AI Technology & Industry Review
Cainiao, the logistics arm of leading Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba Group, hosted the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit (GSLS) in Hangzhou on May 31st. Speaking at the event, Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma called for tens of billions of US dollars in investment to build a national internet-based intelligent logistics backbone in China.
Founded in 2014, ROOBO received US$100 million in Series A financing from iFlytek, and in September 2017 announced B Round financing of US$53 million led by Seven Seas Capital.
The NVIDIA DeepStream Software Development Kit (SDK) was originally released in 2017 to simplify the deployment of scalable intelligent video analytics (IVA) powered by deep learning. Developers can use DeepStream to process, understand and categorize video frames in real time and within stringent throughput and latency requirements.
Cambricon Technologies announced today that it has secured hundreds of million dollars in its Series B funding round, with investments from China’s State-owned Capital Venture, SDIC Venture Capital, China Capital Investment Group, TCL Capital, CITIC Securities, Alibaba VC, Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group and others.
The Baidu Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Lab has released a paper which proposes a neural conditional random field (NCRF) process for cancer metastasis detection on Whole Slide Images (WSIs).
Once upon a time, a cephalopod in Oberhausen, Germany named Paul the Octopus captured human hearts by picking football match winners at the Euro 2008 and 2010 FIFA World Cup with a success rate of 85.7 percent.
We tend to notice the AI that’s in our smartphones, powering our home assistants or piloting self-driving cars. But there is another tech revolution going on — out of sight for most of us — wherein AI and robotics are reinventing entire factories and industrial processes.
The university launched the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute this April, pooling 8 affiliated research centers, 23 labs, and some 100 faculty members into a new Canadian AI supercluster with a focus on operational AI research.
Earlier this week the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2018 announced its Best Two Short Papers, neither of which had yet been published. Today the AI community got its first look at one of the winners when Know What You Don’t Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD was released on arXiv.
Last Saturday night a thief and a document forger went to see Cheung perform in Jinhua City, but instead ended up in handcuffs. They were the latest of five criminal suspects to be apprehended at Cheung concerts over the past two months.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.”
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.
“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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.”
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.
According to an AWS blog post, Apache MXNet now supports Keras 2 and the Keras-MXNet deep learning backend is now available to developers.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Compute Scoreboard:
AlexNet 1
AlphaZero 300,000
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.