AI Technology & Industry Review
AI highlights.
At the Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Apsara Conference 2019, Pingtouge unveiled its first AI dedicated processor for cloud-based large-scale AI inferencing. The Hanguang 800 is the first semiconductor product in Alibaba’s 20-year history.
Chinese tech giant Huawei yesterday introduced the latest iteration of its flagship smartphone: Mate 30, Mate 30 Pro and Mate 30 Pro (5G).
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.
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.
Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W.
Synced would like to invite Toronto AI and data science students and researchers to join representatives of the world’s largest data science community for an evening of networking, discussions, and refreshments!
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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 (PFN) is completing a new private supercomputer, MN-2, which the Japanese AI startup expects to have operational in July 2019.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DeepMind bot AlphaStar has scored a convincing 10/10 victory against pro human players in a special series of StarCraft II matches. Plucky 26 year-old Polish gamer Grzegorz “MaNa” Komincz however salvaged a bit of human pride, snatching a surprise win yesterday in a live rematch at the DeepMind and Blizzard Entertainment Starcraft II Demonstration live stream event hosted in London.
First-timers to NeurIPS — the world’s most prestigious machine learning conference — can explore and enjoy a tech environment full of energy, innovations, and mind-blowing discussions among people studying and working in AI.
The 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is in full swing in Montréal. According to a booklet distributed to attendees, both NeurIPS 2019 and 2020 will take place in Vancouver, making Canada the host country three years in a row. NIPS/NeurIPS has already been held in Montreal and Vancouver a combined 13 times since the world’s leading AI conference left its Denver base in 2001.
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.
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.
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.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued official guidelines on the patenting of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The guidelines became valid on November 1st, 2018.
RE•WORK organized the second Canadian edition of its RE•WORK Global DL Summit Series in Toronto on October 25 – 26. The event attracted over 600 attendees from more than 20 countries who joined conversations with leading AI and Deep Learning experts.
Chip giant Nvidia today announced the opening of its new AI research centre in Toronto.
Nvidia Director of AI Sanja Fidler will lead the AI Research Lab. The University of Toronto Assistant Professor previously worked at the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago as a research assistant professor.
A hearty round of applause arose from the crowd packing the Vancouver Rogers Centre on August 22 when a team of unassuming scientists wearing “OpenAI” T-shirts climbed up on stage.
The Technical University of Munich (TUM) had lured Cheng from a Japanese research institute. At TUM he founded the Institute of Cognitive Systems (ICS). With eight employees in a central office on Karlstraße 45, Cheng set to work on his arduous task: recreating the complexities of human skin and wiring it all to a brain.
DeepMind’s 2018 AlphaGo Zero requires 300,000 times more computing power than AlexNet did in 2013. With larger-than-ever datasets and demandingContinue Reading
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).
On July 10th, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang looking on, Siemens AG signed a partnership agreement with Alibaba Cloud — the cloud-computing arm of Internet conglomerate Alibaba — to bring an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) upgrade to China’s manufacturing industry.
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.
The Alan Turing Institute in the UK and France’s DATAIA Institute have concluded an arrangement to collaborate in the arena of artificial intelligence and data science, part of a five-year commitment between the two countries to improve digital services.
Leading television manufacturer Skyworth has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Chinese internet giant Baidu. In the deal announced March 17, Baidu will invest CN¥1.01 billion (US$159.7 million) in Skyworth’s Smart TV unit Coocaa; while its AI assistant system DuerOS will be integrated into Skyworth’s agenda-setting Super AI TV.