ICLR 2021 Announces List of Accepted Papers
Of the 2997 submissions, 860 papers have made it to ICLR 2021, for an acceptance rate of 28.7 percent — slightly higher than last year’s 26.5 percent.
Latest Posts
BigGAN: A New State of the Art in Image Synthesis
“Best GAN samples ever yet? Very impressive ICLR submission! BigGAN improves Inception Scores by >100.” The above Tweet is from renowned Google DeepMind research scientist Oriol Vinyals. It was retweeted last week by Google Brain researcher and “Father of Generative Adversarial Networks” Ian Goodfellow, and picked up momentum and praise from AI researchers on social media.
AI Biweekly September W 4 – W 5
10 Things You Must Know From September W 4 – W 5
Visual Search Is Revolutionizing E-Commerce
Visual search is an important new business tool that is changing the way people interact with E-commerce and social media platforms. Instead of entering a text query, visual search engines enable users to identify and locate items via photos snapped with their smartphone cameras.
Facebook Open-Sources SKIP Programming Language
Skip is an experimental research language project that Facebook developed over the last three years: “Skip tracks side effects to provide caching with reactive invalidation, ergonomic and safe parallelism, and efficient garbage collection. Skip is statically typed and ahead-of-time compiled using LLVM to produce highly optimized executables.”
Fast Facts on Arm’s New Autonomous Driving Chip
Semiconductor giant Arm today unveiled the Cortex-A76AE, a microarchitecture CPU designed for use in autonomous vehicles. The UK-based Softbank subsidiary hailed the new chip as the world’s first autonomous-class processor with integrated safety features.
OpenAI Scholars Initiative Promotes Diversity in AI
Nadja Rhodes is enamoured with artificial intelligence. A Seattle-based Microsoft software developer unpracticed in AI techniques such as deep learning, Rhodes had applied to a number of tech company sponsored AI residency initiatives, but to no avail. And so she was thrilled to be accepted by OpenAI Scholars.
Tencent Licensed for Self-Driving Vehicle Testing on Beijing Roads
The Beijing Traffic Management Bureau yesterday issued new licenses for self-driving vehicle testing in the Chinese capital, with tech giant Tencent receiving authorization to operate an autonomous vehicle on designated roads for the first time.
Georgia Tech & Google Brain’s GAN Lab Visualizes Model Training in Browsers
Georgia Tech and Google Brain researchers have introduced the new interactive tool GAN Lab, which visually presents the training process of complex machine learning model Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Even machine learning newbs can now experiment with GAN models using only a common web browser.
Petuum & CMU Introduce Open-Source Text Generation Toolkit Texar
Petuum and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have introduced Texar, an open-source general purpose text generation toolkit that can help boost R&D in fast model prototyping and experimentation.
Microsoft Neural TTS Makes Machines Speak like Humans
Microsoft today announced a new neural text-to-speech synthesis system that makes computer voices nearly indistinguishable from human recordings. Neural TTS currently available for preview through Azure Cognitive Services Speech Services.
A Language for Sneakers? GOAT Applies AI in Product Management
Sneakerheads of the world love online reseller GOAT. Sellers submit formatted photos of their sneakers and the company finds a buyer. The GOAT website has some 400,000 listings. Rare models like Air Yeezy Blink, Air Jordan 3 Retro Solefly and Pharrell x Chanel x NMD Human Race Trail can fetch tens of thousands of dollars.
Nvidia Opens AI Research Lab In Toronto
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.
Tencent TStarBots Defeat StarCraft II’s Powerful Builtin AI in the Full Game
Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown impressive performance in a wide range of applications, including video games. StarCraft II, one of the most challenging Real Time Strategy (RTS) games, has however remained unsolved. Until now.
Durham University’s GANomaly Improves Anomaly Detection
In a new paper Durham University researchers introduce a anomaly detection model, GANomaly, comprising a conditional generative adversarial network that “jointly learns the generation of high-dimensional image space and the inference of latent space.” The process enables the model to perform anomaly detection tasks even in sample-poor environments.
Alibaba Launches Chip Company “Ping-Tou-Ge”; Pledges Quantum Chip
Chinese Internet mogul Jack Ma has a flair for naming new businesses: Alibaba originates from a character made famous in the One Thousand and One Nights collection of Arabian folk tales; while the company’s R&D arm Damo Academy derives from the name of a Chinese Buddhist monk instrumental in the creation of Shaolin Kung Fu.
WAIC 2018 Day Two: Tencent Announces Open AI Platform AI.QQ.COM
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 in Shanghai today, Tencent Mobile Internet Group Vice President Hou Xiaonan announced the company’s new Open AI platform, “AI.QQ.COM.”
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from September W2 – W3
Grammarly announces a new tool that provides better grammar checking services for users. The tool is based on Grammarly’s AI system, which uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques. The service will be available on Chrome as an extension, and is expected to launch on Google Docs later this year.
World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 Day One: What Tech Titans & AI Experts Said
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 kicked off yesterday in Shanghai, drawing top-tier AI scientists and entrepreneurs from China’s tech giants for discussions on AI’s latest technological frontiers and industrial applications. Synced is live at the West Bund Artistic Center in Shanghai to bring you highlights from selected Day 1 Keynotes.
Meet California Startup Voicera’s AI Stenographer
California-based Voicera recently came out of beta and introduced their Enterprise Virtual Assistant (“Eva”), a note-taking AI bot that automatically detects and marks a conference call’s important moments and extracts highlights from the call.
MIT & Google Propose AutoML for Model Compression
Researchers from MIT, Google, and Xian Jiaotong University recently published a paper proposing AutoML for Model Compression (AMC), which leverages reinforcement learning to shorten model compression processing time and improve results.
Baidu President Ya-Qin Zhang Talks AI Security
As Chinese Internet giant Baidu has expanded from search to mobile apps, cloud services, and emerging business sectors like autonomous driving and voice assistants, it has correspondingly beefed up its research efforts, particularly in AI, to keep pace with growing security threats.
AI Chip Duel: Apple A12 Bionic vs Huawei Kirin 980
Apple has unveiled the latest iteration of its smartphone chip: the A12 Bionic SoC (system-on-a-chip). The company made the announcement yesterday at its annual product showcase event in Cupertino, California, hailing the A12 as the industry’s first ever 7nm chip (the smallest current transistor scale). It will be embedded in Apple’s new XR, XS, and XS Max iPhones.
RE•WORK AI in Finance Summit New York
Last week’s RE•WORK AI in Finance Summit featured 50 speakers and drew 250 technologists to the Westin New York at Times Square to explore the intersection between AI and Fintech.
ECCV 2018 Announces Best Papers
The 15th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) kicked off in Munich, Germany on Saturday. In a keynote speech this morning the ECCV organizing committee announced the conference’s paper submission stats and best paper selections.
Jeff Dean’s 1990 Senior Thesis Is Better Than Yours
Google AI lead Jeff Dean recently posted a link to his 1990 senior thesis on Twitter, which set off a wave of nostalgia for the early days of machine learning in the AI community. Parallel Implementation of Neural Network Training: Two Back-Propagation Approaches may be almost 30 years old and only eight pages long, but the paper does a remarkable job of explaining the methods behind neural network training and the modern development of artificial intelligence.
Tencent Open-Sources Its Massive Multi-Labeled Image Dataset
Tencent AI Lab has announced that it will open source its multi-label image dataset ML-Images and deep residual network ResNet-101 by the end of September. ML-Images contains 18 million images and more than 11,000 common object categories; while ResNet-101 has reached the highest precision level in the industry.
CMU Dean Andrew Moore To Lead Google Cloud AI; Fei-Fei Li Returns to Stanford
Google Cloud announced today that Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Dean Dr. Andrew Moore will join Google Cloud to lead its AI efforts at the end of this year. The company also announced that its Chief AI Scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li will return to Stanford University this fall.
AI’s Growing Role in Musical Composition
As artificial intelligence matures so does its potential in the creative industries — one of which happens to be music production. Although AI is not about to top the hit charts any time soon, algorithms are already creating, performing and even monetizing their own musical compositions. Synced took a look into current AI music techniques and projects from tech giants and startups alike.
Is It Real or Is It Gibson? A New Virtual Environment for AI Training
Researchers from Stanford University and University of California Berkeley have introduced Gibson Environment, a real-world-based virtual environment for training and testing active perception agents.
Andrew Ng Answers CEOs’ FAQ on AI
Founder and CEO of Landing.AI Andrew Ng delivered a keynote speech on “The New Era of Artificial Intelligence Empowerment” today at the 2018 China Artificial Intelligence Summit (CAIS2018) in Nanjing. Ng said that during Landing.AI’s startup phase he often discussed how to implement AI driven solutions across a wide range of situations with CEOs from around the world. Those discussions informed today’s talk.
Megvii UPerNet Performs Multi-Level Visual Scene Interpretation at a Glance
Beijing-based computer vision unicorn Megvii Technology runs the world’s largest face-recognition technology platform, Face++. The company provides innovative solutions for object detection and image recognition using AI-powered techniques.
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.
AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from August W4 – September W1
Anglian Water plans to install an AI-based energy storage machine system in its water treatment facilities. The system will provide a real-time energy consumption balancing service and increase the lifespan of storage machines. The AI system was designed by Open Energi and is expected to be full operational by next year.
NIPS Tickets Sell Out in Less Than 12 Minutes
Registration opened at 8:00 a.m. PDT today for December’s NIPS 2018 (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) in Montreal. The early birds were the fortunate ones this year — as tickets for the main conference were all snapped up less than a dozen minutes later.
Bottle into Basket: Realistic Object Composition with AI
Compositing multiple objects from different sources into one image is a formidable computer graphics challenge involving relative scaling, spatial layout, occlusion, and viewpoint transformation of objects from the 3D world to a 2D image.
Huawei Introduces Kirin 980: 7nm & Many World Firsts
At the IFA 2018 in Berlin today Huawei unveiled the new Kirin 980, the world’s first 7nm smartphone SoC (system-on-a-chip) with a dual-core NPU (Neural Network Processing Unit).
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.
Chinese AI Startup Brings Diabetes Prediction to Shanghai Hospital
Leading Chinese AI startup 4Paradigm has announced a strategic partnership with Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital on AI application in healthcare, especially chronic health conditions.
Google’s AI-Powered Navlekha Boosts Indian Language Online Content
At the Google For India 2018 conference in New Delhi yesterday Google launched its AI platform Navlekha, which enables publishers to make offline Indian language content fully editable and streamlines the online publishing process.
Brown University Paper Shows Research Robot Vulnerability
Google Brain Research Scientist Ian Goodfellow has tweeted an alarm about IoT hacking of a particularly nightmarish type, after Brown University security researchers were able to remotely access and control a robot in a university research lab. The research also showed that many robotic labs worldwide may be vulnerable to such a takeover technique.