CES 2020 Roundup: Tech Giants, Future Mobility, Smart Home and More
Synced Global AI Weekly January 12th
Category: Industry
Global AI Industry updates.
Robot Arms Selling Huawei Phones in New Unmanned Store
In a scene that looks like it came from a science fiction movie, a pair of robot arms twist and turn overhead as they serve shoppers in Huawei’s new SOTA staffless Wuhan Optics Valley retail outlet.
China’s Financial Services Industry Is Banking on AI
The banking industry was the biggest investor in AI-related applications, accounting for 70 percent of all market purchases.
Happy AI New Year! Global Researchers Reflect on 2019, Talk Trends for 2020
To welcome 2020 with some fresh AI perspectives, Synced spoke with global researchers from Google Brain, Sony AI, Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial (formerly known as Alipay) and other organizations.
2019 in Review: 10 Brilliant AI Apps
As 2019 comes to an end, Synced takes a look back at the year’s bumper crop of AI-powered products, spotlighting 10 new apps that we believe present brilliant ideas, innovative design and unique functionalities.
Deep Learning Pioneers Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio Elected as AAAI-20 Fellows
The AAAI has announced the election of ten AAAI 2020 Fellows — including AI pioneers and 2018 Turing Award Winners Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.
Here’s To Drinking Safely With AI!
There is increasing attention on machine learning, deep learning, IoT and computer vision technologies in attempts to reduce the damage done by alcohol and improve the safety of drinkers.
2019 in Review: 10 AI Failures
Synced 10 AI Failures of 2019
KDD 2020 Opens Call for Research and Applied Data Science Paper Submissions
ACM SIGKDD Invites Industry and Academic Experts to Submit Advancements in Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery and Machine Learning for 26th Annual Conference in San Diego
Baidu’s Pre-training Model ERNIE Achieves New NLP Benchmark Record
ERNIE has achieved new state-of-the-art performance on GLUE and become the world’s first model to score over 90 in terms of the macro-average score (90.1).
Japanese Unicorn Preferred Networks Migrates Its DL Platform to PyTorch
Preferred Networks is migrating its deep learning research platform from its own open source framework Chainer to PyTorch.
How Face Recognition Tech Is Driving the Short Video Trend
Face recognition will continue to play a big role as short video platforms develop functions to appeal to new target groups and provide more innovative, personalized and engaging content to users.
Fighting Fire & Floods With Smart Emergency Systems
Simulation systems can play a valuable role in identifying and testing evacuation plans to enable individuals to promptly leave a dangerous area via the safest and fastest route.
Herring, Not Herring: Deep Learning Accelerates Detection and Classification of Underwater Species
The collaboration produced a deep learning framework for the automatic detection of schools of herring from echograms that outperforms traditional hand-crafted machine learning algorithms on precision, recall, and F1-score metrics.
AI in the E-Commerce Industry
E-commerce is a fast-growing industry. In 2017, global retail e-commerce sales reached US$2.3 trillion, and e-retail revenue is expected to grow to US$4.88 trillion in 2021.
Huawei Tops ETH Zurich 2019 Smartphone Deep Learning Rankings
In an effort to benchmark deep learning on smartphones in the Android ecosystem, researchers from the ETH Zurich Computer Vision Lab last year developed an AI Benchmark application to measure the AI readiness of more than 200 Android devices and 100 mobile SoCs collected in the wild.
Baidu PaddlePaddle Releases 21 New Capabilities to Accelerate Industry-Grade Model Development
Featuring 100+ models, new mobile inference engine, and frameworks for graph & federated learning
Head of Microsoft AI and Research Harry Shum Is Leaving the Company
Microsoft Executive Vice President Harry Shum (Shen Xiangyang), the head of Microsoft AI and Research, will leave the tech giant in early 2020.
Synced Machine Intelligence Awards 2019: ‘The Power of Industry’
The Synced Machine Intelligence Awards 2019 focus is “the power of industry” and the selection process will key in on AI companies’ products, application cases and industry landings — with the most noteworthy companies chosen based on real and objective industry performance.
Extreme E-Commerce: Shipping 2.8 Billion Singles’ Day Parcels
China’s National Post Bureau forecasts some 2.8 billion parcels will be shipped between November 11-18th. While robots will do much of the heavy lifting, an average human warehouse worker will cover 42 kilometers per day, equivalent to a full, sweaty marathon.
OpenAI Releases Full GPT-2; Baidu Q3 Revenues Rise; EMNLP Announces 2019 Best Papers
Synced Global AI Weekly November 10th
2020 AI Residency Guide
As global AI development and deployment continues, the demand for AI talents is growing faster than ever. A number of industry leaders and reputable institutions offer AI residency programs designed to help nurture promising AI talents.
Can a Smart Light Bulb Steal Your Personal Data?
In a new paper, researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) design and implement attacks that leverage characteristics of the light emitted by modern smart bulbs to “steal” users’ private data and preferences from other nearby devices.
Google’s Big Week: Quantum Supremacy, Boosting Search With BERT, Exploring Transfer Learning
Synced Global AI Weekly October 27th
Running an Industrial Robotics Software Startup Is Not Getting Easier
After running the industrial robot operating system startup “Cobot” for three years, founder Miao Li has decided to axe 98 percent of the company’s “fancy services” and just focus on drug logistics and sorting mushrooms.
Milestone: BERT Boosts Google Search
In what the company calls “the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search,” Google today announced that it has leveraged its pretrained language model BERT to dramatically improve the understanding of search queries.
Alibaba Open-Sources Its MCU to Boost AI Research
Alibaba’s chip subsidiary Pingtouge (平头哥) has become the first Chinese company to open-source its Microcontroller (MCU) design platform.
Harvard & Google Seismic Paper Hit With Rebuttals: Is Deep Learning Suited to Aftershock Prediction?
With deep learning emerging as something of a panacea in the world of science, AI researchers and seismologists alike are leveraging the tech in pursuit of better aftershock forecast solutions.
AI In Wildlife Conservation
Image recognition technology in particular has come to play a valuable role in wildlife conservation, where endangered species are tallied and tracked so their numbers and migrations can be more accurately measured and understood.
Kaldi Creator Daniel Povey Joining Xiaomi in Beijing
Daniel Povey, the main developer of the widely used open-source speech recognition toolkit Kaldi, tweeted today that he is likely joining Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi at its Beijing headquarters to work on a next generation “PyTorch-y Kaldi.”
PyTorch 1.3 Released; News From Arm TechCon 2019; Are Deepfakes More Dangerous Than Imagined?
Synced Global AI Weekly October 13rd
How AI Is Modernizing Chinese Agriculture
In recent years frontier technologies such as AI, big data, IoT, and 3S technology (RS remote sensing technology, GIS geographic information systems, and GPS global positioning systems), have been aggressively deployed to accelerate the modernization of Chinese agriculture.
Facebook Debuts PyTorch 1.3 With PyTorch Mobile, Quantization, TPU Support and More
The latest version, PyTorch 1.3, includes PyTorch Mobile, quantization, and Google Cloud TPU support. The release was announced today at the PyTorch Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Open Source Hardware Trends, Arm Takes a Different Tack
Although the term “open source” conveys sentiments such as research sharing and community building, leading semiconductor IP provider Arm, which supports 95 percent of smartphone embedded processors, is not a fan.
Is NVIDIA Doubling Down On RISC-V?
The US chip giant now appears to be exploring the terrain beyond GPU architecture, raising the stakes on other dedicated electronic circuits.
Can AI Assist in Suicide Prevention?
Figures from nonprofit organization Mental Health America show the severe depression rate for US youth increased from 5.9 to 8.2 percent over the last five years. The numbers provide a sobering glimpse of the shortcomings in mental health care, and some researchers are suggesting AI might be able to address the problem.
ARM and Qualcomm Will Continue to Supply Huawei Despite US Ban
Chinese news outlet Caixin is reporting that UK-based chip designer ARM confirmed on Wednesday it will continue to license its chip design architecture to Chinese tech giant Huawei and the company’s chip unit HiSilicon Technologies despite a US trade ban.
Alibaba’s New AI Chip Can Process Nearly 80K Images Per Second
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.
Amazon ML Director Begins DeepMind Professorship at Cambridge
The University of Cambridge has appointed Professor Neil Lawrence as its first DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning, a new position supported by Google-owned, UK-based AI research company DeepMind.
AI vs AI: ‘FakeSpotter’ Studies Neurons to Bust DeepFakes
“Adversaries and strategic competitors probably will attempt to use deep fakes or similar machine-learning technologies to create convincing — but false — image, audio, and video files to augment influence campaigns directed against the United States and our allies and partners.”