortex and Beyond – How AI Is Making a Difference at the World’s Most Valuable Company
“You’ll see AI infused into all our products and services across the company, from tools to help people be more productive at work, to Azure services that give our customers the flexibility to deploy AI capabilities in any environment,” said Microsoft Communications Corporate Vice President Frank Shaw.
Do Deep Neural Networks ‘See’ Faces Like Brains Do?
Recognizing faces is as natural and habitual as can be for human beings. But what actually happens inside our brains during the process of recognizing a face? Can artificial intelligence learn to recognize faces the way humans do?
Locating Moving Objects Using Stereo Sound Instead of Visual Input
In a bid to improve object localization in less-than-ideal circumstances, an MIT and IBM research group has proposed a cross-modal auditory localization framework that can effectively locate objects using stereo sound.
ICCV 2019 and CoRL 2019 Announce Best Papers; DeepMind AlphaStar Reaches ‘Grandmaster Level’
Synced Global AI Weekly November 3rd
Industrial Internet of Things & Factories of the Future
The market opportunities for IIoT are massive. Markets & Markets reports the global IIoT market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.39 percent to reach US$91.4 billion by 2023, with the manufacturing industry holding the largest market share.
Visiting the SOSP 2019 AI System Workshop
The ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) has a long history and a great reputation in Operating Systems (OS) research. This year SOSP was held in Huntsville, a charming town located in lake country, some 200km north of Toronto.
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.
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