OpenAI’s Long Pursuit of Dota 2 Mastery
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.
Category: United States
MIT PixelPlayer “Sees” Where Sounds Are Coming From
The “cocktail party effect” describes humans’ ability to hold a conversation in a noisy environment by listening to what their conversation partner is saying while filtering out other chatter, music, ambient noises, etc.
Waymo Slips into Shanghai
Synced has discovered that Alphabet self-driving subsidiary Waymo has set up an office in China.
On August 23, Synced found an entry in the National Enterprise Information Publicity System indicating that the limited liability company (solely foreign invested – 外国法人独资) Huimo Business Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. had been incorporated in Shanghai.
Revenge of the Nerds! Humans Beat Bots at Dota 2 International
Last August at the Dota 2 International tournament in Seattle, OpenAI introduced an AI bot that upset the world’s top 1v1 human player. The San Francisco-based AI research institute is now at the International 2018 in Vancouver, where their team of state-of-the-art bots is battling professional human teams in a highly anticipated best-of-three 5v5 Dota 2 showdown.
Intel and ByteDance Partner on AI Lab
At a press conference in Beijing today US chipmaker Intel and Chinese tech pioneer ByteDance announced they will collaborate on setting up an AI research lab, talent training, and development of AI applications.
The New Nvidia GeForce RTX: A Gamer’s Dream
Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang today unveiled the company’s long-waited next-generation graphic processing unit (GPU) cards for games, Geforce RTX.
Pedro Domingos Will Lead New D.E. Shaw Machine Learning Group
New York-based investment corporate D. E. Shaw Group yesterday announced that esteemed University of Washington Professor of Computer Science Pedro Domingos will join the firm as a Managing Director and lead its new Machine Learning Research Group.
Revolutionising Graphics: Nvidia Unveils Turing Architecture With Real-Time Ray Tracing
At the prestigious SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) conference in Vancouver yesterday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Turing, an eighth-generation GPU architecture introducing ray tracing and AI capability to real-time graphics.
Spotlight on AI at Google Cloud Next ’18
At the annual Google Cloud Next conference which kicked off July 24 in San Francisco the company unveiled a series of AI-based product releases and enhancements for its analytics and machine learning tools, additional applications on G Suite, and new IoT products.
D.C. Startup Foundry.ai Provides Practical ML Solutions for Big Business
Founded in 2016, Foundry.ai provides cloud-based AI-powered software applications for C-Suite executives, particularly those with Forbes Global 2000 companies.
Tsinghua University Launches Institute For AI; Hires Google’s Jeff Dean As Advisor
China’s prestigious Tsinghua University is opening a dedicated AI research centre. The Tsinghua University Institute for Artificial Intelligence will be led by Dean Bo Zhang (张钹) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua Director of Academic Committee Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (姚期智), a Turing Award Laureate. The announcement was made at today’s Tsinghua-Google AI Symposium in Beijing.
IBM Builds the World’s Largest Facial Image Dataset to Battle Bias in AI
IBM today announced it will release the world’s largest facial attribute dataset in order to fight bias in artificial intelligence systems used to recognize human faces. The dataset was built by IBM research scientists and contains one million images, five times the image count of the current largest facial attribute dataset. It will be publically available this fall.
CVPR 2018 Kicks Off; Best Papers Announced
The 2018 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) opened today in Salt Lake City, USA. The CVPR organizing committee used the occasion to announce its coveted Best Paper and Best Student Paper selections.
The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Designed for AI Computation
The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee today introduced the world’s fastest supercomputer Summit, whose computing power reaches 200 petaflops or 200 million billion calculations per second.
Apple Seeks to Simplify AI Training and Inferencing on macOS
Today it was Apple’s turn to unveil new machine learning tools and software at its 2018 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which runs June 4-8 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California..
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.
Qualcomm Releases Snapdragon 710; Consolidates Its AI Research
In Beijing today Qualcomm announced the release of its Snapdragon 710 Mobile Platform, part of its recently introduced 700 series portfolio. Snapdragon 710 is aimed at smartphone enhancement and features a multi-core AI Engine and neural network processing capabilities.
AI Doubling Its Compute Every 3.5 Months
Compute Scoreboard:
AlexNet 1
AlphaZero 300,000
Google Boosting its AI Research in Tokyo
Google is looking to expand its AI research activities in the Japanese capital. The company’s deep learning and AI research team Google Brain yesterday posted a “Tokyo job listing seeking talented experts to participate in cutting edge research on machine learning”.
Chip Guru Jim Keller Leaves Tesla for Intel
The Head of Tesla’s Autopilot Hardware Team Jim Keller, best known for his CPU design at AMD and Apple, was supposed to help the company make that happen. Today, however, Tesla announced Keller had left…
MIT’s Josh Tenenbaum on Intuitive Physics & Psychology in AI
When Bayesian Cognitive Scientist Josh Tenenbaum recently told a packed University of Toronto lecture hall that “intelligence is not just about pattern recognition,” the significance of the statement was not lost on the audience.
Berkeley Researchers Create Virtual Acrobat
The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab yesterday proposed DeepMimic, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) technique that enables simulated characters to regenerate highly dynamic physical movements learned from data collected from human subjects.
NVIDIA GTC 2018 Peeks Inside the GPU-Powered World
Huang and his NVIDIA team pioneered the graphics processing chip (GPU) in 1999, revolutionizing the visual performance of device displays. But even Huang never dreamt that his GPU would one day become a driving force in the arena of AI.
NVIDIA CEO Says “FGPA is Not the Right Answer” for Accelerating AI
Chip giant NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang created a bit of a stir at yesterday’s GPU Technology Conference in Santa Clara, USA, when he appeared to dis one of these chips’ appropriateness for autonomous vehicle system development: “FPGA is not the right answer,” he said.
NVIDIA Unveils AI Computing Beasts: World’s Largest GPU & Two Petaflop Supercomputer
At the GPU Technology Conference in Santa Clara, USA today, Huang unveiled the world’s largest GPU — a binary beast packed with 16 Tesla V100 with doubled memory 32 GB.
Facebook AI Proposes Group Normalization Alternative to Batch Normalization
As Facebook struggles with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its research arm today delivered a welcome bit of good news in deep learning. Research Engineer Dr. Yuxin Wu and Research Scientist Dr. Kaiming He proposed a new Group Normalization (GN) technique they say can accelerate deep neural network training with small batch sizes.
2017 Turing Award Goes to Computer Chip Pioneers
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced John L. Hennessy, former Stanford University President and Chairman of the Board of Alphabet; and David A. Patterson, retired Professor at University of California, Berkeley, as winners of the 2017 Turing Award for their groundbreaking approach to computer architecture design and evaluation.
Google’s MusicVAE Is a Machine Learning Mozart
Google has announced the release of MusicVAE, a machine learning model that makes composing musical scores as easy as mixing paint on a palette. A breakthrough from Google Brain’s Magenta Project, MusicVAE generates and morphs melodies to output multi-instrumental passages optimized for expression, realism and smoothness which sound convincingly like human-composed music.
Microsoft AI Achieves Milestone in Machine Translation
Microsoft researchers in the US and Asia sent a shockwave through the AI community today with their paper Achieving Human Parity on Automatic Chinese to English News Translation, which introduces a neural machine translation system they say equals the performance of human experts in Chinese-to-English translation.
Paige.AI Combats Cancer With AI and Computational Pathology
Paige.AI is a New York-based startup that fights cancer with AI. Launched last month as a spinoff from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) — the largest cancer research institute in the US — Paige.AI has exclusive access to MSK’s IP in the field of computational pathology as well as its dataset of 25 million pathology cancer images (“slides”).
“Trashbots” Boost Recycling at Pittsburgh Airport
Trashbot uses cameras and sensors to scan discarded items. A machine learning algorithm based on Bayesian classifier sorts the trash for either landfill or recycle. If you dump an unfinished can of Coke, excess liquid will be drained off on a Teflon-coated sheet.
DataVisor Uses Unsupervised Learning to Combat Online Fraud
DataVisor is a Mountain View, California based anti-fraud startup that uses AI to detect fake accounts, prevent money laundering, and protect financial institutions from credit scams. The company offers clients its DataVisor APIs for real-time data connection, and a specialized UI for direct results.
MIT and SenseTime Become Allies in AI
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Chinese AI Unicorn SenseTime today announced the MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence, a partnership the duo says “aims to open up new avenues of discovery across MIT in areas such as computer vision, human-intelligence-inspired algorithms, medical imaging, and robotics.”
Chinese Startups Hauled In Half of 2017 Global AI Funding
Over US$12.5 billion in funding flowed into AI startups in 2017, with Chinese startups receiving 48 percent of that, according to the new CB Insights report The State of Artificial Intelligence.
It’s All in the Eyes: Google AI Calculates Cardiovascular Risk From Retinal Images
Now Google has introduced a surprising new use for retinal images: combined with artificial intelligence, they can also predict a patient’s risk of heart attack or stoke…
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.
Boston Dynamics Robodog Opens a Door, Owns the Internet
SoftBank-owned robot-maker Boston Dynamics is once again wowing the internet. Its latest creation is a robodog named SpotMini which can deftly open doors with its head-mounted gripper arm…
Google’s TPU Chip Goes Public in Challenge to Nvidia’s GPU
Google announced this morning that its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) — a custom chip that powers neural network computations for Google services…
Google Cloud’s Jia Li on AutoML’s First 30 Days
Who is using AutoML Vision, the “simple, secure and flexible ML service that lets you train custom vision models for your own use cases” that Google launched last month?
Chinese-American Startup Partnership Promises a Self-Driving Electric SUV by 2020
Chinese electric car startup BYTON says it will produce a self-driving SUV by 2020. The bold pledge came with the announcement of a partnership with Aurora…