Airbus AI Introduces Natural Language QA System for Flight Crews
Airbus has developed a new Smart Librarian (SL) FCOM QA system comprising a dialogue engine, retriever (search engine), and QA module.
Author: Synced
Machine Intelligence | Technology & Industry | Information & Analysis
Toshiba Debuts Logistic Robot for Overlapping Piled Luggage in Distribution Warehouse
Japanese conglomerate Toshiba announced it will launch a logistics robot that accurately recognizes randomly piled luggage utilizing AI in 2021.
Government Agency DGA Debuts the Thailand’s First National AI Centre
As part of the Thai government’s digital transformation roadmap for 2020-22, the Digital Government Development Agency (DGA) has launched the first national AI centre.
Tesla Puts Additional USD 6.3 Million in New Factory; Builds New R&D Center in Shanghai
Tesla confirmed to invest an additional USD 6.3 million in Shanghai to build a supercharging pile factory.
Princeton Student’s AI Model Generates Chinese Landscape Paintings That Fool Human Evaluators
A Princeton student designed a GAN framework for Chinese landscape painting generation that is so effective most humans can’t distinguish its works from the real thing.
‘Biology’s ImageNet Moment’ – DeepMind Says Its AlphaFold Has Cracked a 50-Year-Old Biology Challenge
Google’s UK-based lab and research company DeepMind says its AlphaFold AI system has solved the protein folding problem, a grand challenge that has vexed the biology research community for half a century.
Synced Tradition and Machine Learning Series | Part 1: Entropy
This is the first in a special Synced series of introductory articles on traditionally theoretical fields of studies and their impact on modern day machine learning.
Facebook Proposes Free-Viewpoint Rendering on Monocular Video
Facebook’s new model enables free-viewpoint rendering of dynamic scenes in a single video.
Do We Really Need Green Screens for High-Quality Real-Time Human Matting?
Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and SenseTime propose a lightweight matting objective decomposition network (MODNet) that can smoothly process real-time human matting from a single input image with diverse and dynamic backgrounds.
AI Helps Qatar Make Pre-Emptive Decisions to Secure Food Supply
The Qatar Center for Artificial Intelligence at Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University is developing the latest AI tools and technologies to enhance food production in Qatar.
Oracle opens cloud data centre in Dubai to accelerate digital transformation in UAE
Oracle has launched a regional cloud data centre – the Zayed Innovation and Artificial Intelligence Hub – in Dubai.
New AI APP by Singapore Government Pledges to Block Scam Calls and SMS
Recent report by telecommunications giant Singtel show that scam calls have doubled from last year and that customers have received more than 5,000 calls so far in 2020.
40 Projects Worth Over USD 9 Billion Signed at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen
On November 24, the World Internet Conference Digital Economy Industry Cooperation Conference was held in Wuzhen, China.
JD.com Set Up JD Exploration Research Institute to Further Research in Six Areas Including AI
At the JDDiscovery-2020 Global Technology Discovery Conference, the Chinese e-commerce giant announced a new research institute to further research in areas including AI, quantum computing and so on.
MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory establishes Biotechnology and Human Systems Division; Spearheads AI and Biology Research
MIT Lincoln Laboratory has established a new research and development division, the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division.
Tencent Robot X’s Jamoca Takes on Kung Fu Master Challenge to Walk on Quincunical Piles
Tencent Robotics X Lab announced new developments in mobile robot research – the four-legged mobile robot Jamoca.
USC & Amazon ‘SLADE’ Self-Training Framework Uses Unlabelled Data to Improve Information Retrieval
The SeLf-trAining framework for Distance mEtric learning (SLADE) framework combines self-supervised learning and distance metric learning methods to improve information retrieval performance.
TUM Receives EURO 50 Million to Form AI Research Institute in the Construction Industry with Nemetschek Innovation Foundation
The Nemetschek Innovation Foundation will provide approximately EURO 50 million over the next ten years to fund an AI research and teaching institute at TUM.
China Drafts 14th Five-Year Digital Economy Plan; AI Industry Scale in 1H 2020 Reach USD 11.7 Billion
China is accelerating the preparation of the “14th Five-Year” digital economy plan, which will be the country’s first designated plan for the digital economy.
Microsoft Announces Strategic Cooperation with Spinoff XiaoIce; XiaoIce Wraps Up Pre-A Round Financing
Microsoft China and XiaoIce announced a strategic partnership, jointly launching 2B AI and cloud computing solutions in three areas: finance, automotive and content production.
University of Alberta U^2-Net: Generating Realistic Pencil Portraits Using Salient Object Detection
University of Alberta recently proposed U^2-Net, a novel deep network architecture that achieves very competitive performance in salient object detection.
IEEE: AI, ML, 5G and IoT will be the Most Important Technologies in 2021
Recent IEEE study released the results of a survey of Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers in the U.S., U.K., China, India and Brazil.
Shanghai Electric and Siemens Energy to Establish Smart Energy Empowerment Centre
Chinese multinational power and electrical equipment manufacturing company Shanghai Electric signed a collaboration agreement with Siemens Energy on launching a new smart energy empowerment centre.
APAC Financial Institutions Embrace AI/ML
Asia Pacific (APAC)’s adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning in financial markets is accelerating.
South Korea to Introduce AI to High School Education in 2021; to Train 5,000 Incumbent Teachers by 2025
South Korea will introduce AI to nationwide high school education in 2021
McGill University, Facebook & Mila Release 14M Article NLP Pretraining Dataset for Medical Abbreviation Disambiguation
In EMNLP 2020, a Montreal-based research team introduced a large medical text dataset designed to boost abbreviation disambiguation in the medical domain.
Japan’s Fujitsu, AIST, and RIKEN Achieve Highest Speed on the MLPerf HPC BL Processing Benchmark Using Supercomputer Systems
The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and RIKEN announced a performance milestone in supercomputing.
Saudi Arabia to Invest USD 20 Billion in AI and Data by 2030 to Diversify Economy
Saudi Arabia announced a multibillion-dollar investment strategy in artificial intelligence (AI) and data by 2030 to diversify its oil-based economy.
2020 Beijing AI Development Report: 1,500 companies, 4,000 scholars and 40,000 industry practitioners
Beijing Zhiyuan AI Research Institute released the 2020 Beijing AI Development Report, showing that Beijing ranks first nationally in 17 areas, including for having the highest numbers of companies and scholars.
A-axis Superconductive Wafers for Enhanced Sensors and High-Performance Computing
Researchers achieved world-class interface smoothness with a-axis YBa2Cu3O7-x/PrBa2Cu3O7-x/YBa2Cu3O7-x trilayers grown on (100) LaAlO3 substrates.
UP-DETR: Unsupervised ‘Random Query Patch Detection’ Pretrains Transformers for Object Detection
A new study by South China University of Technology and Tencent WeChat AI researchers is the latest fruitful attempt to utilize transformer architectures in object detection.
Impersonator++ Human Image Synthesis – Smarten Up Your Dance Moves!
A new AI-powered image synthesis framework makes “learning” to moonwalk or drop Blackpink dance moves a snap.
Egypt and Hungary Discuss Potential Collaboration on AI
Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology met with the Ambassador of Hungary in Cairo to discuss boosting cooperation between the two countries in the fields of AI and data science, capacity building, innovation and entrepreneurship, applied research, and cyber-security.
Qualcomm: 5G will create USD 13.1 trillion in global economic output in 2035
In the next 15 years, global 5G investment and R&D investment will increase by 10.8% from the forecast value in 2019.
Facebook Building Automatic Differentiation System for Kotlin Programming Language
Facebook AI is building an automatic differentiation system for the Kotlin programming language and developing a system for tensor typing.
EMNLP 2020 Best Paper Award Goes to UC Berkeley Team
The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020) kicked off on Monday as a virtual conference.
CoRL 2020 Best System Paper Winner: Noah’s Ark Lab Multi-Agent RL Simulation for Autonomous Driving
The CoRL 2020 Best System Paper Award was presented today to Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and University College London for their paper SMARTS: Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Training School for Autonomous Driving.
Automatic Image-to-Painting Translation Method Generates Vivid Paintings in Controllable Styles
Stylized Neural Painter is a novel automatic image-to-painting translation method that generates vivid and realistic artworks in controllable styles
DeepMind Open-Sources Lab2D: Environmental Design for Multi-Agent RL Research
A new DeepMind scalable environment simulator takes a digital approach to the question, enabling the examination of environmental factors on AI agents.
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2020) Best Paper Awards Announced
CoRL 2020 kicked off yesterday and runs virtually through November 18. This year saw 475 papers submitted, a 20 percent rise over 2019.