AI Technology & Industry Review
Global machine intelligence updates.
Founded by two Chinese AI experts in 2012, the company is particularly competent in recognizing human faces and vehicles. Such capability appeals to China’s public security departments.
Chinese State media People’s Daily recently reported the country is facing a shortage of five million AI talents.
A separate LinkedIn survey revealed that while there are some 1.9 million AI engineers worldwide, about one million reside in the US while China is home to just 50,000.
New Chinese regulations will permit self-driving vehicle testing on public roads across the country.
The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Public Security, and Ministry of Transport yesterday jointly issued the Intelligent Connected Vehicle Road Test Management Standards…
The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab yesterday proposed DeepMimic, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) technique that enables simulated characters to regenerate highly dynamic physical movements learned from data collected from human subjects.
China’s Ministry of Education last week issued its AI Innovation Action Plan for Colleges and Universities to the education departments at all levels and institutions of higher education.
At last month’s RE•WORK Deep Learning in Finance Summit in London, leading AI industry practitioners and academics from prestigious universities discussed their research, provided insights on business trends and real-life AI applications, and addressed current challenges facing the AI industry as a whole.
China’s traffic police are using AI to tackle “Chinese-style jaywalking” at major urban intersections. Facial recognition cameras take a 15-second video and four snapshots of pedestrians crossing on a red light.
China’s computer vision company SenseTime today announced it had raised a staggering US$600 million in Series C funding, setting a world record for an AI company and bringing its value to an estimated US$4.5 billion to make it the world’s most valued AI startup.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a computer simulation as “the use of a computer to represent the dynamic responses of one system by the behaviour of another system modeled after it.”
When the NBA’s Golden State Warriors decided to favour three-pointers over two-point shots in 2016, the winning strategy sent a shockwave through professional basketball. This was a “data-driven decision” based on higher score probability, explains Alex Martynov.
Huang and his NVIDIA team pioneered the graphics processing chip (GPU) in 1999, revolutionizing the visual performance of device displays. But even Huang never dreamt that his GPU would one day become a driving force in the arena of AI.
Lawyee is a Peking University spinoff founded in 2003 that was one of the first companies specializing in building searchable legal databases and digitizing IT systems for Chinese courts and law firms.
In Beijing today, China’s Ministry of Education, Sinovation AI Lab, and Peking University jointly announced the Global AI Talent Training Program for Chinese Universities.
Now social and behavioral scientists can use the TuringBox platform to study artificial intelligence algorithms. AI contributors can upload existing and novel algorithms for review, gaining a reputation in their community.
Facebook operates two flagship open source machine learning frameworks — Caffe2 and PyTorch. Their incompatibility, however, made it difficult to transform a PyTorch-defined model into Caffe2 or vice versa. Facebook is doing something about that.
Hikvision AI Cloud is a distributed structure incorporating cloud computing and edge computing. Launched last year, it can extend an AI algorithm from the cloud centre to an edge network of on-premises video recorders and servers, and further to edge devices, such as security cameras.
The Age of Discovery began in the 15th century, when Europeans built their first oceangoing vessels and set out to explore the world. Whether motivated by political, economic or cultural factors, human exploration has traditionally been driven by technological progress.
Chip giant NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang created a bit of a stir at yesterday’s GPU Technology Conference in Santa Clara, USA, when he appeared to dis one of these chips’ appropriateness for autonomous vehicle system development: “FPGA is not the right answer,” he said.
France is pledging €1.5 billion to hasten the development of its fledgling AI ecosystem. French President Emmanuel Macron made the commitment this morning at the Artificial Intelligence Summit held at the College de France Research Center.
In a world of increasingly connected humans, the new frontier is devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). Alibaba Cloud wants to secure its position in this rapidly growing market by connecting ten billion devices over the next five years.
At the GPU Technology Conference in Santa Clara, USA today, Huang unveiled the world’s largest GPU — a binary beast packed with 16 Tesla V100 with doubled memory 32 GB.
YOLO creators Joseph Redmon and Ali Farhadi from the University of Washington on March 25 released YOLOv3, an upgraded version of their fast object detection network, now available on Github.
Crown Prince and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Dubai Future Foundation Sheikh Hamdan officially opened the 4th edition of the Dubai Future Accelerator (DFA) on March 24th at Dubai’s Emirates Towers. The program aims to boost tech development across the United Arab Emirates.
Embedded AI can transform a tabletop speaker into a personal assistant; give a robot brains and dexterity; and turn a smartphone into a smart camera, music player, or game console. Traditional processors, however, lack the computational power to support many of these intelligent features.
As Facebook struggles with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its research arm today delivered a welcome bit of good news in deep learning. Research Engineer Dr. Yuxin Wu and Research Scientist Dr. Kaiming He proposed a new Group Normalization (GN) technique they say can accelerate deep neural network training with small batch sizes.
Mapbox, a San Francisco-based digital mapping startup, released its Mapbox AR at the Mobile World Conference 2018 in Barcelona. The AR platform comprises a suite of tools, a low-level AR core kit, and a framework.
It came as somewhat unexpected news when on March 22nd the Beijing Municipal Government gave tech unicorn Baidu the green light to test driverless cars on the city’s public roads.
Founded in 2014 by international business lawyer Noory Bechor and machine learning guru Ilan Admon, LawGeex is a Tel Aviv-based legal tech startup focused on contract review. It closed US$7 million in Series A funding last March, principally from Indeed.com owner Recruit Holdings, Lool Ventures, and LionBird.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced John L. Hennessy, former Stanford University President and Chairman of the Board of Alphabet; and David A. Patterson, retired Professor at University of California, Berkeley, as winners of the 2017 Turing Award for their groundbreaking approach to computer architecture design and evaluation.
Chinese tech giant Huawei unveiled its latest development board, HiKey 970, which is dedicated to AI-powered devices and applications.
An Uber self-driving SUV struck and killed a female pedestrian Sunday evening in Tempe, Arizona. The first known autonomous vehicle-related pedestrian death on a public road stunned the AI community and raised public concerns on autonomous driving safety.
Google has announced the release of MusicVAE, a machine learning model that makes composing musical scores as easy as mixing paint on a palette. A breakthrough from Google Brain’s Magenta Project, MusicVAE generates and morphs melodies to output multi-instrumental passages optimized for expression, realism and smoothness which sound convincingly like human-composed music.
Google is collaborating with the United States Department of Defense to create an AI system for identifying drone footage. The system will leverage machine learning and computer vision technologies to collect and categorize drone footage more efficiently.
By the end of 2017, there were more than 300 fintech startups across the continent. Disrupt Africa’s Finnovating for Africa: Exploring the African Fintech Startup Ecosystem Report 2017 concludes that African fintech startups’ growth since 2015 has been nothing short of tremendous.
Dr. Zheng joined JD Finance last month as Vice President and Chief Data Scientist, Urban Computing Business Unit President, and Urban Computing Lab Director. JD Finance is the fintech arm of JD.com, China’s largest e-commerce platform by revenue.
Synced surveyed the international regulations, and here are our picks of major regions and countries that are accommodating the testing and deployment of autonomous driving technologies on their public roads.
Microsoft researchers in the US and Asia sent a shockwave through the AI community today with their paper Achieving Human Parity on Automatic Chinese to English News Translation, which introduces a neural machine translation system they say equals the performance of human experts in Chinese-to-English translation.
According to a China Securities Journal report, the China International Capital Corporation (CICC) and China’s largest food processor, manufacturer and trader China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) are looking to invest US$2 billion (CNY 13 billion) in JD Finance, the fintech spinoff of online retailer JD.com.
I purchased a Tmall Genie X1 — Alibaba’s flagship smart speaker — at the discounted price of US$15 during China’s November 11 “Singles Day” shopping festival. I was given order number 560,000-ish, and received the product a month later. The speaker is regularly priced at US$79, about the same as its American counterpart Google Mini.
Apollo Scape was released under Baidu’s autonomous driving platform Apollo, which Baidu hopes will become “the Android of the auto industry.” Apollo gives developers access to a complete set of service solutions and open-source codes and…