Synced - Part 58

by Synced 2018-06-13 0

Google Opens AI Research Centre in Ghana

Google today announced it is opening its first-ever AI research centre in Africa. The internet giant aims to gather machine learning researchers and engineers in Accra, the capital of Ghana, to facilitate local AI development.

by Synced 2018-06-12 0

AI China

Chinese Computer Vision Unicorn Yitu Closes C+ Round With $200 Million

Chinese computer vision company Yitu announced today that is has secured US$200 million in its C+ funding round, with investments from GC Capital, ICBC International, and SPDB International.

by Synced 2018-06-11 0

AI Research

ACL 2018 Announces Its Five Best Papers

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) will hold its 56th Annual Meeting July 15 – 20 in Melbourne, Australia. Yesterday, the ACL 2018 organising committee announced its three best long papers and two best short papers.

by Synced 2018-06-11 0

AI AI Bi-Weekly

AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from May W4 – June W1

Microsoft is working on a bias-detecting tool which can alert people if an AI algorithm might be treating them unfairly based on their race or gender. As more and more decisions are being made by or based on AI, the detection of unfair biases has become an important public issue.

by Synced 2018-06-10 1

AI China

Alibaba and RoboSense Announce First Solid-State LiDar-Driven Logistics Robot Cart

At the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit (GSLS) in Hangzhou on May 31st, Alibaba’s Cainiao and RoboSense jointly announced the G Plus, which they say is the world’s first unmanned logistics vehicle integrated with solid-state LiDAR.

by Synced 2018-06-08 0

AI United States

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.

by Synced 2018-06-08 0

AI

Google Researchers Hail New AI Principles Designed to Halt AI Weaponization

Over the past three months, criticism and protests have been mounting over Google’s participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program to build machine learning models to detect and categorize objects in drone footage provided by the US Department of Defense.

by Synced 2018-06-07 0

AI China

Alibaba Cloud Farming Automation Wants Pigs That Can Run 200km

At the Computing Conference 2018 Shanghai Summit today, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of its AI program ET Agricultural Brain, a step towards the interactive automation of pig farming, aiming at continuously embedding AI technologies into modern agriculture.

by Synced 2018-06-07 0

AI

Humans Feared Smart Robots Over a Century Before Elon Musk et al Raised the Alarm

The galloping progress in artificial intelligence has stirred up widespread public concern over unemployment and displacement. One can see however that humans have a surprisingly long history of fearing intelligent machines and their potential societal impacts.

by Synced 2018-06-07 5

AI

Law Schools Are Catching Up With AI Legaltech

Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba announced in April that it would launch Alibaba Law School, integrating big data teaching methods with legal education. As we await updates, law programs around the world have already begun re-designing their curriculums to better fit the age of big data and AI.

by Synced 2018-06-05 0

AI Research

Nanjing University Team Introduces Multi-layered Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (mGBDTs)

GcForest, a decision tree ensemble approach that is much easier to train than deep neural networks, has received a lot of attention from researchers since it was introduced by Prof. Zhihua Zhou and his student Ji Feng last year. Based on their previous work, Zhou, Feng and Nanjing University colleague Yang Yu have now proposed Multi-layered Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (mGBDTs).

by Synced 2018-06-05 0

AI United States

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..

by Synced 2018-06-04 1

AI Research Self Driving

A Chinese VC’s Take on Investing in Autonomous Driving

Synced recently spoke with Delian Capital Senior Vice President Xuesong Fan about the current status of automated driving startups. Fan graduated from Harbin Engineering University and worked for years on Chinese satellite engineering. In 2015 came down to earth, applying his experience to self-driving car investments.

by Synced 2018-06-03 0

AI China

Testing Smart Speakers: A Look Inside the Alibaba Acoustic Lab

Each spring, tech hobbyists visit Alibaba for its annual open tour. This May 10, Synced toured the company’s acoustic lab, which is dedicated to R&D for its voice assistant Tmall Genie.

by Synced 2018-06-01 27

AI Emerging Company

LexSet’s AI-Powered Interior Designer

New York-based AI startup LexSet.ai wants to make furniture shopping as simple and fun as playing a kid’s video game, with an AI-powered plug-in interior designer that “analyzes your home…

by Synced 2018-06-01 0

AI Research Self Driving

UC Berkeley Open-Sources 100k Driving Video Database

UC Berkeley’s Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) has open-sourced their newest driving database, BDD100K, which contains over 100k videos of driving experience, each running 40 seconds at 30 frames per second.

by Synced 2018-05-31 0

AI

Pittsburgh Mayor vs Uber: Can Stricter Safety Regulations End the Impasse?

David Danks commented on self-driving vehicle testing on the streets of his Pittsburgh neighbourhood: “They’re boring. You don’t notice them anymore because you see them five to ten times every day. People started to walk more and more frequently directly in front of the Uber cars, disproportionately more than they would ever in front of a human-driven car.”

by Synced 2018-05-31 0

AI China

World #1 AI Startup SenseTime Gets Additional $620 Million

China’s computer vision startup SenseTime today announced it had raised US$620 million in Series C+ funding, a mere 50 days after it closed its Series C funding with US$600 million.

by Synced 2018-05-30 1

AI

Nvidia’s New HGX-2 Cloud Server Could Be a Game Changer for HPC & AI

“The world of computing has changed,” announced Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang this week as he unveiled the new NVIDIA HGX-2 Cloud Server Platform at his company’s GPU Technology Conference in Taiwan.

by Synced 2018-05-29 0

AI Industry United States

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.

by Synced 2018-05-28 0

AI

Andrew Ng, Lior Pachter & Gary Marcus Twitter Joust on AI Radiology

This week Andrew Ng tweeted that his Stanford University team had developed a model that is “comparable to the best radiologist performance in detecting abnormalities on finger and wrist studies. However, model performance is lower than best radiologist performance…

by Synced 2018-05-28 11

AI China

Cleaning-Robot Maker ECOVACS Goes Public on Shanghai Stock Exchange

Suzhou-based Ecovacs Robotics debuted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange today. The floor sweeping and window cleaning robot company issued 40.1 million shares at US $3.13 per share, and plans to use the funds raised via its IPO to produce four million home service robots, build an IoT ecosystem, and expand into the global market.

by Synced 2018-05-28 1

AI AI Bi-Weekly

AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from May W3 – May W4

Fujitsu and Japan Publishing Co. (Nissha) together introduce SeleBoo, an AI solution the leverages information on 3.5 million books and some 3,000 bookstores nationwide to automatically stock books based on characteristics of each bookstore…

by Synced 2018-05-27 0

AI Conference

Element AI’s Fill-in-the-Blanks AI Worksheet

C2 Montreal’s annual artificial intelligence forum was co-hosted this year by Element AI, a local unicorn co-founded by deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio. The theme was Taking the Next Step.

by Synced 2018-05-25 9

AI AI Globalization

GDPR Explanation vs AI Performance?

European netizens spent yesterday clicking through privacy policy updates for their various subscribed platforms and services. That’s because the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — billed as the world’s toughest data use policy — came into effect today.

by Synced 2018-05-25 22

AI United States

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.

by Synced 2018-05-23 0

AI Research

Tencent Launches Super Brain Platform and “Three Nets” Strategy

In his keynote at the Tencent Cloud Service Summit 2018 in Guangzhou today, Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma introduced his company’s new Super Brain platform and a Three Nets cloud concept comprising the “Internet of Things,” “Internet of Humans” and “Internet of Intelligence.”

by Synced 2018-05-23 0

AI Conference

Intel Into AI: New Conference, Chips & Partners

Intel today opened its first-ever AI Developer Conference, AIDevCon, a two-day gathering at San Francisco’s prestigious Palace of Fine Arts. While day one was short on hot announcements, the company did detail some aggressive plans for AI.

by Synced 2018-05-22 0

AI

MXNet Now Supports Keras 2

According to an AWS blog post, Apache MXNet now supports Keras 2 and the Keras-MXNet deep learning backend is now available to developers.

by Synced 2018-05-22 1

AI

AI Community Reacts to Reddit Post: Are Grad Students Reviewing NIPS Papers?

NIPS’ peer reviewer selection process came under question in the AI community last week, when a Reddit user who identified as a predoctoral student posted that they had been selected as a NIPS reviewer, and needed advice on how to properly write paper reviews…

by Synced 2018-05-21 0

AI China

3D Sensor Unicorn Orbbec Closes Over $200 Million Series D

AI startup Orbbec (奥比中光) today closed an over US$200 million Series D funding round led by Ant Finance. Other investors include Saif Partners, Green Pine Capital, Telstra Ventures, and Renzhi Capital.

by Synced 2018-05-19 0

AI AI Globalization China

An Overview of China’s Top-Funded AI Startups

From 2015 – 2017 over 450 Chinese AI startups received funding totaling CN¥30 billion (US$4.8 billion). Although the number of funding rounds declined in 2017, the year’s total funding was more than double the total for 2015 and 2016 combined.

by Synced 2018-05-18 7

AI

Baidu COO Qi Lu Out; Haifeng Wang Named New AI Group Senior VP

Baidu announced this morning that COO Qi Lu will leave his position in July due to “personal and family reasons.” Baidu also promoted Dr. Haifeng Wang to Senior Vice President and General Manager of Baidu AI Group.

by Synced 2018-05-17 64

AI United States

AI Doubling Its Compute Every 3.5 Months

Compute Scoreboard:
AlexNet 1
AlphaZero 300,000

by Synced 2018-05-17 16

AI AI Globalization

AI as the New Oil: Saudi Arabia’s $500 Billion Smart City

The Saudi government says it will pour US$500 billion into this mega-project, with construction expected to begin in 2020. NEOM will occupy 26,500 sq km (10,230 sq miles), 218 times larger than the city of San Francisco.

by Synced 2018-05-16 1

AI AI Globalization

South Korea Aims High on AI, Pumps $2 Billion Into R&D

Eager to kickstart its AI industry, the nation of 52 million yesterday released an ambitious national plan to invest ₩2.2 trillion (US$2 billion) by 2020 to strengthen its AI R&D capability.

by Synced 2018-05-15 3

AI Self Driving

Year-Old Self-Driving Startup Roadstar.ai Gets $128 Million Birthday Present

Shenzhen City-based self-driving startup Roadstar.ai today announced US$128 million in Series A Funding, setting a single round private financing record for China’s autonomous driving industry.

by Synced 2018-05-14 0

AI China

SJTU Develops World’s Largest 3D Photonic Quantum Chip

A Shanghai Jiao Tong University research team has developed the world’s largest-scaled 3D photonic quantum chip that can demonstrate a 2D quantum walk.

by Synced 2018-05-14 0

AI AI Bi-Weekly

AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from May W1 – May W2

Singapore’s NGEE Ann Polytechnic (NP) and London’s Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE) launch an AI in Finance course. The course will provide an overview of AI knowledge in the fintech and digital finance fields.

by Synced 2018-05-13 1

AI

New SlamTech A3 LiDAR: Smaller Size, Bigger View

Founded in 2009, SlamTech is a Shanghai-based laser sensor manufacturer whose main products include the low-cost 360-degree laser scanning ranging radar RPLiDAR, the laser-based modular autonomous positioning navigation solution SLAMWARE, and the ZEUS robot service platform for business.

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