According to Reuters, leading Chinese AI unicorn Megvii Technology (also known as Face++) has begun raising a new round ofContinue Reading
Category: AI
Global machine intelligence updates.
AI Biweekly: Smarter Responses from Amazon and Google; Innovations in Robotics
In the past two weeks, news related to the field of human-computer interaction and voice interaction has been focused on technology giants Amazon and Google. Amazon upgraded its Fire TV Cube and the Amazon Music system, which enhances the diversity of voice interactions.
2018 in Review: 10 AI Failures
Last December Synced compiled its first “Artificial Intelligence Failures” recap of AI gaffes from the previous year. AI has achieved remarkable progress, and many scientists dream of creating the Master Algorithm proposed by Pedro Domingos — which can solve all problems envisioned by humans.
Tencent’s New Medical AI Lab Targets Parkinson’s
Chinese tech giant Tencent’s first attempt in AI healthcare was the Miying platform, which has been a point of pride for CEO Huateng Ma since its 2017 launch. Supported by AI-powered medical imaging technologies, Miying assists doctors with the screening of esophageal cancer, pulmonary nodules, cervical cancer, etc. The platform has been well received in the AI and medical communities, with a fast-expanding market in Chinese top-tier AAA hospitals.
Meet Deep Graph Library, a Python Package For Graph Neural Networks
The MXNet team and the Amazon Web Services AI lab recently teamed up with New York University / NYU Shanghai to announce Deep Graph Library (DGL), a Python package that provides easy implementations of GNNs research. Some fast takeaways on DGL:
Fei-Fei Li Among Six Chinese Scholars Named ACM 2018 Fellows
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced its 2018 Fellows. A total of 56 scholars with outstanding contributions in computer-related fields were honoured; and six Chinese scholars — Fei-Fei Li, Huan Liu, Jiebo Luo, Lili Qiu, Tian He, and Lillian Lee — are among them.
Chinese Publisher Introduces AI Textbooks For Preschoolers
Photos of an artificial intelligence textbook for Chinese preschoolers have gone viral. Artificial Intelligence Experiment Materials is a 33-volume textbook series aimed at Chinese students from kindergarten to high school that was published this July by Henan People’s Publishing House.
Vancouver Named NeurIPS 2019 & 2020 Host as Visa Issues Continue to Plague the AI Conference
The 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is in full swing in Montréal. According to a booklet distributed to attendees, both NeurIPS 2019 and 2020 will take place in Vancouver, making Canada the host country three years in a row. NIPS/NeurIPS has already been held in Montreal and Vancouver a combined 13 times since the world’s leading AI conference left its Denver base in 2001.
Insilico Medicine Announces MOSES Benchmark Platform for Molecular Generation
Insilico Medicine, a drug discovery startup located in Johns Hopkins University, has introduced MOSES (Molecular Sets), a platform which can be used to compare model accuracy in molecular generation. MOSES provides a standardized benchmarking dataset, a set of open-sourced models with unified implementation, and evaluation metrics.
AI Brush: New GAN Tool Paints Worlds
The digital painting tool GANpaint has gone viral on social media. The product of a team of high-profile researchers from MIT, IBM, Google, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, GAPpaint allows anyone — even those with little knowledge of digital painting or photoshop — to “paint” incredibly complex and detailed photorealistic scenes.
NeurIPS 2018 Opens; Best Papers Announced
The 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) kicked off today in Montréal. In their opening remarks this afternoon the NeurIPS organizing committee announced the conference’s major best paper selections and other awards. Four submissions shared top honors in the best paper category.
DeepMind AlphaFold Delivers “Unprecedented Progress” on Protein Folding
In 2016 Google’s DeepMind stunned the world when their Go computer AlphaGo secured a historic victory over Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol. Yesterday the UK’s top AI team delivered their latest “wow moment” as their AI system AlphaFold topped the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition.
Google AI Music Project Magenta Drops Beats Like Humans
Magenta Studio is a Google Brain project “exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process.” The Google Brain team created the open-source music-making package using machine learning models.
Alibaba DIEN AI Boosts E-Commerce Ad Effectiveness
The winter holiday shopping season has begun, and just as department stores are dressing up their window displays, so are e-commerce companies working on the product recommendation systems they use to identify and target online shoppers’ wants and needs.
Alibaba Open-Sources Its X-Deep Learning Framework
Alibaba has announced it will open-source X-Deep Learning (XDL), the algorithm framework behind its marketing technology and big data platform Alimama. The source code and support documents’ release is slated for December.
AWS Announces AI Chips & 13 New ML Features; Consolidating Its Cloud Dominance
Amazon Web Services has unveiled two chips and 13 machine learning capabilities and services at its AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. The releases reflect Amazon’s determination to attract more developers to AWS by broadening its range of tools and services.
The DeepMap Approach: “Your Data, Your HD Map”
In a near future, when self-driving cars have replaced human drivers, it’s believed that high-definition (HD) maps can play a similarly useful role, as “the memory of robot drivers”.
Uber AI Beats Montezuma’s Revenge (Video Game)
Another video game has succumbed to the strength of artificial intelligence. Uber researchers announced yesterday that their AI has completely solved Atari’s Montezuma’s Revenge, a classic game that involves moving a character from one room to another while killing enemies and collecting jewels in a 16th century Aztec-like pyramid.
FAIR & NYU School of Medicine Share fastMRI Tools; Release Largest-Ever MRI Dataset
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine’s Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI2R) announced today they are sharing a standardized set of AI tools and baselines and MRI data as part of their joint research project fastMRI.
AI Biweekly: Google Pushes Its Enterprise Services; AI Takes a Creative Role in Media Production
The big news from Google in the last two weeks includes the CEO change in Google Cloud’s business and new efforts in the Google Health department. After three years as the CEO of Google Cloud, Diane Greene announced that she will step down.
FAIR Paper Questions Pre-Training’s Efficacy in CV
ImageNet Pre-training is common in a variety of CV (Computer Vision) tasks, as something of a consensus has emerged that pre-training can help a model learn transferrable information that can be useful for target tasks.
Global Companies Are Making AI Breakthroughs
Synced Global AI Weekly November 25th
AI-Powered Dynamic Pricing Is Everywhere
Demand-based price fluctuations are nothing new: even a century ago cinemas charged less for matinee screenings than for more popular evening shows, and room rates at a beach resort naturally varied by season.
Can 34-Year-Old Chipmaker Xilinx Challenge the Big Players in AI?
American chip company Xilinx is an industry pioneer, with 34 years of experience and counting. And yet the company remains a niche supplier lacking the star power of chip giants like Intel, whose processors are found in most PCs; or Nvidia, whose GPU are the choice for most AI applications.
Mitsui and Preferred Networks Partner on Biomedical/Healthcare Solutions
Japanese global trading giant Mitsui & Co. and leading deep learning startup Preferred Networks (PFN) have announced a joint venture in the US to provide Biomedical/Healthcare Solutions, including Cancer Diagnostic Services, based on deep learning technology.
OpenCV 4.0 Release Ends 3.5 Year Wait
Intel’s open-source programming function computer vision library OpenCV has released the first stable version in its 4.0 line. The community has waited for more than 3.5 years for the update.
Google Brain & Geoffrey Hinton Technique Thwarts Adversarial Attacks
DARCCC (Detecting Adversaries by Reconstruction from Class Conditional Capsules) is a technique which uses a similarity metric to compare reconstructed images with an original input image to identify whether it was an adversarial image, and further detects whether the system was attacked.
Shanghai Tests Graph Recurrent Neural Networks for Traffic Prediction
A new study from Shanghai’s Transportation Information Center (STIC) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University uses Graph Recurrent Neural Networks (GRNN) for high-accuracy traffic prediction and city traffic control.
Name Flip-Flop: NIPS Is Now “NeurIPS”
Just two weeks before its 32nd annual meeting and one month after it said it wouldn’t, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has changed in its official acronym — from “NIPS” to “NeurIPS.”
Sony Breaks ResNet-50 Training Record on ImageNet
Researchers from Japanese electronics giant Sony have trained the ResNet-50 neural network model on ImageNet in a record-breaking 224 seconds — 43.4 percent better than the previous fastest time for the benchmark task.
Big News of AI Industry Leaders This Week
Synced Global AI Weekly Nov 18th
Talk Review: Deep Learning: Practice and Trends, NIPS 2017 – Part I
Deep Learning has become an essential toolbox which is used in a wide variety of applications, research labs, industries, etc. In this tutorial given at NIPS 2017, the speakers provide a set of guidelines which will help newcomers to the field understand the most recent and advanced models and their application to diverse data modalities.
Finish Him! Kicking Mortal Kombat’s Kano With AI
A Google engineer has used AI to enable humans to throw virtual punches and kicks at the tough guys in popular fighting video game Mortal Kombat3. Instead of jabbing at a controller, the user fights via a web camera, with the AI rendering their air strikes to an onscreen clone in real time. You punch and kick, and Kano goes down.
Head of R&D Jia Li Leaves Google Cloud AI
Head of R&D of Google Cloud AI Jia Li has left her position with the company. Li informed Synced in a text message yesterday and the Google team confirmed her departure this morning.
Global Minima Solution for Neural Networks?
New research from Carnegie Mellon University, Peking University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that global minima of deep neural networks can been achieved via gradient descent under certain conditions. The paper Gradient Descent Finds Global Minima of Deep Neural Networks was published November 12 on arXiv.
Andrew Ng Offers “AI For Everyone”
One of the top minds in machine learning, Andrew Ng is having an increasingly profound impact on AI education. Ng’s machine learning course at Stanford University remains the most popular on Coursera, the world-leading online education platform he co-founded in 2012.
OpenAI Founder: Short-Term AGI Is a Serious Possibility
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the long-range, human-intelligence-level target of contemporary AI researchers worldwide. It’s believed AGI has the potential to meet basic human needs globally, end poverty, cure diseases, extend life, and even mitigate climate change. In short, AGI is the tech that could not only save the world, but build a utopia.
Peking University to Open New Campus With AI Focus
China’s respected Peking University will open a new campus with a focus on artificial intelligence and engineering, Xinhuanet has reported. The new campus is set to occupy an area of nearly 4.15 million square metres (approximately 128 football fields) and will be located in Changping, a district situated in the suburbs of northwest Beijing.
A First: 3D-Chip-Based Analog Photonic Quantum Computer Demonstrates Quantum Fast Hitting
Analog quantum computing has been an appealing tool with potential real-life applications on various optimization and simulation tasks, and much less stringent requirements on error corrections compared to universal quantum computing.
AI Biweekly: Fujitsu AI to Vancouver; Gartner Says AI Powering IoT Automation and Deployment
10 Things You Must Know from November W 1 – W 2