AI Technology & Industry Review
Global machine intelligence updates.
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…
To apply AI technology to the oil and gas industry, oil companies and startups generally first establish either a research group or a research center for the purpose. AI for oil and gas is a huge potential market, expected to reach US$2.85 billion by 2022.
Compared to other tech giants, Samsung is a relative late-bloomer in AI. But recent moves in acquisitions and R&D signal the company is jumping onto the intelligence wave, and doing so with a strong focus on virtual voice assistants.
Paige.AI is a New York-based startup that fights cancer with AI. Launched last month as a spinoff from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) — the largest cancer research institute in the US — Paige.AI has exclusive access to MSK’s IP in the field of computational pathology as well as its dataset of 25 million pathology cancer images (“slides”).
Today Baidu announced Institute of Quantum Computing, which will conduct applied research and development on software and information technologies
S&P Global has signed an agreement to acquire Kensho, a Cambridge, MA-based AI company that uses data analytics and machine learning algorithms to find correlations and arbitrage opportunities in large-scale financial datasets.
Chinese Premier Keqiang Li delivered this year’s official government work report, identifying “reinforcing the new generation of artificial intelligence research and development” among the state’s innovation focuses for 2018.
Baidu announced today that self-driving startup JingChi has joined its open-source autonomous driving platform Apollo as a cooperative partner. JingChi’s new CEO Tony Han said in a statement, “JingChi is pleased to join Apollo, and is willing to grow fast with Apollo’s help.”
Capillary Technologies is a cloud-based SaaS company serving over 300 large enterprises and 500 small or medium businesses in over 30 countries. It improves retailers’ engagement with customers through analytics.
Cyber Threats have become a critical issue in today’s world. Worldwide spending on information security climbed to over US$90 billion in 2017, a roughly 15% increase compared to 2016. Research and development of cyber threat detection and response capabilities will continue to grow this year.
Chinese media is reporting that several domestic brokers and investment banks were recently informed by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) that it will relax regulations on prospectus approval time and profitability minimums for Chinese unicorns in the domains of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, biotech, and high-end manufacturing.
Trashbot uses cameras and sensors to scan discarded items. A machine learning algorithm based on Bayesian classifier sorts the trash for either landfill or recycle. If you dump an unfinished can of Coke, excess liquid will be drained off on a Teflon-coated sheet.
DataVisor is a Mountain View, California based anti-fraud startup that uses AI to detect fake accounts, prevent money laundering, and protect financial institutions from credit scams. The company offers clients its DataVisor APIs for real-time data connection, and a specialized UI for direct results.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Chinese AI Unicorn SenseTime today announced the MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence, a partnership the duo says “aims to open up new avenues of discovery across MIT in areas such as computer vision, human-intelligence-inspired algorithms, medical imaging, and robotics.”
The Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics’ closing ceremony on Sunday was capped by a spectacular eight-minute presentation from 2022 host Beijing that featured state-of-the-art robotics and AI technology.
Jin Wang, CEO of China’s self-driving startup JingChi, has stepped down just 11 months after founding the company.
JingChi said in a statement that “Jin Wang left the company due to family issues. Despite that, the company remains unchanged.”
A Chatbot is information service interface done by a computer program, sometimes with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Chatbot applications range from functional to fun, and have been growing quickly both in sophistication and popularity.
Alibaba took a big step towards quantum computing yesterday when its cloud service subsidiary Aliyun (“Alibaba Cloud”) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly launched an 11-qubit quantum computing service.
Over US$12.5 billion in funding flowed into AI startups in 2017, with Chinese startups receiving 48 percent of that, according to the new CB Insights report The State of Artificial Intelligence.
Tencent Youtu — literally translated as “image optimization lab” — is the image processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, and data mining research arm of Chinese tech giant Tencent Group.
Baidu’s research arm announced yesterday that its 2017 text-to-speech (TTS) system Deep Voice has learned how to imitate a person’s voice using a mere three seconds of voice sample data.
Now Google has introduced a surprising new use for retinal images: combined with artificial intelligence, they can also predict a patient’s risk of heart attack or stoke…
Non-profit organization Atrius Health applies NLP technology to identify clinical data and extract information…
Synced celebrates the Chinese New Year 2018 by announcing our 30 Best AI Use Case Award. The Award recognizes companies that have applied AI in various industries or organizations.
China is determined to win the global AI race. The country continues to spark technological breakthroughs and establish AI-powered infrastructures for its cities and transportation networks.