Chip Guru Jim Keller Leaves Tesla for Intel
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…
Category: AI
Global machine intelligence updates.
Liulishuo’s AI App Is Teaching English to 70 Million People
Liulishuo is the AI English teacher on your phone. You don’t need to know how it works, yet it helps you learn English more efficiently than a human teacher,” says Yi Wang, Founder and CEO of Liulishuo — a Beijing-based “AI + language” company…
PyTorch Releases Major Update, Now Officially Supports Windows
PyTorch, an open source machine learning library for Python, today announced the release of “PyTorch 0.4.0 with Windows support”.
New Petuum & CMU Paper Identifies Statistical Correlation Among Deep Generative Models
On April 17th, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Petuum, a Pittsburgh-based CMU spinoff focused on artificial intelligence platforms jointly published On “Unifying Deep Generative Models”.
McKinsey Report: AI Promises Added Value of up to US$5.8 Trillion
The McKinsey Global Institute this month released the report “Notes From the AI Frontier Insights From Hundreds of Use Cases”. The 36-page discussion paper surveys cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, and discusses how they can be integrated or transformed into practical applications across 19 selected industries.
AI in the Media and Entertainment Industry
The Media and Entertainment industry is a cornerstone of contemporary human culture, delivering films, TV shows, advertisements and more in a multitude of languages across a wide variety of devices.
Tomaso Poggio on Deep Learning Representation, Optimization, and Generalization
While Poggio the teacher has taught some extraordinary leaders in AI, Poggio the scientist is renowned for his theory of deep learning, presented in papers with self-explanatory names: Theory of Deep Learning I, II and III.
Baidu to Test Self-driving Food Delivery with Meituan
Chinese media is reporting that Baidu will launch a series of self-driving delivery tests in cooperation with Meituan-Dianping, a group-buying service for local food and retail businesses. The first tests will take place in Xiongan, about 100 kilometres southwest of Beijing…
China’s “National AI Team” Gets Busy
A phrase that’s cropping up a lot in Chinese media these days is “National AI Team (人工智能国家队).” While this may suggest a squad of scientists heading off to some sort of AI Olympics, it rather refers to a new class of AI companies that are either backed by national institutes or closely integrated into government-funded programs.
Tencent’s Smart Speaker Tingting Brings WeChat to the Entire Family
Tencent today officially launched its first-ever smart speaker, Tencent Tingting (腾讯听听), which can send or receive voice messages via WeChat.
Alibaba Unveils Ali-NPU; Acquires Chipmaker C-Sky Microsystems(Updated)
Alibaba’s R&D arm DAMO Academy announced yesterday that it is developing a new neural network chip called Ali-NPU for AI inferencing in the field of image processing, machine learning, etc.
MIT’s Josh Tenenbaum on Intuitive Physics & Psychology in AI
When Bayesian Cognitive Scientist Josh Tenenbaum recently told a packed University of Toronto lecture hall that “intelligence is not just about pattern recognition,” the significance of the statement was not lost on the audience.
Alibaba Gears Up for Self-Driving Road Tests
China’s self-driving industry has just welcomed another major player: Alibaba Group is developing Level 4 autonomous driving technology and is ready to test its self-driving cars on public roads, Chinese media reported today.
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from Apr W 2 – Apr W 3
IBM announces a four-year program in collaboration with Calgary-based Natural Resources Solutions Center to help oil and gas companies with sustainability and efficiency.
ICLR 2018’s Best Papers: Variant Adam, Spherical CNNs, and Meta-Learning
Leading machine learning conference International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) has named its best research papers of the last year: On the convergence of Adam and Beyond, Spherical CNNs, and Continuous Adaptation via Meta-learning in Nonstationary and Competitive Environments.
How AI Can Speed Up Drug Discovery
The US FDA defines five steps for the development of a new drug: discovery and development, preclinical research, clinical research, FDA review, and FDA post-market safety monitoring.
China’s Yitu Battles for Position in Huge Facial Recognition Market
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.
China Prepares for AI Talent Shortage
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.
China OKs Self-driving Tests on Public Roads
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…
Berkeley Researchers Create Virtual Acrobat
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 Puts Education Focus on AI; Plans 50 AI Research Centres By 2020
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.
Onsite From RE•WORK Finance Summit in London — Deep Learning & Trading
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.
AI Photographs Chinese Jaywalkers; Shames Them on Public Screens
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 SenseTime Scores US$600 Million in Funding to Become the World’s Most Valued AI Startup
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.
Simulations Pave the Road for Self-Driving Technologies
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.”
AI-Powered Hockey Analytics: A Game Changer
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.
NVIDIA GTC 2018 Peeks Inside the GPU-Powered World
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 Has Digitized 40 Million Chinese Court Records
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.
Chinese Ministry of Education, Sinovation, and Peking U Join Hands to Train AI Talents
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.
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from Mar W 4 – Apr W 1
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.
Caffe2 Merges With PyTorch
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.
Chinese Video Surveillance Giant Hikvision to Opensource its AI Technology
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.
What to Expect About Space Exploration and Machine Learning After Elon Musk’s SpaceX Makes History
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.
NVIDIA CEO Says “FGPA is Not the Right Answer” for Accelerating AI
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 Pumps €1.5 Billion into AI in Bid to Catch Up
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.
Alibaba to Connect 10 Billion Devices in 5 Years
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.
NVIDIA Unveils AI Computing Beasts: World’s Largest GPU & Two Petaflop Supercomputer
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.
The YOLOv3 Object Detection Network Is Fast!
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 Sheikh Hamdan Launches New Round of AI Programmes in Dubai
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.
Tracking the Transforming AI Chip Market
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.