AI Is Personalizing Hotel Services
Synced surveyed several “future hotels” that are already applying AI in hospitality, to see how the tech can provide guests with a unique and satisfying experience.
Category: Industry
Global AI Industry updates.
California Startup GTI Releases AI Chips to Challenge NVIDIA and Intel
In his 1988 IEEE paper Cellular Neural Networks: Theory, UC Berkeley PhD student Lin Yang proposed Cellular Neural Network theory, a predecessor of the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that would later revolutionize machine learning. Based on this theory, Yang blueprinted a 20*20 parallel simulated circuit chip in the university lab.
GG! DeepMind Struts Its StarCraft Strength; Humans Strike Back
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.
Natural Language Processing In Early Education
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a hot research area in artificial intelligence and computer science. The technology teaches machines to understand human language so they can more effectively communicate with us. NLP research is integrated with linguistics, context analysis and semantics.
DeepMind Announces Pre-Symptom Eye Disease Prediction at Moorfields
Google DeepMind has announced that its project with London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital will now include working with clinicians to predict eye diseases before symptoms occur.
Drive.ai Launches Autonomous Ride-Hailing Service in Arlington, Texas
The slogan of Arlington, Texas is “American Dream City,” and as residents start their commute this morning some may wonder if they are in fact dreaming. A fleet of futuristic autonomous vehicles today began chauffeuring Arlingtonites along city streets in self-driving startup Drive.ai’s latest public road testing project.
Andrew Ng Warns of Centralized AI Power
One of the biggest risks involved with AI is “it tends to concentrate power in hands of fewer individuals,” warns Andrew Ng, one of the AI’s most prestigious figures.
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.
Fintech Surge: S&P Global Acquires Kensho for Record $550 Million; Ant Financial Launches Pre-IPO Funding
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Tech Giants Are Gobbling Up AI Startups
It’s no surprise that tech companies are eager to stay abreast of AI developments. When they’re not luring AI talents with huge compensation packages, they’re on the lookout for AI startups suitable for acquisition.
2017 in Review: 10 AI Failures
At Synced we are naturally fans of machine intelligence, but we also realize some new techniques struggle to perform their tasks effectively, often blundering in ways that humans would not.
Hosting Robot Brains on the Cloud
The anticipated 2020 deployment of 5G networks will effect a tenfold speed increase compared to 4G LTE, creating an environment favourable for the mass integration of various robots into an AI-powered cloud. Beijing-based CloudMinds wants to create such a cloud.
Andrew Ng Announces Landing.ai – Bringing AI to Manufacturing
One of the top minds in artificial intelligence, Andrew Ng believes “AI is the new electricity.” However few industries canContinue Reading
Google Opens China AI Center
Google is opening an artificial intelligence research lab in Beijing, Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud Fei-fei Li announced today at the Google Developer Conference in Shanghai.
Using AI to Secure Ride-Sharing Platforms
Fallout from the Uber data breach scandal is being felt across the industry. In an effort to beef up cybersecurity, researchers are exploring AI solutions.
China’s Smart Speaker Market Heats Up
The lack of Mandarin interface in Echo and Google Home has prompted a number of Chinese companies to get in the game with their own smart speakers.
Bringing Robotics from the Lab to the Real World
At last week’s Collaborative Robotics and Advanced Vision Conference in San Jose, John Petry from Cognex stressed the need for robotic technology companies to provide maintainable deep learning-based solutions for their manufacturing customers.
MIT-CHIEF 2017 Conference Recap
The conference was held November 17-19th, and attracted research scientists, industry influencers, venture investors, and entrepreneurs from the Greater Boston Area.
Computer Vision Startup CloudWalk Collects US$375 Million
Heavy investments in computer vision will energize the IoT revolution that is rapidly building smart city infrastructures all across Asia.
Rolling Out the Tesla Semi
Electric, automated, and stormtrooper-shiny: the Tesla Semi debuted yesterday in Hawthorne, California.
Will iFlytek Voice Input’s 98% Accuracy Kill the Keyboard?
Human-machine interaction is rapidly evolving. Today, 12% of Chinese users opt for voice input over typing. What does this signal for tomorrow?
Poker & AI: The Rise of Machines Against Humans
AI applications in the poker industry? This infograh shows you the AI capable of playing poker at (very) high levels.
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from Nov (Pt 1)
AT&T’s New Acumos AI Platform Hosted by Linux Foundation; Waymo is in Arizona Testing Self-Driving Cars; DJI Unveils Drone Management Solution FlightHub; Amazon’s Fourth Research Hub in Germany Targets Visual AI R&D