Samsung Announces $17bn Investment for Texas Semiconductor Manufacturing Facility
On November 23, Samsung Electronics announced the company is investing $17 billion to build a new semiconductor manufacturing facility in Taylor, Texas.
Category: United States
Meet CSL: Facebook AI Approach Achieves 19% WER Reduction for ASR Under Ultra Low-Resource Conditions
A research team from Facebook AI proposes a Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning (CSL) approach that synthesizes pseudo-labelling and contrastive losses to improve the stability of learned speech representations for automatic speech recognition (ASR).
Facebook & Google’s LazyTensor Enables Expressive Domain-Specific Compilers
A team from Facebook and Google has proposed LazyTensor — a technique for targeting domain-specific compilers without sacrificing define-by-run ergonomics.
Google Study Shows Transformer Modifications Fail To Transfer Across Implementations and Applications
A team from Google Research explores why most transformer modifications have not transferred across implementation and applications, and surprisingly discovers that most modifications do not meaningfully improve performance.
Apple Reveals Design of Its On-Device ML System for Federated Evaluation and Tuning
Apple has laid out the design characteristics of a new generic system that enables federated evaluation and tuning (FE&T) systems on end-user devices.
Google & JHU Paper Explores and Categorizes Neural Scaling Laws
A research team from Google and Johns Hopkins University identifies variance-limited and resolution-limited scaling behaviours for dataset and model size in four scaling regimes.
Yann LeCun Hails MSA Transformer’s ‘Huge Progress’ in Protein Contact Prediction
UC Berkeley, Facebook AI Research and New York University researchers’ Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA) Transformer surpasses current state-of-the-art unsupervised structure learning methods by a wide margin.
Stanford University Deep Evolutionary RL Framework Demonstrates Embodied Intelligence via Learning and Evolution
Stanford researchers’ DERL (Deep Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning) is a novel computational framework that enables AI agents to evolve morphologies and learn challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks in complex environments using only low level egocentric sensory information.
‘Papers-With-Video’ Browser Extension Adds Video Access to arXiv
A Nepalese machine learning (ML) researcher has introduced a handy browser extension that lets users directly access videos related to research papers published on the popular preprint platform arXiv.
Trump Administration Cuts Off Licenses for Huawei Chips Suppliers Including Intel
According to a report from Reuters, the Trump administration has notified Intel among others, that their supplier licenses to Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei have been revoked.
Trump Escalates His China Tech Ban from Tiktok to WeChat
US President Donald Trump released two executive orders to ban the Chinese messaging app WeChat.
Intel AI Summit 2019 | Chip Giant Accelerates AI at the Edge
The new Intel products strengthen the company’s growing portfolio of AI solutions, which is expected to generate more than US$3.5 billion in revenue in 2019.
Microsoft Ignite 2019 | Project Cortex AI Builds Enterprise Knowledge Networks
The message from Microsoft is clear: the company is investing in knowledge, which it believes will become one of the most important assets of any organization.
Microsoft Ignite 2019 | From Office to Cortex and Beyond – How AI Is Making a Difference at the World’s Most Valuable Company
“You’ll see AI infused into all our products and services across the company, from tools to help people be more productive at work, to Azure services that give our customers the flexibility to deploy AI capabilities in any environment,” said Microsoft Communications Corporate Vice President Frank Shaw.
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.
Direct and Star in Your Own Movie With California AI Startup Rct Studio
Interactive movies are redefining cinema and storytelling and opening up a world of possibilities in the entertainment industry. There are no “spoilers” for films with no predetermined endings, whose characters and plots develop based on viewers’ real-time direction. Now, what if these viewers became characters?
Google Cloud Next | New Hybrid Cloud ‘Anthos,’ Partnerships, Data Centres
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become powerful tools for tech giants looking to build the optimal cloud service platform. To catch up with rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google is accelerating the development of its own cloud services.
Father of GANs Ian Goodfellow Splits Google For Apple
Ian Goodfellow — the research scientist who pioneered generative adversarial networks (GANs) — has left Google Brain and joined Apple to direct a special machine learning project, according to his Linkedln profile updated today and CNBC.
NVIDIA CEO Says No Rush on 7nm GPU; Company Clearing Its Crypto Chip Inventory
NVIDIA CEO and Co-Founder Jensen Huang says a rumored next-generation GPU architecture is not a priority for the company, and that he remains optimistic about clearing the chip inventory built up for cryptocurrency mining. Huang made the remarks in a press conference Tuesday at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Santa Clara.
GTC 2019 | Highlights & Disappointments at NVIDIA’s Annual Conference
NVIDIA’s annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) attracted some 9,000 developers, buyers and innovators to San Jose, California this week. CEO and Co-Founder Jensen Huang’s two-and-a-half hour keynote speech fused GPU-based innovations in domains ranging from graphic design to autonomous driving.
GTC 2019 | New NVIDIA One-Stop AI Framework Accelerates Workflows by 50x
No wow moments, no bells, and no whistles. Jensen Huang has delivered some groundbreaking keynote speeches in his years at the helm of NVIDIA, but today’s was not among them.
Facebook Releases a Trio of New AI Hardware Designs
Zion is the company’s next-generation, large-memory unified training platform; Kings Canyon is an integrated circuit optimized for AI inference; and Mount Shasta is a specialized ASIC for video transcoding.
Boeing 737 MAX Crashes Raise Public Distrust of Autonomous Systems
On Sunday, March 10, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft en route to Nairobi crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. It was the second fatal crash in six months involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes.
New Google Program Applies Technical Writers to Open Source Documentation
Google yesterday announced a new program, Seasons of Docs, that aims to make a substantive contribution to open source software development. The eight-month project will assemble a team of technical writers to work on improving documentation development for various open source projects.
OpenAI Establishes For-Profit Company
In a move that has surprised many, OpenAI today announced the creation of a new for-profit company to balance its huge expenditures into compute and AI talents. Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator who stepped down last week, has been named CEO of the new “capped-profit” company, OpenAI LP.
UC Cuts Elsevier Subscriptions as ML Community Pushes Open Access
The University of California has halted all further subscriptions with one of the world’s largest scholarly publishers, Amsterdam-based Elsevier. The move follows more than six months of negotiations which failed to reach a substantial agreement on securing universal open access to UC research.
Caffe Pioneer & AI Infrastructure Director Leaves Facebook
Facebook AI Infrastructure Director Yangqing Jia is leaving his position with the company, a person familiar with the matter told Synced. The Facebook team confirmed his departure yesterday.
After Mastering Go and StarCraft, DeepMind Takes on Soccer
Having notched impressive victories over human professionals in Go, Atari Games, and most recently StarCraft 2 — Google’s DeepMind team has now turned its formidable research efforts to soccer. In a paper released last week, the UK AI company demonstrates a novel machine learning method that trains a team of AI agents to play a simulated version of “the beautiful game.”
AI Hasn’t Found Its Isaac Newton: Gary Marcus on Deep Learning Defects & ‘Frenemy’ Yann LeCun
Synced is proud to present Gary Marcus as the last installment in our Lunar New Year Project — a series of interviews with AI experts reflecting on AI development in 2018 and looking ahead to 2019. (Read the previous articles on Clarifai CEO Matt Zeiler and Google Brain Researcher Quoc Le.)
OpenAI Guards Its ML Model Code & Data to Thwart Malicious Usage
The San Francisco-based AI non-profit however has raised eyebrows in the research community with its unusual decision to not release the language model’s code and training dataset. In a statement sent to Synced, OpenAI explained the choice was made to prevent malicious use: “it’s clear that the ability to generate synthetic text that is conditioned on specific subjects has the potential for significant abuse.”
IBM AI Debater Vs Human Champ
Debating is a hallmark of human civilization, and few do it better than World Debating Championship Finalist Harish Natarajan. Last night at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Natarajan stepped up against an AI-empowered debating machine from IBM.
Landing AI Names Gopi Prashanth New VP of Engineering
AI Guru Andrew Ng announced today that Gopi Prashanth, formerly the Director of Technology for Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at Amazon Go, is joining Landing AI as VP of Engineering.
AI Gaming Gets Physical: MIT Robot Plays Jenga!
There’s a lot more to a friendly game of Jenga than meets the eye. Strategies are informed by a complex set of tactile and visual stimuli — by touching a block and observing the tower, we not only see but also feel our actions and their consequences. The MIT Jenga robot thus marks an important step in AI’s transition to the physical world.
FAIR & NYU School of Medicine Share fastMRI Tools; Release Largest-Ever MRI Dataset
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine’s Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI2R) announced today they are sharing a standardized set of AI tools and baselines and MRI data as part of their joint research project fastMRI.
Head of R&D Jia Li Leaves Google Cloud AI
Head of R&D of Google Cloud AI Jia Li has left her position with the company. Li informed Synced in a text message yesterday and the Google team confirmed her departure this morning.
2019 AI Residency Guide
Synced surveyed a number of 2019 AI residency programs that may be of interest to readers.
Best NLP Model Ever? Google BERT Sets New Standards in 11 Language Tasks
The new Google AI paper BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding is receiving accolades from across the machine learning community.
MIT Is Opening a $1Bn AI College
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced they will invest US$1 billion into a new college for artificial intelligence. The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing will “constitute both a global center for computing research and education, and an intellectual foundry for powerful new AI tools.”
Millions Are Proposing to Alexa
Virtual personal assistants have become an integral part of our everyday lives. So much so that some people want to take the relationship with their digital friend to the next level. A new Business Insider article reveals that over one million people asked Amazon’s Alexa to marry them in 2017.
Fastai 1.0 for PyTorch: “There’s Nothing Better Out There”
In conjunction with yesterday’s release of open source AI software framework PyTorch 1.0, leading deep learning course developer Fast.ai has announced its first open source library for deep learning — fastai v1.