AI Technology & Industry Review
Global machine intelligence updates.
The number of AI-related research papers has skyrocketed in recent years, outpacing papers from all other academic topics since 2000. This has, not unsurprisingly, resulted in a shortage of qualified peer reviewers in the machine learning community, particularly when it comes to conference paper submissions.
Text-based CAPTCHA remain one of the most visible and commonly used mechanisms for website security. As a sort of online gatekeeper that distinguishes between humans and bots, the little solvable image fields have critical commercial applications in blocking automatic spam and preventing e-transfer fraud; and can also stop bots from spreading fraudulent information, etc.
Japanese AI startup Preferred Networks (PFN) has developed a new processor dedicated to deep learning. The company unveiled the MN-Core chip, board, and server last week at SEMICON Japan 2018 in Tokyo.
The last year saw an explosion of artificial intelligence consumer products, from virtual assistants to image editors to AI mini-games. Synced has selected 10 AI apps that we believe brought a novel approach to tech or task in 2018.
Synced Global AI Weekly December 23rd
This summer Chinese beauty cam and photo editor specialist Meitu Inc. announced an FPGA-accelerated neural network computing project with young startup Snow Lake AI. The collaboration aims to boost computing speed on Meitu mobile phones by 30 times.
At the Huawei Intelligent Computing Conference yesterday in Beijing, the Chinese tech giant announced a new intelligent computing strategy for enterprises, launched the world’s first 7nm ARM-based data centre processor, and introduced a new-generation intelligent computing platform.
In an exclusive interview with Synced at NeurIPS, members of the University of Toronto and Vector Institute team led by Assistant Professor David Duvenaud discussed their winning submission Neural Ordinary Differential Equations — a math-based approach to designing deep learning models that is stimulating discussion across the machine learning community.
Apple is ramping up its ambitious AI strategy, announcing today that John Giannandrea — the former Google AI Chief that Apple poached this April — has joined the company’s executive team as Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
Tsinghua University and Beijing Innovation Center for Future Chips (BICFC) recently published their White Paper on AI Chip Technologies, “to inform readers about the competing technologies and the development trends of AI chips.”
First-timers to NeurIPS — the world’s most prestigious machine learning conference — can explore and enjoy a tech environment full of energy, innovations, and mind-blowing discussions among people studying and working in AI.
While previous pregnancy detection techniques relied heavily on human labour, Alibaba’s new “pregnancy diagnosis algorithms” can help. The AI system was developed by Alibaba Cloud engineers in a joint effort with pig farming scientists.
The last 12 months saw unprecedented international public discourse around all things AI. As part of our year-end wrap-up, this week Synced looks at what ten notable people had to say about artificial intelligence in 2018:
The team behind MLPerf has announced the machine learning benchmark’s first set of results. MLPerf is a broad machine learning benchmark designed to measure the best performance of each participant with its own resources on a specific task.
Synced Global AI Weekly December 16th
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a hot research area in artificial intelligence and computer science. The technology teaches machines to understand human language so they can more effectively communicate with us. NLP research is integrated with linguistics, context analysis and semantics.
The NVIDIA paper proposes an alternative generator architecture for GAN that draws insights from style transfer techniques. The system can learn and separate different aspects of an image unsupervised; and enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis.
Andrew Ng is touting his new, free, AI Transformation Playbook. The 12 page online document is a unique package of artificial intelligence tricks aimed at the increasing number of CEOs who want to transform their companies by introducing AI technologies. The AI mastermind and founder of Landing.ai released the playbook today.
Over the last several years the world has witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in artificial intelligence research, development and deployment. There are now AI startups galore, most traditional industries are testing AI transformations, and governments around the world are writing ambitious strategic plans for the tech.
Alibaba is using artificial intelligence to predict the upcoming flu season in Macau.
Synthesizing peptides — the chains of amino acids that conduct various functions within cells — has long been a research area of interest for scientists and engineers. There has however been little success thus far, as existing methods for synthesizing peptides have been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
According to Reuters, leading Chinese AI unicorn Megvii Technology (also known as Face++) has begun raising a new round of funding with a target of US$500 million. This would will bring the company’s value to an estimated US$3.5 billion.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.