AI Technology & Industry Review
The Synced Lunar New Year Project is a series of interviews with AI experts reflecting on AI development in 2018 and looking ahead to 2019. In this second installment (click here to read the previous article on Clarifai CEO Matt Zeiler), Synced speaks with Google Brain Researcher Quoc Le on his latest invention, AutoML, Google Brain’s pursuit of AI, and the secret of transforming lab technologies into real practices.
Facebook researchers have introduced two new methods for pretraining cross-lingual language models (XLMs). The unsupervised method uses monolingual data, while the supervised version leverages parallel data with a new cross-lingual language model.
Google rang in the Lunar New Year with a couple of AI-powered treats: a new Live Transcribe service to help the deaf and hard of hearing, and a Google Doodle showcasing the ancient Chinese art of Shadow Puppetry.
Uber AI Lab has created a buzz in the machine learning community with the publication of a paper introducing a new reinforcement learning algorithm called Go-Explore. The algorithm is designed to overcome the challenges of intelligence exploration in reinforcement learning to improve performance on hard-exploration tasks.
Last December some 9,000 attendees packed a single venue in Montreal for a week-long academic conference. NeurIPS was completely sold out, the latest indication of just how hot AI is nowadays. As AI and machine learning continue to ignite discussion across a wide variety of disciplines, novel approaches to the tech are also garnering interest.
AI Guru Andrew Ng announced today that Gopi Prashanth, formerly the Director of Technology for Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at Amazon Go, is joining Landing AI as VP of Engineering.
This is the first installment of the Synced Lunar New Year Project, a series of interviews with AI experts reflecting on AI development in 2018 and looking ahead to 2019. In this article, Synced chats with Clarifai Founder and CEO Matt Zeiler on recent progress in computer vision and his company’s plans for the future. Founded in New York in 2013, Clarifai produces advanced image recognition systems.
Papers With Code is a unique and useful resource that presents trending ML research along with the code to implement it. The site was created by Atlas ML CEO Robert Stojnic, aka “rstoj” on Reddit’s machine learning board. The latest version of Papers With Code has added 950+ unique machine learning tasks, 500+ State-of-the-Art result leaderboards and 8500+ papers with code.
10 AI News You Must Know From January W4 – W5
Researchers from NLP startup Shannon.AI have published a study proposing Glyce — a set of Chinese glyph-vectors for Chinese character representations. Glyce has already mastered 13 core Chinese natural language processing tasks.
Synced Global AI Weekly February 3rd
Synced surveyed several “future hotels” that are already applying AI in hospitality, to see how the tech can provide guests with a unique and satisfying experience.
In July 2017 the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) launched its Digital Health Innovation Action Plan to provide Americans “timely access to safe and effective digital health products,” many of which are being developed using artificial intelligence technologies.
There’s a lot more to a friendly game of Jenga than meets the eye. Strategies are informed by a complex set of tactile and visual stimuli — by touching a block and observing the tower, we not only see but also feel our actions and their consequences. The MIT Jenga robot thus marks an important step in AI’s transition to the physical world.
To help keep our readers abreast of the trend, Synced has identified five high-quality open-source datasets that were released this month (January 2019) and that AI researchers and engineers might find useful in their work.
A cooperative research group from Facebook and the University of Southern California has introduced an alternative evaluation task for visual-grounding systems: BISON (Binary Image Selection).
Many scientists believe that a quantum computing device will one day perform highly complex computational tasks which are far beyond the ability of today’s classical computers.
The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19) is now underway in Hawaii, USA. The program chairs are Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and Zhi-Hua Zhou (Nanjing University, China).
In his 1988 IEEE paper Cellular Neural Networks: Theory, UC Berkeley PhD student Lin Yang proposed Cellular Neural Network theory, a predecessor of the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that would later revolutionize machine learning. Based on this theory, Yang blueprinted a 20*20 parallel simulated circuit chip in the university lab.
Subscribe to Synced Global AI Weekly Natural Questions: a New Corpus and Challenge for Question Answering Research To help spur researchContinue Reading
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) recently approved the use of a “Judging Support System” developed by Fujitsu for a series of FIG gymnastics events in 2019. The system will be tested at the 2019 FIG World Cup Series, then officially launched for the 49th Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany this coming October.
DeepMind bot AlphaStar has scored a convincing 10/10 victory against pro human players in a special series of StarCraft II matches. Plucky 26 year-old Polish gamer Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz however salvaged a bit of human pride, snatching a surprise win yesterday in a live rematch at the DeepMind and Blizzard Entertainment Starcraft II Demonstration live stream event hosted in London.
A research team from the University of Rochester, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Adobe Research has proposed a foreground-aware image inpainting system to achieve superior results on challenging cases with complex compositions.
Huawei has announced the world’s first core chip for 5G base stations. The Chinese tech giant unveiled the new “Tiangang” chipset today in Beijing.
DeepMind and Blizzard Entertainment will present a StarCraft II live-stream demonstration on Thursday, Jan 24. The London-based Alphabet company known for taking down the world’s top Go master in 2017 tweeted the announcement yesterday.
ANYmal does not have an easy life. One of the four-legged robot’s main tasks is to learn how to stand up again — no matter how many times it is kicked, pushed or otherwise tumbles to the ground. A research team from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich University trained ANYmal using reinforcement learning (RL) and published their work last Wednesday.
10 AI News You Need To Know From January W 2 – W 3
The announcement seemed too early for April Fools’, but a Yelp spokesperson confirmed with Synced that it was in fact a gag: “we typically use a joking tone when we write our release notes for the app store. Our latest note was meant in jest.”
The internet loves those little looping action images we call GIFs. They can tell a short visual story in a small file size that has high portability. The visual quality of GIFs is however usually low compared to the videos they were sourced from. If you are sick of fuzzy, low resolution GIFs, then researchers from Stony Brook University, UCLA, and Megvii Research have just the thing for you: “the first learning-based method for enhancing the visual quality of GIFs in the wild.”
Subscribe to Synced Global AI Weekly Microsoft Awarded Five-Year $1.76 Billion IDIQ Contract by DoD Microsoft was awarded a $1,760,000,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ)Continue Reading
From Beijing to Barcelona to Buenos Aires, startups like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Swiggy, Zomato and Go-Jek are revolutionizing urban food delivery. In the first quarter of 2018, food delivery accounted for 13 percent of Uber trips worldwide, and that figure is increasing.
To make ML-based solutions available for a wider variety of deployment scenarios, Waymo’s autonomous driving team has collaborated with Google AI Brain Team researchers on a system that automates the creation of high quality and low latency neural networks on existing AutoML architectures.
Every January, thousands of companies head to Las Vegas to launch new products at CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the world’sContinue Reading
A cooperative research group from Google, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins has proposed “Auto-DeepLab,” a new method which utilizes hierarchical Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for semantic image segmentation. The project team includes top AI researchers Director of the Stanford Vision Lab Fei-Fei Li; and UCLA Center for Cognition, Vision, and Learning Director Alan Yuille.
The proliferation of social media in our daily lives has profoundly changed the way we work and play with others. It has also created an entirely new job: thousands of people worldwide now work for Google, Facebook and Twitter “Community Operations Teams.” Whenever a user flags content as offensive, it’s sent to these guys for review.
At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2019) in Las Vegas, Synced visited pet tech booths to explore the current state and future directions of AI powered tech and smart offerings aimed at our furry companions. We found smart pet technologies can generally be divided into six categories: Tracking, Monitoring, Playing, Feeding, Toilets, and Bathing.
Subscribe to Synced Global AI Weekly – CES Day One: AI Is Everywhere – CES 2019: What we’ve seen, and are still seeing,Continue Reading
The amount of news information a person can routinely access these days would have been unimaginable a hundred years ago. But we still have just 24 hours in a day, and only a single pair of eyes to read, and so the question arises: how to get as much valuable news as possible in a limited time?
Each year global automakers, component manufacturers and tech companies flock to Las Vegas to promote their visions of future mobility at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Synced visited CES 2019 this week to check out new products and chart trends in the mobility market.
Researchers using enhanced super-resolution technology are giving classic video games of the past incredible, texture-rich visual makeovers. The team has released ‘remastered’ versions of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and most recently — a visually enhanced version of 2001 third-person shooter game Max Payne.