AI Technology & Industry Review
Global machine intelligence updates.
Chinese Internet mogul Jack Ma has a flair for naming new businesses: Alibaba originates from a character made famous in the One Thousand and One Nights collection of Arabian folk tales; while the company’s R&D arm Damo Academy derives from the name of a Chinese Buddhist monk instrumental in the creation of Shaolin Kung Fu.
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 in Shanghai today, Tencent Mobile Internet Group Vice President Hou Xiaonan announced the company’s new Open AI platform, “AI.QQ.COM.”
Grammarly announces a new tool that provides better grammar checking services for users. The tool is based on Grammarly’s AI system, which uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques. The service will be available on Chrome as an extension, and is expected to launch on Google Docs later this year.
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 kicked off yesterday in Shanghai, drawing top-tier AI scientists and entrepreneurs from China’s tech giants for discussions on AI’s latest technological frontiers and industrial applications. Synced is live at the West Bund Artistic Center in Shanghai to bring you highlights from selected Day 1 Keynotes.
California-based Voicera recently came out of beta and introduced their Enterprise Virtual Assistant (“Eva”), a note-taking AI bot that automatically detects and marks a conference call’s important moments and extracts highlights from the call.
As Chinese Internet giant Baidu has expanded from search to mobile apps, cloud services, and emerging business sectors like autonomous driving and voice assistants, it has correspondingly beefed up its research efforts, particularly in AI, to keep pace with growing security threats.
Apple has unveiled the latest iteration of its smartphone chip: the A12 Bionic SoC (system-on-a-chip). The company made the announcement yesterday at its annual product showcase event in Cupertino, California, hailing the A12 as the industry’s first ever 7nm chip (the smallest current transistor scale). It will be embedded in Apple’s new XR, XS, and XS Max iPhones.
Last week’s RE•WORK AI in Finance Summit featured 50 speakers and drew 250 technologists to the Westin New York at Times Square to explore the intersection between AI and Fintech.
The 15th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) kicked off in Munich, Germany on Saturday. In a keynote speech this morning the ECCV organizing committee announced the conference’s paper submission stats and best paper selections.
Google AI lead Jeff Dean recently posted a link to his 1990 senior thesis on Twitter, which set off a wave of nostalgia for the early days of machine learning in the AI community. Parallel Implementation of Neural Network Training: Two Back-Propagation Approaches may be almost 30 years old and only eight pages long, but the paper does a remarkable job of explaining the methods behind neural network training and the modern development of artificial intelligence.
Tencent AI Lab has announced that it will open source its multi-label image dataset ML-Images and deep residual network ResNet-101 by the end of September. ML-Images contains 18 million images and more than 11,000 common object categories; while ResNet-101 has reached the highest precision level in the industry.
Google Cloud announced today that Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Dean Dr. Andrew Moore will join Google Cloud to lead its AI efforts at the end of this year. The company also announced that its Chief AI Scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li will return to Stanford University this fall.
As artificial intelligence matures so does its potential in the creative industries — one of which happens to be music production. Although AI is not about to top the hit charts any time soon, algorithms are already creating, performing and even monetizing their own musical compositions. Synced took a look into current AI music techniques and projects from tech giants and startups alike.
Researchers from Stanford University and University of California Berkeley have introduced Gibson Environment, a real-world-based virtual environment for training and testing active perception agents.
Founder and CEO of Landing.AI Andrew Ng delivered a keynote speech on “The New Era of Artificial Intelligence Empowerment” today at the 2018 China Artificial Intelligence Summit (CAIS2018) in Nanjing. Ng said that during Landing.AI’s startup phase he often discussed how to implement AI driven solutions across a wide range of situations with CEOs from around the world. Those discussions informed today’s talk.
Beijing-based computer vision unicorn Megvii Technology runs the world’s largest face-recognition technology platform, Face++. The company provides innovative solutions for object detection and image recognition using AI-powered techniques.
A hearty round of applause arose from the crowd packing the Vancouver Rogers Centre on August 22 when a team of unassuming scientists wearing “OpenAI” T-shirts climbed up on stage.
Anglian Water plans to install an AI-based energy storage machine system in its water treatment facilities. The system will provide a real-time energy consumption balancing service and increase the lifespan of storage machines. The AI system was designed by Open Energi and is expected to be full operational by next year.
Registration opened at 8:00 a.m. PDT today for December’s NIPS 2018 (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) in Montreal. The early birds were the fortunate ones this year — as tickets for the main conference were all snapped up less than a dozen minutes later.
Compositing multiple objects from different sources into one image is a formidable computer graphics challenge involving relative scaling, spatial layout, occlusion, and viewpoint transformation of objects from the 3D world to a 2D image.
At the IFA 2018 in Berlin today Huawei unveiled the new Kirin 980, the world’s first 7nm smartphone SoC (system-on-a-chip) with a dual-core NPU (Neural Network Processing Unit).
The “cocktail party effect” describes humans’ ability to hold a conversation in a noisy environment by listening to what their conversation partner is saying while filtering out other chatter, music, ambient noises, etc.
Leading Chinese AI startup 4Paradigm has announced a strategic partnership with Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital on AI application in healthcare, especially chronic health conditions.
At the Google For India 2018 conference in New Delhi yesterday Google launched its AI platform Navlekha, which enables publishers to make offline Indian language content fully editable and streamlines the online publishing process.
Google Brain Research Scientist Ian Goodfellow has tweeted an alarm about IoT hacking of a particularly nightmarish type, after Brown University security researchers were able to remotely access and control a robot in a university research lab. The research also showed that many robotic labs worldwide may be vulnerable to such a takeover technique.
Electrifying an entire dance club is easy if you have killer moves like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. But for the rest of us, not so much. We may shake our butts and swing our arms, but let’s face it: some people just can’t dance. But now there’s hope, thanks to AI.
Inspired by STEM-focused YouTuber carykh, Indian developer Jaison Saji has produced a deep network system, DanceNet, that can automatically generate dance moves. Synced used DanceNet to produce a short clip (below) with code published on Github.
CGI is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary culture. Filming for example a battle scene between warriors and mystic creatures in Wakanda involves much more than just dressing and directing actors.
Synced has discovered that Alphabet self-driving subsidiary Waymo has set up an office in China.
On August 23, Synced found an entry in the National Enterprise Information Publicity System indicating that the limited liability company (solely foreign invested – 外国法人独资) Huimo Business Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. had been incorporated in Shanghai.
Last August at the Dota 2 International tournament in Seattle, OpenAI introduced an AI bot that upset the world’s top 1v1 human player. The San Francisco-based AI research institute is now at the International 2018 in Vancouver, where their team of state-of-the-art bots is battling professional human teams in a highly anticipated best-of-three 5v5 Dota 2 showdown.
At a press conference in Beijing today US chipmaker Intel and Chinese tech pioneer ByteDance announced they will collaborate on setting up an AI research lab, talent training, and development of AI applications.
The 24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) opened on August 19 at the Excel Center in London, UK. Best Paper Awards go to a Technical University of Munich team for “Adversarial Attacks on Classification Models for Graphs (Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks for Graph Data)” in the Research Track; and “Real-time Personalization using Embeddings for Search Ranking at Airbnb”, by a team from Airbnb, in the ADS Track.
Nvidia and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have open-sourced their video-to-video synthesis model. By using a generative adversarial learning framework, the method can generate high-resolution, photorealistic and temporally coherent results with various input formats, including segmentation masks, sketches, and poses.
Blockchain hardware, software, and services company Bitmain confirms it will build a data center in Rockdale, Texas and invest US$500 million in the United States over the next seven years. Bitmain will launch a local training program and hire more than 400 employees.
Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang today unveiled the company’s long-waited next-generation graphic processing unit (GPU) cards for games, Geforce RTX.
Computers are now excellent at recognizing images of human faces, cats and dogs — but struggle when it comes to detecting continuous actions, for example determining if a character in a video might be “dancing the tango.” Computers also fall short in detecting nuanced expressions of human emotions.
New York-based investment corporate D. E. Shaw Group yesterday announced that esteemed University of Washington Professor of Computer Science Pedro Domingos will join the firm as a Managing Director and lead its new Machine Learning Research Group.
A Google Brain research group has published a paper proposing a new method for evaluating generative models by using insights from competitive games between human players.
On August 8th Chinese Q&A website Zhihu — named after the Mandarin phrase “Do You Know?” — announced it had raised US$270 million in its Series E funding round. With 180 million registered users and 110 million answered posts, China’s biggest Q&A website and fourth-largest social media platform’s total valuation now stands at US$2.5 billion.
Google Brain Software Engineer Martin Wicke says a preview version of TensorFlow 2.0 will be released later this year. To cope with dramatic changes in both users and use-cases, TensorFlow 2.0 will shift its focus to “ease of use.” Wicke made the announcements yesterday in a Google Groups post.