Top 10 Chinese Cities for AI Development: Beijing Ranks No. 1
China’s goal of becoming the world’s leading AI innovation center by 2030 is based on an ambitious blueprint that encourages individual cities to develop and strengthen AI ecosystems.
Category: Asia
Huawei Introduces World’s First Flagship 5G SoC in Challenge to Samsung and Qualcomm
Huawei did not disappoint when the IFA 2019 opened this morning, announcing the new Kirin 990 5G, whose built-in 5G modem makes it the world’s first-ever 5G flagship chipset.
Huawei’s First Commercial AI Chip Doubles the Training Performance of Nvidia’s Flagship GPU
Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W.
South Korean Game Developer’s AI Turns Your Selfie Into an Anime Face
Last month a team of South Korean researchers proposed a method that uses unsupervised image translation to transform a simple selfie into a classic Japanese-style anime face.
One Year Countdown: Readying AI Security for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
This time next year an expected 10 million foreign visitors and millions of Japanese from Hokkaido to Okinawa will converge on the Tokyo Metropolis for the Games of the XXXII Olympiad.
Baidu PaddlePaddle DL Framework & Huawei Kirin SoC: A Formidable Partnership
Baidu’s homegrown deep learning framework PaddlePaddle will empower Huawei’s Kirin smartphone chips, the company announced at the Baidu Create 2019 AI Developer Conference that kicked off today in Beijing.
A Look at China’s Growing Semiconductor Industry
In February Chinese AI semiconductor maker Horizon Robotics raised US$600 million in Series B funding from SK China, SK Hynix and big auto groups, making it the first in its field to reach the staggering valuation of US$3 billion.
Beep! Beep! Huawei Gets Into Car Systems
At the Auto Shanghai 2019 Key Tech Forum yesterday Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu unveiled the company’s plan to provide information and communication technology (ICT) to OEMs to help them build better vehicles.
Opportunities and Challenges in the Japanese Smart Home Market
ccording to a Fuji Research Laboratory report, the Japanese smart home market is expected to top JP¥4.2 trillion (US$38 billion) in 2025, up 36.3 percent from 2017. The market is being driven by smart devices including smartphones, which already account for more than half the market and are continuing to grow due their ability to conveniently connect IoT devices.
TableBank: Benchmark for Image-based Table Detection and Recognition
A collaboration between researchers from China’s Beihang University and Microsoft Research Asia has produced TableBank, a new image-based dataset for table detection and recognition built with novel weak supervision from Word and Latex documents on the Internet.
Roadstar.ai: The Rise and Fall of a Self-Driving Startup
A year ago, Shenzhen-based self-driving start-up Roadstar.ai was cruising along promisingly. In May 2018 the company announced a US$128 million funding round led by Wu Capital and state-backed Shenzhen Capital Group — one of the largest autonomous driving investments ever in China.
Elite Chinese Music School Now Offers PhDs in Music + AI
Now, China’s elite Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) has announced it is recruiting PhDs for a new Music AI and Information Technology program. CCOM says prospective students should have a background in Computer Science, AI, or Information Technology; along with musical abilities (instrument playing or singing).
iFLYTEK & HIT Reading Comprehension Model Betters Humans, Tops SQuAD2.0 Leaderboard
Chinese AI company iFLYTEK has bested the SQuAD2.0 challenge once again. The model “BERT + DAE + AoA” submitted by the joint iFLYTEK Research and HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology) laboratory HFL outperformed humans on both EM (exact match) and F1-score (fuzzy match) indexes to top the SQuAD2.0 leaderboard.
Baidu’s ERNIE Tops Google’s BERT in Chinese NLP Tasks
Baidu has released ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration), a new knowledge integration language representation model which outperforms Google’s state-of-the-art BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) in Chinese language tasks.
Preferred Networks Builds State-Of-The-Art Supercomputer Mn-2 Powered With Nvidia GPUs
Preferred Networks (PFN) is completing a new private supercomputer, MN-2, which the Japanese AI startup expects to have operational in July 2019.
Bengio at Tsinghua University on Maturing Deep Learning and BabyAI
Last November Synced ran an interview with Yoshua Bengio, in which the deep learning maverick, Université de Montréal Professor and MILA Scientific Director discussed his research and commented on the current state of deep learning and AI.
Beijing AI Targets “Hospital Scalpers”
It’s not uncommon to find scalpers at concert halls and sporting events, hawking admission tickets at inflated prices. Chinese hospitals however have been invaded by a more problematic breed of scalper — those who deal in the appointment registration tokens that hospitals use to process patient visits.
Lunar New Year, AI Style
Welcome to the Year of the Pig! Lunar New Year is China’s biggest holiday, with this year’s celebrations picking up during the “Little Year” period in late January, peaking February 4 for New Year’s Eve, and continuing through February 19.
Meet Fujitsu’s AI Gymnastics Judges
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) recently approved the use of a “Judging Support System” developed by Fujitsu for a series of FIG gymnastics events in 2019. The system will be tested at the 2019 FIG World Cup Series, then officially launched for the 49th Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany this coming October.
Mitsui and Preferred Networks Partner on Biomedical/Healthcare Solutions
Japanese global trading giant Mitsui & Co. and leading deep learning startup Preferred Networks (PFN) have announced a joint venture in the US to provide Biomedical/Healthcare Solutions, including Cancer Diagnostic Services, based on deep learning technology.
Sony Breaks ResNet-50 Training Record on ImageNet
Researchers from Japanese electronics giant Sony have trained the ResNet-50 neural network model on ImageNet in a record-breaking 224 seconds — 43.4 percent better than the previous fastest time for the benchmark task.
Will AI Save Japan’s Agricultural Sector?
To address the aging problem farmers are turning to “smart agriculture” labour-saving techniques and devices and large-scale production. Artificial intelligence is playing an important role in accelerating and improving the technologies driving Japan’s smart agriculture.
Baidu’s Haifeng Wang Will Chair New ACL Asia-Pacific Chapter
At the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Melbourne, Australia this week President Marti Hearst announced the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL).
India and South Korea Sign MoUs on Science & Innovation Technologies
The Government of India announced today that it has signed five memorandums of understanding (MoU) with South Korea to strengthen bilateral ties in the development of innovative technologies. The agreements were concluded at the Fourth India-Korea Science & Technology Ministers Steering Committee Meeting this week in New Delhi.
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.
Tokyo: AI and Society Symposium
Synced attended the AI and Society Symposium held October 10-11th in Tokyo, where speakers from industry and academia exchanged ideas for practical applications and possible future developments of AI.