AI Technology & Industry Review
Global machine intelligence updates.
The country is aiming to build the world’s top hub for AI innovations and talents, and yesterday, prestigious Tsinghua University issued a progress report. The 2018 China Artificial Intelligence Development Report provides an insightful, data-intensive overview of the current status of AI in China.
From Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, Japanese anime has made it okay for adults everywhere to enjoy cartoons again. Now, a team of Tsinghua University and Cardiff University researchers have introduced CartoonGAN — an AI-powered technology that simulates the styles of Japanese anime maestri from snapshots of real world scenery.
Innoviz is a two-year-old Israeli provider of LiDAR remote sensing solutions. The company took a leap forward in the solid state LiDAR field recently by scoring a couple of important partnerships: BMW chose solid-state Innoviz LiDAR sensors and computer vision tech to enable its Level 3-5 autonomous vehicles in April…
Getting lost can be a hassle when in unfamiliar places, and a common solution is to ask a local for directions. Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) wants to transform their AI learning algorithm into that savvy local guide.
Chinese autonomous driving solution provider Pony.ai has reported an additional US$102 million in Series A1 funding — just six months after scoring US$112 million — to bring its Series A total to US$214 million.
The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval is now in full swing at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, US — although some leading researchers won’t be attending. Yesterday the respected conference presented its Best Paper Awards.
When robots need a brain, their creators turn to Silicon Valley. Most of the AI tech that drives advanced robotics originates in Bay Area labs. At last month’s ReWork Deep Learning for Robotics Summit in San Francisco, researchers from Silicon Valley AI labs and institutes discussed their latest work and how it is being used to teach robots. Synced was onsite to bring you an inside look at their work.
The Government of India announced today that it has signed five memorandums of understanding (MoU) with South Korea to strengthen bilateral ties in the development of innovative technologies. The agreements were concluded at the Fourth India-Korea Science & Technology Ministers Steering Committee Meeting this week in New Delhi.
The Alan Turing Institute in the UK and France’s DATAIA Institute have concluded an arrangement to collaborate in the arena of artificial intelligence and data science, part of a five-year commitment between the two countries to improve digital services.
Tact.ai raises US$27 million in its series C round from Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce. The conversational AI company plans to use the funds to develop a cutting-edge AI-powered CRM voice interaction system to change the way salespeople interact with information.
In the drive to unleash the full potential of artificial intelligence, data transmission has thus far been mostly overlooked. It was not viewed as a serious issue until the recent rise of AI ratcheted up demand for data processing.
A performance boost of less than one percent may not seem like much to most people, but for Microsoft Global Technical Fellow and Chief Speech Scientist Xuedong Huang, it’s cause for celebration.
At the recent IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Brisbane, Australia, the Best Student Paper award went to ETH Zurich Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL)’s Miguel de la Iglesia Valls et al. for Design of an Autonomous Racecar: Perception, State Estimation and System Integration.
A new research paper demonstrating the first Automatic Grammatical Error Correction system to reach human-level performance has been published on arXiv by Tao Ge, Furu Wei and Ming Zhou from the Natural Language Computing Group, Microsoft Research Asia.
At the Baidu Create 2018 AI developer conference which kicked off today in Beijing, the company announced a series of AI-based innovations and product releases that seem designed to regain public trust.
At the recent youth and technology themed 2050 Conference in Hangzhou, Seemmo CTO Jianhui Wang delivered a talk called The Survival Guide for AI Companies.
China now has some 4,040 AI companies, according to a whitepaper released by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology at this weekend’s 22nd China International Software EXPO in Beijing.
A team of Chinese quantum physicists has demonstrated the world’s first 18-qubit entanglement. This is the largest entangled state ever in all physical systems, and represents a big step towards large-scale highly efficient quantum computing.
The opportunities for studying AI at Chinese higher learning institutes have never been better or more varied. More than 70 Chinese universities and colleges have introduced AI-related majors, and 283 universities are licensed to offer data science programs.
The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2018 will be held July 10 – 15 in Stockholm, Sweden. Yesterday, from more than 600 accepted papers, the prestigious conference announced its Best Paper Awards.
OneClick.ai, a startup founded by two former Microsoft engineers in Seattle, is on a mission to make AI more accessible to businesses. “We design, build and deploy custom AI models as a scalable API that can be accessed from anywhere. Just prepare your data, and we’ll take care of the rest,” says co-founder and CTO Ning Jiang.
A business data search firm is bombarding China’s subways and business centres with ads. TianYanCha — literally SkyEye Search — has become the “go to” source for governments, consulting agencies, legal service providers, and media outlets who want to perform comprehensive business background checks.
China’s prestigious Tsinghua University is opening a dedicated AI research centre. The Tsinghua University Institute for Artificial Intelligence will be led by Dean Bo Zhang (张钹) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua Director of Academic Committee Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (姚期智), a Turing Award Laureate. The announcement was made at today’s Tsinghua-Google AI Symposium in Beijing.
IBM today announced it will release the world’s largest facial attribute dataset in order to fight bias in artificial intelligence systems used to recognize human faces. The dataset was built by IBM research scientists and contains one million images, five times the image count of the current largest facial attribute dataset. It will be publically available this fall.
The Tencent Academic and Industrial Conference (TAIC) will be held in Stockholm, Sweden on July 14th, gathering top AI researchers and young professionals from around the world. Synced is organizing the conference, where Tencent’s seven core business groups and invited academics and industry professionals will share insights on the current state of AI technologies.
Suzhou City-based AI and speech technology company AISpeech announced today it had raised CN¥500 million (US$76 million) in Series D Funding led by Oriza Holdings and China Minsheng Investment Group. Chinese media reports the company is also planning an IPO on a local stock exchange.
Salesforce announces a deeper data sharing partnership with Google. Consumer insights from Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 will be merged into one dashboard for either platform. Marketing Cloud data can be used to create a more customized web experience.
Chinese search engine company Sogou announced today that COO Liyun Ru will leave his position on June 30th for personal reasons. Dr. Jingfang Xu will now lead the company’s Search Division and oversee AI smart search development.
Cainiao, the logistics arm of leading Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba Group, hosted the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit (GSLS) in Hangzhou on May 31st. Speaking at the event, Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma called for tens of billions of US dollars in investment to build a national internet-based intelligent logistics backbone in China.
In a new video posted by IEEE Spectrum, a 7.38-kilogram red robot composed of 12 interlinking modules swiggles through a 60 cm gap before rising and floating in mid-air like the mythical Dragon it is named after.
Founded in 2014, ROOBO received US$100 million in Series A financing from iFlytek, and in September 2017 announced B Round financing of US$53 million led by Seven Seas Capital.
The NVIDIA DeepStream Software Development Kit (SDK) was originally released in 2017 to simplify the deployment of scalable intelligent video analytics (IVA) powered by deep learning. Developers can use DeepStream to process, understand and categorize video frames in real time and within stringent throughput and latency requirements.
The 2018 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) opened today in Salt Lake City, USA. The CVPR organizing committee used the occasion to announce its coveted Best Paper and Best Student Paper selections.
Cambricon Technologies announced today that it has secured hundreds of million dollars in its Series B funding round, with investments from China’s State-owned Capital Venture, SDIC Venture Capital, China Capital Investment Group, TCL Capital, CITIC Securities, Alibaba VC, Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group and others.
The Baidu Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Lab has released a paper which proposes a neural conditional random field (NCRF) process for cancer metastasis detection on Whole Slide Images (WSIs).
Once upon a time, a cephalopod in Oberhausen, Germany named Paul the Octopus captured human hearts by picking football match winners at the Euro 2008 and 2010 FIFA World Cup with a success rate of 85.7 percent.
We tend to notice the AI that’s in our smartphones, powering our home assistants or piloting self-driving cars. But there is another tech revolution going on — out of sight for most of us — wherein AI and robotics are reinventing entire factories and industrial processes.
The paper Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks, published last week on arXiv by researchers from DeepMind, Google Brain, MIT and University of Edinburgh, has stimulated discussion in the artificial intelligence community.
The university launched the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute this April, pooling 8 affiliated research centers, 23 labs, and some 100 faculty members into a new Canadian AI supercluster with a focus on operational AI research.
Earlier this week the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2018 announced its Best Two Short Papers, neither of which had yet been published. Today the AI community got its first look at one of the winners when Know What You Don’t Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD was released on arXiv.