AI Technology & Industry Review
Global machine intelligence updates.
In his keynote at the Tencent Cloud Service Summit 2018 in Guangzhou today, Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma introduced his company’s new Super Brain platform and a Three Nets cloud concept comprising the “Internet of Things,” “Internet of Humans” and “Internet of Intelligence.”
Intel today opened its first-ever AI Developer Conference, AIDevCon, a two-day gathering at San Francisco’s prestigious Palace of Fine Arts. While day one was short on hot announcements, the company did detail some aggressive plans for AI.
According to an AWS blog post, Apache MXNet now supports Keras 2 and the Keras-MXNet deep learning backend is now available to developers.
NIPS’ peer reviewer selection process came under question in the AI community last week, when a Reddit user who identified as a predoctoral student posted that they had been selected as a NIPS reviewer, and needed advice on how to properly write paper reviews…
AI startup Orbbec (奥比中光) today closed an over US$200 million Series D funding round led by Ant Finance. Other investors include Saif Partners, Green Pine Capital, Telstra Ventures, and Renzhi Capital.
From 2015 – 2017 over 450 Chinese AI startups received funding totaling CN¥30 billion (US$4.8 billion). Although the number of funding rounds declined in 2017, the year’s total funding was more than double the total for 2015 and 2016 combined.
Baidu announced this morning that COO Qi Lu will leave his position in July due to “personal and family reasons.” Baidu also promoted Dr. Haifeng Wang to Senior Vice President and General Manager of Baidu AI Group.
Compute Scoreboard:
AlexNet 1
AlphaZero 300,000
The Saudi government says it will pour US$500 billion into this mega-project, with construction expected to begin in 2020. NEOM will occupy 26,500 sq km (10,230 sq miles), 218 times larger than the city of San Francisco.
Eager to kickstart its AI industry, the nation of 52 million yesterday released an ambitious national plan to invest ₩2.2 trillion (US$2 billion) by 2020 to strengthen its AI R&D capability.
Shenzhen City-based self-driving startup Roadstar.ai today announced US$128 million in Series A Funding, setting a single round private financing record for China’s autonomous driving industry.
A Shanghai Jiao Tong University research team has developed the world’s largest-scaled 3D photonic quantum chip that can demonstrate a 2D quantum walk.
Singapore’s NGEE Ann Polytechnic (NP) and London’s Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) launch an AI in Finance course. The course will provide an overview of AI knowledge in the fintech and digital finance fields.
Founded in 2009, SlamTech is a Shanghai-based laser sensor manufacturer whose main products include the low-cost 360-degree laser scanning ranging radar RPLiDAR, the laser-based modular autonomous positioning navigation solution SLAMWARE, and the ZEUS robot service platform for business.
Alphabet Chairman and Former Stanford University President John Hennessy said yesterday that the AI voice technology system Google Duplex passes the Turing test in limited conditions.
While a Computer Science PhD candidate at the University of Washington, Hao focused on intelligent human-computer interaction research, and R&D and evaluation of intelligent systems and their tools.
Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup Unisound, (a.k.a. Yunzhisheng / 云知声) today announced that it had raised US$100 million in Series C funding, the richest-ever single funding round for a smart voice technology startup.
Researchers from the British AI company yesterday published a paper on Nature — Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in artificial agents — which proposes an artificial virtual agent that can navigate like mammals.
The 2018 Toronto – Tsinghua AI Squared Forum attracted researchers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students to Canada’s largest city to “discuss opportunities for research collaboration and partnerships in areas of artificial intelligence.”
Google Cloud Chief Scientist Fei-Fei Li is one of the most popular and influential AI figures today. The woman behind the large-scale image dataset Image.Net is a visionary and an authority on AI’s development.
Yaoyun Shi’s Team at the Aliyun Quantum Laboratory (AQL) today announced that they have developed the world’s most powerful quantum circuit simulator: “Tai Zhang.”
Days after Facebook F8 wrapped up in San Jose, the Microsoft Developer Conference Build 2018 opened in Seattle. The conference runs May 7-9 at the Washington Convention Center, and is an opportunity for Microsoft to court developers…
Google I/O 2018 kicked off today with an uptempo keynote from CEO Sundar Pichai. The tech giant’s annual developer conference is always a platform for big announcements, and this was no exception, with Google gearing up for what promises to be an especially busy year.
Starting in July, a Drive.ai fleet of vehicles will operate with fixed pick-up and drop-off locations in a geofenced area of the city comprising retail, entertainment, and office space.
Emailing back and forth to book meetings can be a huge waste of time, especially when people are in different time zones, don’t know each other’s availability, or schedules change, etc.
Leading television manufacturer Skyworth has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Chinese internet giant Baidu. In the deal announced March 17, Baidu will invest CN¥1.01 billion (US$159.7 million) in Skyworth’s Smart TV unit Coocaa; while its AI assistant system DuerOS will be integrated into Skyworth’s agenda-setting Super AI TV.
Cambricon today unveiled its Cambricon 1M chip for edge computing, and the MLU100, the first in a new chip series for cloud computing.
Chinese AI and humanoid robotic company UBTECH Robotics today announced a staggering US$820 million in Series C funding. With its new estimated value of US$5 billion, Shenzhen City-based UBTECH becomes the world’s most valuable AI startup.
Thousands in the machine learning community say they will boycott Nature’s paywalled Machine Intelligence Journal, which is set for a January 2019 release.
Facebook generally uses its F8 Developer Conference to introduce new website features. This year however there was a distinct emphasis on “AI,” with the term mentioned more than ever in the event’s keynote speech.
In December 2017 Chinese pharma tech startup AccutarBio raised US$15 million from IDG Capital, YITU Tech, and ZhenFund.
On April 29th, the Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) of China’s State Council announced that China Railway Signal & Communication Corp (CRSC) had completed lab testing of their high-speed rail self-driving system (C3 + ATO)…
AI researchers are gathering in Vancouver, Canada for the sixth annual ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations). The event starts today and runs to May 3rd at the Vancouver Convention Centre.
Google introduces starter kits designed to help people learn and experiment with AI solutions.
The robotics community is abuzz with speculation following reports that Amazon’s R&D arm Lab126 is hiring senior researchers for a home robot-producing project codenamed “Vesta.”
If you are familiar with the biotech industry, you know Cambridge. The small city at the center of the Great Boston Area hosts over 1,000 biotechnology-related companies. Most of these companies cluster around Kendall Square, the same block as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Farming is becoming a data-centric business powered by artificial intelligence. China’s big tech firms are using neural network-backed computer vision, wearable devices, and predictive analytics algorithms to reimagine pig, chicken, cow, goose, and cockroach farming.
Google is looking to expand its AI research activities in the Japanese capital. The company’s deep learning and AI research team Google Brain yesterday posted a “Tokyo job listing seeking talented experts to participate in cutting edge research on machine learning”.
In response to a growing shortage of AI talents, Zhang announced that Baidu will train over 100,000 AI talents with expertise in engineering and product development over the next three years.
The Head of Tesla’s Autopilot Hardware Team Jim Keller, best known for his CPU design at AMD and Apple, was supposed to help the company make that happen. Today, however, Tesla announced Keller had left…