Baidu’s Revenue Hits RMB 100 Billion in 2020, Driven by AI Transitions
On February 18, Baidu released the 2020 full year and Q4 financial report, presenting revenue of RMB 107.1 Billion, and its net profit of RMB 22 billion.
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Machine Intelligence | Technology & Industry | Information & Analysis
Chinese AI Voice Recognition Star Unisound Withdraws IPO Request Three Months After Application
On February 19, Beijing-based AI startup Unisound has decided halted its IPO application to the Shanghai Stalk Exchange.
SAIC Joins Hand With Horizon Robotics for Autopilot Chips
On February 22, Chinese state-owned automotive company SAIC Motor announced that it has forged a comprehensive strategic cooperation with Horizon Robotics, an AI smart chip unicorn.
Daimler Subsidiary Torc Robotics Adopts Amazon Cloud to Develop Autonomous Driving
Torc Robotics has selected Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) as its cloud service provider to meet large-scale data transmission, storage and computing speed requirements.
Panda Hub Chengdu Appointed National AI Innovation Zone Amongst Eight Other Cities
Ministry of Industry and Information technology appointed five more cities to the country’s National Artificial Intelligence Innovation Application Pilot Zones.
Visualize Your Model Errors! Microsoft Toolkit Identifies and Diagnoses ML Failures
A Microsoft team has introduced Error Analysis, a responsible AI toolkit designed to identify and diagnose errors in machine learning models.
Huawei’s HMS for Car Partners with Mercedes Benz
Huawei and Mercedes-Benz S-Class are cooperating to provide car owners with the HMS for Car Huawei smart vehicle solution.
BENDR for BCI: UToronto’s BERT-Inspired DNN Training Approach Learns From Unlabelled EEG Data
University of Toronto researchers propose a BERT-inspired training approach as a self-supervised pretraining step to enable deep neural networks to leverage newly and publicly available massive EEG (electroencephalography) datasets for downstream brain-computer-interface (BCI) applications.
Apple Reveals Design of Its On-Device ML System for Federated Evaluation and Tuning
Apple has laid out the design characteristics of a new generic system that enables federated evaluation and tuning (FE&T) systems on end-user devices.
Google & JHU Paper Explores and Categorizes Neural Scaling Laws
A research team from Google and Johns Hopkins University identifies variance-limited and resolution-limited scaling behaviours for dataset and model size in four scaling regimes.
L.E.K. Consulting: Drones to Account for 30% of Deliveries by 2040
British consulting firm L.E.K. has released a recent research report stating that as unmanned technology and network scale greatly reduce costs, by 2040, drones may account for as much as 30 percent of same-day parcel deliveries.
Goldman Sachs Launches Marcus Invest Robo-Adviser
On February 16, Goldman Sachs announced that it is launching an automated wealth management platform to invest client funds in a portfolio of stocks and bonds.
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Chinese AI Chip Maker Horizon Robotics Bags USD 9M for Series C
According to statement on February 12, Chinese AI chip unicorn Horizon Robotics announces a third time series C financing.
Swiss Fragrance Giant Givaudan Acquires French AI Startup Myrissi
As part of the long-term strategy to “expand AI capabilities”, Swiss flavours and fragrance giant Givaudan announced that it will acquire the French company Myrissi.
Yann LeCun Hails MSA Transformer’s ‘Huge Progress’ in Protein Contact Prediction
UC Berkeley, Facebook AI Research and New York University researchers’ Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA) Transformer surpasses current state-of-the-art unsupervised structure learning methods by a wide margin.
UC Berkeley & Google’s BoTNet Applies Self-Attention to CV Bottlenecks
Researchers from UC Berkeley and Google Research have introduced BoTNet, a “conceptually simple yet powerful” backbone architecture that boosts performance on computer vision (CV) tasks such as image classification, object detection and instance segmentation.
DeepMind Achieves High-Performance Large-Scale Image Recognition Without Batch Normalization
DeepMind has designed a family of Normalizer-Free ResNets (NFNets) that can be trained in larger batch sizes and stronger data augmentations and have set new SOTA validation accuracies on ImageNet.
Stanford University Deep Evolutionary RL Framework Demonstrates Embodied Intelligence via Learning and Evolution
Stanford researchers’ DERL (Deep Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning) is a novel computational framework that enables AI agents to evolve morphologies and learn challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks in complex environments using only low level egocentric sensory information.
DeepMind & UCL’s Alchemy Is a ‘Best-of-Both-Worlds’ 3D Video Game for Meta-RL
A research team from DeepMind and University College London have released Alchemy, a novel open-source benchmark for meta-RL research.
Transformers Scale to Long Sequences With Linear Complexity Via Nyström-Based Self-Attention Approximation
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UC Berkeley, Google Brain and American Family Insurance propose Nyströmformer, an adaption of the Nystrom method that approximates standard self-attention with O(n) complexity.
ICMI 2020 Best Paper | Gesticulator: A framework for semantically-aware speech-driven gesture generation
The research develop machine learning methods that enable virtual agents (such as avatars from a computer game) to communicate non-verbally.
Staying Abreast of Changing Language: DeepMind Explores Temporal Generalization in Language Models
In a bid to solve the temporal generalization problem of modern language models, a team of DeepMind researchers propose it’s time to develop adaptive language models that will remain up-to-date in our ever-changing world.
The Eyes Have It: 20 Million Images Make TEyeD World’s Largest Human Eye Dataset
A new study by University Tübingen introduces the world’s largest unified eye dataset with over 20 million human eye images captured using head-mounted eye trackers.
55 Researchers From 44 Institutions Propose GEM, a ‘Living Benchmark’ for NLG
To track progress in natural language generation (NLG) models, 55 researchers from more than 40 prestigious institutions have proposed GEM (Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics), a “living benchmark” NLG evaluation environment.
AAAI 2021 Best Papers Announced
The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) kicked off today as a virtual conference. The organizing committee announced the Best Paper Awards and Runners Up during this morning’s opening ceremony.
CMU Researchers Explore ‘Crazy Idea’ of Automating AI Paper Reviews
A bold Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) team recently explored the prospect of using AI to review AI papers.
New Transfer Learning Approach Summarizes Historical Texts in Modern Languages
Researchers from the University of Sheffield, Beihang University, and Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute have proposed a transfer learning approach that can automatically process historical texts at a semantic level to generate modern language summaries.
Georgia Tech & Facebook Tensor Train Approach Achieves 112x Size Reduction in DL Recommendation Models
A new study by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Facebook AI introduces TT-Rec, a way to drastically compress the size of memory-intensive Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM) and make them easier to deploy at scale.
Google Brain Introduces Symbolic Programming + PyGlove Library to Reformulate AutoML
A recent study by the Google Brain Team proposes a new way of programming automated machine learning (AutoML) based on symbolic programming.
UmlsBERT: Clinical Domain Knowledge Augmentation of Contextual Embeddings Using the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus
UmlsBERT is a deep Transformer network architecture that incorporates clinical domain knowledge from a clinical Metathesaurus in order to build ‘semantically enriched’ contextual representations that will benefit from both the contextual learning and domain knowledge.
NVIDIA, UToronto, McGill & Vector Study Delivers Real-Time SDF Rendering & SOTA Complex Geometry Reconstruction
A new study by NVIDIA, University of Toronto, McGill University and the Vector Institute introduces an efficient neural representation that enables real-time rendering of high-fidelity neural SDFs for the first time while delivering SOTA geometry reconstruction quality.
ZeRO-Offload: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Models on a Single GPU
Researchers from University of California, Merced and Microsoft have introduced ZeRO-Offload, a novel heterogeneous DL training technology that enables training of multi-billion parameter models on a single GPU without any model refactoring.
Rebiber: Normalizing BibTeX with Conference Information
A new BibTeX-normalizing tool dubbed Rebiber is gaining popularity in the AI research community. The creation of a PhD student, Rebiber addresses incomplete or confusing paper citation information.
Naver AI Lab Researchers Relabel 1.28 Million ImageNet Training Images
Researchers from Naver AI Lab says they’ve found a computationally efficient re-labelling strategy that fixes a significant flaw in popular image classification benchmark ImageNet.
Chinese AI Firm 4Paradigm Raises $700M for Series D
On January 22, Beijing-based AI firm 4Paradigm announced USD 700 million series D investments from Boyu Capital, Primavera Capital and Hopu Investments.
Japan: Harvesting Robots to Help Aging Farmers and Shortage of Labor
Recent footage shows agricultural robot co-developed by National Research Institute Agricultural Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University, and automobile parts manufacturer Denso harvesting apples in Japan’s orchards.
AI Art Critic? New Dataset and Models Make Emotional Sense of Visual Artworks
Is it possible for machines to understand and integrate human emotions in visual arts? Meet ArtEmis, a new large-scale dataset of emotional reactions and explanations for visual artworks.
Tsinghua AI Report: China Applied for 389,571 AI Patents in the Past Ten Years
Analyzing papers and patent data collected from top AI journals and conferences, 44 in total from 2011 to 2020, Tsinghua University’s new AI development report revealed new statistical insights.
IBM Closes China Research Laboratory
IBM has closed off its Beijing-based China Research Laboratory (CRL) after 25 years of operation.
Synced Tradition and Machine Learning Series | Part 2: Optimization Basics
This is the second in a special Synced series of introductory articles on traditionally theoretical fields of studies and their impact on modern-day machine learning.