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by Synced 2018-05-11 Number of comments0

AI

Alphabet Chairman: Google Duplex Passes the Turing Test “In a Limited Domain”

Alphabet Chairman and Former Stanford University President John Hennessy said yesterday that the AI voice technology system Google Duplex passes the Turing test in limited conditions.

by Synced 2018-05-11 1

AI China

YITU CIO Hao Lu on AI Startups, Innovation, and Coming Home

While a Computer Science PhD candidate at the University of Washington, Hao focused on intelligent human-computer interaction research, and R&D and evaluation of intelligent systems and their tools.

by Synced 2018-05-11 Number of comments0

AI Research

China’s Voice Tech AI Startup Unisound Raises US$100 Million to Boost IoT Services

Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup Unisound, (a.k.a. Yunzhisheng / 云知声) today announced that it had raised US$100 million in Series C funding, the richest-ever single funding round for a smart voice technology startup.

by Synced 2018-05-10 3

AI

New DeepMind AI Learns to Navigate Like an Animal; Scientists React

Researchers from the British AI company yesterday published a paper on Nature — Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in artificial agents — which proposes an artificial virtual agent that can navigate like mammals.

by Synced 2018-05-10 Number of comments0

AI AI Globalization

Toronto and Tsinghua Universities Connect for “AI Squared” Forum

The 2018 Toronto – Tsinghua AI Squared Forum attracted researchers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students to Canada’s largest city to “discuss opportunities for research collaboration and partnerships in areas of artificial intelligence.”

by Synced 2018-05-09 2

AI Conference

Fei-Fei Li at Google I/O: Humans Overestimate AI in the Short-Term, Underestimate Its Long-Term Potential

Google Cloud Chief Scientist Fei-Fei Li is one of the most popular and influential AI figures today. The woman behind the large-scale image dataset Image.Net is a visionary and an authority on AI’s development.

by Synced 2018-05-09 Number of comments0

AI China

Alibaba Says Its New “Tai Zhang” Is the World’s Most Powerful Quantum Circuit Simulator

Yaoyun Shi’s Team at the Aliyun Quantum Laboratory (AQL) today announced that they have developed the world’s most powerful quantum circuit simulator: “Tai Zhang.”

by Synced 2018-05-08 Number of comments0

AI Conference

Microsoft Courts Developers with AI-Enhanced Tools at Build 2018

Days after Facebook F8 wrapped up in San Jose, the Microsoft Developer Conference Build 2018 opened in Seattle. The conference runs May 7-9 at the Washington Convention Center, and is an opportunity for Microsoft to court developers…

by Synced 2018-05-08 Number of comments0

AI Conference

Google Flexes Its AI Muscles at I/O 2018: An Enhanced Google Assistant, TPU 3.0, ML Kit, Google Lens & Waymo

Google I/O 2018 kicked off today with an uptempo keynote from CEO Sundar Pichai. The tech giant’s annual developer conference is always a platform for big announcements, and this was no exception, with Google gearing up for what promises to be an especially busy year.

by Synced 2018-05-07 Number of comments0

AI Self Driving

Drive.AI Launches Self-Driving Car Service in Texas; Demo Video Now Available (Updated)

Starting in July, a Drive.ai fleet of vehicles will operate with fixed pick-up and drop-off locations in a geofenced area of the city comprising retail, entertainment, and office space.

by Synced 2018-05-05 Number of comments0

AI

AI E-Mail Assistants Streamline Meeting Scheduling

Emailing back and forth to book meetings can be a huge waste of time, especially when people are in different time zones, don’t know each other’s availability, or schedules change, etc.

by Synced 2018-05-04 10

AI Global News

Can AI Reinvent the TV?

Leading television manufacturer Skyworth has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Chinese internet giant Baidu. In the deal announced March 17, Baidu will invest CN¥1.01 billion (US$159.7 million) in Skyworth’s Smart TV unit Coocaa; while its AI assistant system DuerOS will be integrated into Skyworth’s agenda-setting Super AI TV.

by Synced 2018-05-03 1

AI China

Cambricon Unveils its First AI Chip for Cloud Computing

Cambricon today unveiled its Cambricon 1M chip for edge computing, and the MLU100, the first in a new chip series for cloud computing.

by Synced 2018-05-03 Number of comments0

AI China Emerging Company

UBTECH Robotics Gets US$820 Million Funding; Becomes the World’s Most Valuable AI Startup

Chinese AI and humanoid robotic company UBTECH Robotics today announced a staggering US$820 million in Series C funding. With its new estimated value of US$5 billion, Shenzhen City-based UBTECH becomes the world’s most valuable AI startup.

by Synced 2018-05-02 2

AI

ML Community Pledges to Boycott Nature’s New Paywalled Journal

Thousands in the machine learning community say they will boycott Nature’s paywalled Machine Intelligence Journal, which is set for a January 2019 release.

by Synced 2018-05-02 2

AI Conference

Focus on AI at Facebook F8; PyTorch 1.0 Released (Updated)

Facebook generally uses its F8 Developer Conference to introduce new website features. This year however there was a distinct emphasis on “AI,” with the term mentioned more than ever in the event’s keynote speech.

by Synced 2018-05-01 2

AI Emerging Company

AccutarBio Advances AI in Drug Discovery

In December 2017 Chinese pharma tech startup AccutarBio raised US$15 million from IDG Capital, YITU Tech, and ZhenFund.

by Synced 2018-05-01 Number of comments0

AI Self Driving

China’s 350 kph Self-Driving Train Gets Ready to Hit the Rails

On April 29th, the Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) of China’s State Council announced that China Railway Signal & Communication Corp (CRSC) had completed lab testing of their high-speed rail self-driving system (C3 + ATO)…

by Synced 2018-04-30 1

AI Conference

ICLR 2018 Kicks Off in Vancouver

AI researchers are gathering in Vancouver, Canada for the sixth annual ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations). The event starts today and runs to May 3rd at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

by Synced 2018-04-30 Number of comments0

AI AI Bi-Weekly

AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from Apr W 4 – Apr W 5

Google introduces starter kits designed to help people learn and experiment with AI solutions.

by Synced 2018-04-29 Number of comments0

AI

Amazon Patents Provide Clues to New Home Robot

The robotics community is abuzz with speculation following reports that Amazon’s R&D arm Lab126 is hiring senior researchers for a home robot-producing project codenamed “Vesta.”

by Synced 2018-04-29 Number of comments0

AI

The Past, Present & Future of Biotech in Boston

If you are familiar with the biotech industry, you know Cambridge. The small city at the center of the Great Boston Area hosts over 1,000 biotechnology-related companies. Most of these companies cluster around Kendall Square, the same block as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

by Synced 2018-04-27 Number of comments0

AI

Pigs, Cows & Cockroaches on the AI Animal Farm

Farming is becoming a data-centric business powered by artificial intelligence. China’s big tech firms are using neural network-backed computer vision, wearable devices, and predictive analytics algorithms to reimagine pig, chicken, cow, goose, and cockroach farming.

by Synced 2018-04-27 Number of comments0

AI AI Globalization United States

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”.

by Synced 2018-04-26 1

AI AI Globalization China

Baidu to Train 100,000 AI Talents in Three Years

In response to a growing shortage of AI talents, Zhang announced that Baidu will train over 100,000 AI talents with expertise in engineering and product development over the next three years.

by Synced 2018-04-26 Number of comments0

AI United States

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…

by Synced 2018-04-25 5

AI

Liulishuo’s AI App Is Teaching English to 70 Million People

Liulishuo is the AI English teacher on your phone. You don’t need to know how it works, yet it helps you learn English more efficiently than a human teacher,” says Yi Wang, Founder and CEO of Liulishuo — a Beijing-based “AI + language” company…

by Synced 2018-04-25 1

AI

PyTorch Releases Major Update, Now Officially Supports Windows

PyTorch, an open source machine learning library for Python, today announced the release of “PyTorch 0.4.0 with Windows support”.

by Synced 2018-04-24 Number of comments0

AI

New Petuum & CMU Paper Identifies Statistical Correlation Among Deep Generative Models

On April 17th, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Petuum, a Pittsburgh-based CMU spinoff focused on artificial intelligence platforms jointly published On “Unifying Deep Generative Models”.

by Synced 2018-04-23 2

AI

McKinsey Report: AI Promises Added Value of up to US$5.8 Trillion

The McKinsey Global Institute this month released the report “Notes From the AI Frontier Insights From Hundreds of Use Cases”. The 36-page discussion paper surveys cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, and discusses how they can be integrated or transformed into practical applications across 19 selected industries.

by Synced 2018-04-21 13

AI Industry

AI in the Media and Entertainment Industry

The Media and Entertainment industry is a cornerstone of contemporary human culture, delivering films, TV shows, advertisements and more in a multitude of languages across a wide variety of devices.

by Synced 2018-04-20 1

AI Research

Tomaso Poggio on Deep Learning Representation, Optimization, and Generalization

While Poggio the teacher has taught some extraordinary leaders in AI, Poggio the scientist is renowned for his theory of deep learning, presented in papers with self-explanatory names: Theory of Deep Learning I, II and III.

by Synced 2018-04-20 6

AI China

Baidu to Test Self-driving Food Delivery with Meituan

Chinese media is reporting that Baidu will launch a series of self-driving delivery tests in cooperation with Meituan-Dianping, a group-buying service for local food and retail businesses. The first tests will take place in Xiongan, about 100 kilometres southwest of Beijing…

by Synced 2018-04-20 2

AI China

China’s “National AI Team” Gets Busy

A phrase that’s cropping up a lot in Chinese media these days is “National AI Team (人工智能国家队).” While this may suggest a squad of scientists heading off to some sort of AI Olympics, it rather refers to a new class of AI companies that are either backed by national institutes or closely integrated into government-funded programs.

by Synced 2018-04-20 3

AI China Research

Tencent’s Smart Speaker Tingting Brings WeChat to the Entire Family

Tencent today officially launched its first-ever smart speaker, Tencent Tingting (腾讯听听), which can send or receive voice messages via WeChat.

by Synced 2018-04-19 1

AI China

Alibaba Unveils Ali-NPU; Acquires Chipmaker C-Sky Microsystems(Updated)

Alibaba’s R&D arm DAMO Academy announced yesterday that it is developing a new neural network chip called Ali-NPU for AI inferencing in the field of image processing, machine learning, etc.

by Synced 2018-04-17 1

AI United States

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.

by Synced 2018-04-16 Number of comments0

AI Self Driving

Alibaba Gears Up for Self-Driving Road Tests

China’s self-driving industry has just welcomed another major player: Alibaba Group is developing Level 4 autonomous driving technology and is ready to test its self-driving cars on public roads, Chinese media reported today.

by Synced 2018-04-16 Number of comments0

AI AI Bi-Weekly

AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from Apr W 2 – Apr W 3

IBM announces a four-year program in collaboration with Calgary-based Natural Resources Solutions Center to help oil and gas companies with sustainability and efficiency.

by Synced 2018-04-16 Number of comments0

AI

ICLR 2018’s Best Papers: Variant Adam, Spherical CNNs, and Meta-Learning

Leading machine learning conference International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) has named its best research papers of the last year: On the convergence of Adam and Beyond, Spherical CNNs, and Continuous Adaptation via Meta-learning in Nonstationary and Competitive Environments.