Augmenting Virtual Assistants with Personality and Personalization
People care most about having good content and being recognized by virtual assistants, the AI-powered human-machine conversational interfaces.
Category: AI
Global machine intelligence updates.
China’s AI-powered NetEase is Music to Your Ears
Chinese netizens are all ears for the company’s “hearty” AI-powered music recommendations. In an interview with Synced, NetEase Data Scientist Jia Xu and Product Manager Bowen Shen explained the NetEase system, which learns how to predict what songs will resonate with a user’s particular taste in music…
Boston Dynamics Robodog Opens a Door, Owns the Internet
SoftBank-owned robot-maker Boston Dynamics is once again wowing the internet. Its latest creation is a robodog named SpotMini which can deftly open doors with its head-mounted gripper arm…
Arm Launches Project Trillium, Two AI Processors
Ninety percent of AI-enabled devices shipped today are based on architecture developed by Arm, a leading UK-based chip intellectual property (IP) provider known for its CPU and GPU processors…
Google’s TPU Chip Goes Public in Challenge to Nvidia’s GPU
Google announced this morning that its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) — a custom chip that powers neural network computations for Google services…
Safety Regulations for Self-Driving Cars in America
California has hosted public road testing for more than 180 self-driving vehicles from 27 companies.
Alibaba City Brain Goes Rural: AI Pig Farming in Sichuan
Sichuan pig farming corporation Dekon Group and pig feed supplier Tequ Group’s new partnership with Alibaba Cloud to apply its AI-powered “ET Brain” to pig farming. The trio are investing tens of millions of USD in the project, which was announced on February 6, 2018.
Volvo’s Roadmap to Digitalization
The Volvo Concierge Services platform enables users to smoothly coordinate with third-party providers to book services such as on-the-spot fuel-ups or car washing.
Google Cloud’s Jia Li on AutoML’s First 30 Days
Who is using AutoML Vision, the “simple, secure and flexible ML service that lets you train custom vision models for your own use cases” that Google launched last month?
Program Lead Jake Lussier on Udacity’s New Flying Car Nanodegree
Online education platform Udacity thrilled flying car enthusiasts with its announcement of the world’s first flying car program.
Chinese-American Startup Partnership Promises a Self-Driving Electric SUV by 2020
Chinese electric car startup BYTON says it will produce a self-driving SUV by 2020. The bold pledge came with the announcement of a partnership with Aurora…
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from February (Pt 1)
The staffless Amazon Go opens to the public in downtown Seattle. Just like a normal convenience store, this intelligent store sells pre-cooked food, snacks, drinks , etc. — but there’s no cashier scanning the goods.
Spotlight on Eight African AI Startups
Synced has identified eight exciting startups bringing AI to Africa’s education, finance, and health revolutions.
Woebot Delivers a Daily Dose of Mental Wellness
Woebot is designed to identify, evaluate and treat mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and stress disorders based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), one of the most widely used mental health treatment frameworks.
The AAAI 2018 Keyword is “Learning”
AI academics from around the world are pouring into New Orleans for the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
CES 2018 Autonomous Driving Tech Review
At CES 2018, 555 companies or organizations participated in the “Automotive/Vehicle Technology” category, 23% of which were companies using autonomous driving technologies.
Will New EU Regulations Starve Data-Hungry Deep Learning Models?
The GDPR mandates that all customers or users are entitled to receive “specific information” regarding the decision. This raises the issue of AI interpretability, especially in deep learning systems.
Geoffrey Hinton on Images, Words, Thoughts, and Neural Patterns
The “Godfather of AI” Professor Geoffrey Hinton told a packed room of professionals and students today that machine learning is reinventing our relationship with our own thoughts.
Andrew Ng Launches $175 Million AI Fund
Andrew Ng today announced the foundation of “AI Fund,” aimed at supporting startups that can transform businesses with AI technologies.
Kuala Lumpur Gets Alibaba AI’s First Brain Implant
Alibaba’s cloud computing division Alibaba Cloud announced today that its AI-powered “ET City Brain” will be deployed in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in partnership with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), the country’s digital economy development agency, and Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL).
Trio of China’s Big State Banks Invest in 4Paradigm AI
January 26th, Beijing-based AI firm 4Paradigm has announced strategic investments from the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China and China Construction Bank.
Chinese Rideshare Unicorn DiDi Launches AI Lab in Beijing
China’s ridesharing unicorn DiDi Chuxing unveiled its “DiDi AI Labs” today in Beijing. The new AI lab expands on the DiDi Research Institute and DiDi Labs, and will cluster over 200 AI scientists and engineers
Tech Giants Talk Conversational AI at RE•WORK
At the RE•WORK AI Assistant Summit San Francisco yesterday, research scientists and engineers from Amazon, Apple and Google spoke on how they are addressing challenges and evolving their conversational AI systems.
China Aims to Get the Jump on AI Standardization
China has just released its “Artificial Intelligence Standardization White Paper.” The 98-page document was edited by the China Electronics Standardization Institute under the guidance of the National Standardization Management Committee Second Ministry of Industry.
Arm Accelerates its AI Efforts
Jem Davies, General Manager of the ARM Machine Learning Group, sat down with Synced to outline his company’s ambitious roadmap for machine learning development.
Unveiling China’s Mysterious AI Lead: Synced Machine Intelligence Awards 2017
The Synced 2017 Machine Intelligence Awards recognize companies that use AI technologies in smart and commercially viable ways. This year we received more than 500 applications, and with the help of our industry analysts selected the top 10% that really stood out.
Amazon Go vs Alibaba Tao Cafe: Staffless Shop Showdown
Amazon and Alibaba’s brick-and-mortar-but-no-staff shops offer very different user experiences. To bring you first-hand feedback, Synced visited them.
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from January (Pt 2)
NVIDIA Announces Delivery Target For Self Driving Processor Xavier; Facebook Plans to Shut Down Its Personal Assistant “M” on January 19th; Amazon Alexa Is Integrating With Windows 10; A US Media Team Plans to Launch Vital Intelligence Data Live
Self-Driving Boats: Ghosts on the Ocean
Maritime transportation industry has been facing employment shortage. Manless operations may solve this problem and reduce the high cost of manpower. In comparison to land autonomous driving, there are fewer obstacles on the sea where travel routes are more open.
Life After Baidu: Yuanqing Lin’s AI Startup Moves Fast on Funding and B2B Opportunities
Yuanqing Lin’s AI startup Aibee.ai — or AI2B, AI to business — has landed US $25 million in angel round funding. The company was founded by the former Director of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), and provides general AI solutions such as computer vision and image and speech recognition for companies in education, finance, retail, real estate and other sectors.
Baidu Research Adds Elite AI Talents, New Labs
Baidu Research announced talent acquisition of Dr. Kenneth W. Church, Dr. Jun Hua, and Dr. Hui Xiong, and launched two new research labs.
Barack Obama is the Benchmark for Fake Lip-Sync Videos
The Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) recently launched ObamaNet — a photo-realistic lip-sync neural network that can make anyone appear to be saying anything.
Ubiquitous Virtual Assistants and AI Homogenization at CES 2018
CES exhibitors promoted everything from AI-powered vehicles to smart refrigerators and robot puppies. But the tech driving these diverse products was the same: the virtual assistant, a conversational AI that can understand human speech and generate humanlike responses.
UC Berkeley & Facebook AI Researchers Introduce House3D for Reinforcement Learning
To boost learning research aimed at endowing robots with better generalization capabilities, Yi Wu from UC Berkeley and Yuxin Wu, Georgia Gkioxari, and Yuandong Tian from Facebook AI research recently published the paper Building Generalizable Agents with a Realistic and Rich 3D Environment.
A Review of AI History Beyond Deep Learning
There are people who equate AI with Machine Learning (and to an extent, deep learning), this is a huge misunderstanding.
Uncanny Artificial Humans
One of the most attention-grabbing displays at CES 2018 is “Joel,” a body inside a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, curled up in the fetal position and peacefully waiting for a consciousness.
After Creating 166 Million Super Cute Selfies, Meitu’s AI Sets its Sights on Skin
You may find AI Andy’s dreamy creations too cute for your taste, but numbers don’t lie: at time of writing a total of 166,743,348 users had employed the artbot’s “tech magic” to beautify their selfies.
CES 2018 Just Got AI’ed
Algorithms are taking center stage at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018, as exhibitors strive to out “smart” each other with AI-powered gadgets and appliances.
Baidu at CES: Developing AI at “China Speed”
China is undergoing a revolutionary transformation as AI rapidly penetrates industries from transportation to communication — a growth rate phenomenon that Baidu Group President & COO Qi Lu calls “China speed.”
Yamaha Sets the Pace for Self-Driving Motorcycles
A creation of Yamaha’s new Innovation Center, MOTOROiD will make its international debut this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.