Apple A13 Bionic VS Huawei Kirin 990 5G; Is $1 Billion AI Investment Not Enough?; R.I.P Python 2
Synced Global AI Weekly September 15th
Author: Synced
Machine Intelligence | Technology & Industry | Information & Analysis
LiDAR Industry Hits Impasse: Was Elon Musk Right After All?
Since the business mindset is to focus on short-term feasible technologies, the lack of serious buyers is the real problem for the LiDAR industry.
IEEE Ranks Robot Creepiness: Sophia Is Not Even Close to the Top
Based on users’ votes, IEEE Spectrum also compiles rankings of today’s Top Rated, Most Wanted, and Creepiest Robots. Join Synced as we take a stroll through the uncanny valley and meet the world’s top-three creepiest robots.
Nasty Language Processing: Textual Triggers Transform Bots Into Bigots
Now a group of researchers from the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) have shown how trigger words and phrases can “inflict targeted errors” on natural language processing (NLP) model outputs, prompting them to generate racist and hostile content.
QAit AI Learns by Interacting With Its Environment
For an AI system to acquire knowledge the way humans generally do it would need to interact with its surroundings and extract information through its own attention and analysis choices. That’s the idea behind a new paper from Microsoft Research, Polytechnique Montreal, MILA and and the University of Montreal.
AI Chip Duel: Apple A13 Bionic VS Huawei Kirin 990 5G
“A13 Bionic is the fastest chip ever in a smartphone, that quickly handles the tasks that matter most to people every day,” boasted Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller this morning at the Apple’s annual product conference in Cupertino, California.
Chinese Gaming Giant NetEase Leverages AI to Create 3D Game Characters from Selfies
A team of researchers from the Chinese gaming giant NetEase have developed a method to automatically create players’ in-game characters from a standard portrait photo.
R.I.P. Python 2: October 16, 2000 – January 1, 2020
In an official statement released today on python.org, the volunteer team that manages the programming language announced they will sunset Python 2 on January 1, 2020.
Top 10 Chinese Cities for AI Development: Beijing Ranks No. 1
China’s goal of becoming the world’s leading AI innovation center by 2030 is based on an ambitious blueprint that encourages individual cities to develop and strengthen AI ecosystems.
Facebook Leaks Data of 419M Users; NeurIPS 2019 Accepted Papers Announced; AI Passes 8th Grade Science Test
Synced Global AI Weekly September 8th
AI-Powered Stickers and Emojis Deliver Next-Gen Personalisation
More and more social apps are now leveraging AI technologies such as machine learning, deep neural networks and facial recognition to enable users to create highly-individualized emojis from selfies and photos.
Facebook Introduces Dataset & Challenge to Counter DeepFakes
In collaboration with Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from top universities, Facebook today announced the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) with the aim of finding innovative deepfake detection solutions to help the media industry spot videos that have been morphed by AI models.
Huawei Introduces World’s First Flagship 5G SoC in Challenge to Samsung and Qualcomm
Huawei did not disappoint when the IFA 2019 opened this morning, announcing the new Kirin 990 5G, whose built-in 5G modem makes it the world’s first-ever 5G flagship chipset.
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, AI Knows Where You Are
A group of Chinese researchers have come up with a novel method for identifying mirrors in images which outperforms state-of-the-art detection and segmentation methods on targeted baselines.
One Network to Fit All Hardware: New MIT AutoML Method Trains 14X Faster Than SOTA NAS
A group of MIT researchers (Han Cai, Chuang Gan and Song Han) have introduced a “Once for All” (OFA) network that achieves the same or better level accuracy as state-of-the-art AutoML methods on ImageNet, with a significant speedup in training time.
Chinese “DeepFake” App Goes Viral, Renewing Concerns About Potential Misuse of Face-Swapping Tech
A recently released Chinese deepfake mobile application, “ZAO,” enables just about anyone to easily swap faces with popular characters such as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Jack Dawson in The Titanic, and so on.
Clone a Voice in Five Seconds With This AI Toolbox
A new Github project introduces a remarkable Real-Time Voice Cloning Toolbox that enables anyone to clone a voice from as little as five seconds of sample audio.
AI Video Colourization Without References or Human Guidance
If the great Charlie Chaplin were alive today he might well marvel at the artificial intelligence enabled colour versions of his comedy masterpieces such as Modern Times or The Idle Class.
Jack Ma and Elon Musk Debate AI in Shanghai; Apple Makes A Rare Apology; Self-Driving Taxi Concerns
Synced Global AI Weekly September 1st
Why AI Is Reading Your Resume and What Can You Do About It
Artificial intelligence can help companies navigate a global human resource market that is projected to reach US$30 billion by 2025, due in large part to technological proliferation.
Meet Microsoft Suphx: The World’s Strongest Mahjong AI
At the Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on August 29, Microsoft’s Global Executive Vice President Harry Shum officially introduced MSRA’s Suphx (“Super Phoenix”) as “the most powerful Mahjong AI in history,”
Adversarial Patch on Hat Fools SOTA Facial Recognition
Researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University and Huawei Moscow Research Center have introduced a wearable card designed to perform the opposite function — concealing a person’s identity from facial recognition systems.
AI Creates Fashion Models With Custom Outfits and Poses
A new research paper from Berlin-based unicorn fashion and technology company Zalando uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce high-resolution images of virtual fashion models ready to model clothes of any style.
Data Annotation: The Billion Dollar Business Behind AI Breakthroughs
Most insiders Synced interviewed agreed that machine learning training methods which require less labeled data — such as weakly supervised learning, few-shot learning and unsupervised learning — are achieving some promising results.
OpenAI Method Evaluates Model Defense Against Unforeseen Adversarial Examples
To ramp up the robustness of neural networks, researchers from OpenAI have introduced a novel method that evaluates how well a neural network classifier performs against adversarial attacks that were not seen during their training.
Humans Don’t Realize How Biased They Are Until AI Reproduces the Same Bias, Says UNESCO AI Chair
In a recent interview with Synced, Shawe-Taylor spoke on his role at UNESCO, emerging AI trends and the tech’s unseemly side, human-centered AI research, and the progress of AI in Europe.
California Startup Builds Worlds Largest AI Chip; Open AI Releases 774M Parameter Language Model; Waymo Shares Its Open Dataset
Synced Global AI Weekly August 25th
Autonomous Delivery Moves From Research Labs to the Streets
According to multinational consulting firm McKinsey & Company, by the year 2025 some 85 percent of last-mile deliveries will be carried by autonomous vehicles.
Huawei’s First Commercial AI Chip Doubles the Training Performance of Nvidia’s Flagship GPU
Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W.
MIT & Adobe Introduce Real Time AR Tool for Storytelling
Researchers from MIT Media Lab and Adobe Research recently introduced a real-time interactive augmented video system that enables presenters to use their bodies as storytelling tools by linking gestures to illustrative virtual graphic elements.
Shared Machine Learning: Ant Financial’s Solution For Data Privacy
One of the world’s largest financial companies, Alibaba subsidiary Ant Financial, recently introduced Shared Machine Learning (SML) as their solution for data privacy.
AutoML + GAN = AutoGAN! AI Can Now Design Better GAN Models Than Humans
Thanks to the creation of AutoML — which is essentially automated neural architecture search (NAS) — AI can now design better deep neural networks than human researchers for computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection.
How to Hide Your Feelings From AI Voice Assistants
No matter whether the conversations commence with “Ok, Google”, “Hello Alexa”, or “Hey Siri”, tech giants Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all granted third-party contractors access to their users’ many interactions with voice assistants.
Seoul National University AI Uses Text Tags to Colourize Line Drawings
Let’s say you’ve just sketched a portrait but don’t have the inclination to hand-colour your creation. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply tell an artificial intelligence assistant what colours you want and have it do the rest? Well, now you can!
Hot Chips | A California Startup Has Built an AI Chip as Big as a Notebook. Why?
California artificial intelligence startup Cerebras Systems yesterday introduced its Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the world’s largest-ever chip built for neural network processing.
Of Mice and Machines: Can AI Read Rodents’ Minds?
Researchers from Two Six Labs and Stanford Schnitzer Lab have developed a deep learning system designed to explore the workings of the mouse mind and predict behavior by processing brain-based electrical activity with a neural network.
A Trio of Machine Learning & Language Technology Breakthroughs You Shouldn’t Miss
Synced Global AI Weekly August 18th
Why Automation Isn’t the Answer to Smart Manufacturing
While management teams and consultants may spout trendy tech terms such as “process”, “automated”, or “smart”, and seem keen to hand over precisely-timed, measured tasks to machines, the truth is that AI tech is not a panacea — because manufacturing is hard.
Masters Will Share Insights at First Toronto Kaggle Days Meetup
Synced would like to invite Toronto AI and data science students and researchers to join representatives of the world’s largest data science community for an evening of networking, discussions, and refreshments!
DeepMind ‘Bsuite’ Evaluates Reinforcement Learning Agents
Now AI researchers have created a similar evaluation system to assess the relative performance of reinforcement learning (RL) systems across different tasks.