AI Technology & Industry Review
On Sunday, March 10, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft en route to Nairobi crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. It was the second fatal crash in six months involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes.
In a move that has surprised many, OpenAI today announced the creation of a new for-profit company to balance its huge expenditures into compute and AI talents. Sam Altman, the former president of Y Combinator who stepped down last week, has been named CEO of the new “capped-profit” company, OpenAI LP.
The University of California has halted all further subscriptions with one of the world’s largest scholarly publishers, Amsterdam-based Elsevier. The move follows more than six months of negotiations which failed to reach a substantial agreement on securing universal open access to UC research.
A paper recently accepted for ICLR 2019 challenges this with a novel optimizer — AdaBound — that authors say can train machine learning models “as fast as Adam and as good as SGD.” Basically, AdaBound is an Adam variant that employs dynamic bounds on learning rates to achieve a gradual and smooth transition to SGD.
Facebook AI Infrastructure Director Yangqing Jia is leaving his position with the company, a person familiar with the matter told Synced. The Facebook team confirmed his departure yesterday.
Synced Global AI Weekly March 3rd
Beijing winters can be devastating on feral cats, with studies suggesting only about 40 percent make it through the long stretch of cold and harsh weather. A Baidu AI engineer who goes by the alias “Wan’xi” (晚兮) set out to make a difference for vulnerable neighbourhood kitties, and the result is an AI-powered smart shelter system.
The Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) announced this week they have accepted 1300 research papers for CVPR 2019, which will be held June 16 – 20 in Long Beach, California. This year’s submission and acceptance totals both set records for the world’s premier computer vision conference, which had never before accepted more than 1000 papers.
Having notched impressive victories over human professionals in Go, Atari Games, and most recently StarCraft 2 — Google’s DeepMind team has now turned its formidable research efforts to soccer. In a paper released last week, the UK AI company demonstrates a novel machine learning method that trains a team of AI agents to play a simulated version of “the beautiful game.”
10 AI News You Must Know from February W 1 – W 2
The San Francisco-based AI non-profit however has raised eyebrows in the research community with its unusual decision to not release the language model’s code and training dataset. In a statement sent to Synced, OpenAI explained the choice was made to prevent malicious use: “it’s clear that the ability to generate synthetic text that is conditioned on specific subjects has the potential for significant abuse.”
Debating is a hallmark of human civilization, and few do it better than World Debating Championship Finalist Harish Natarajan. Last night at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Natarajan stepped up against an AI-empowered debating machine from IBM.
Synced Global AI Weekly February 10th
AI Guru Andrew Ng announced today that Gopi Prashanth, formerly the Director of Technology for Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at Amazon Go, is joining Landing AI as VP of Engineering.
Synced Global AI Weekly February 3rd
There’s a lot more to a friendly game of Jenga than meets the eye. Strategies are informed by a complex set of tactile and visual stimuli — by touching a block and observing the tower, we not only see but also feel our actions and their consequences. The MIT Jenga robot thus marks an important step in AI’s transition to the physical world.
To help keep our readers abreast of the trend, Synced has identified five high-quality open-source datasets that were released this month (January 2019) and that AI researchers and engineers might find useful in their work.
The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19) is now underway in Hawaii, USA. The program chairs are Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and Zhi-Hua Zhou (Nanjing University, China).
A research team from the University of Rochester, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Adobe Research has proposed a foreground-aware image inpainting system to achieve superior results on challenging cases with complex compositions.
10 AI News You Need To Know From January W 2 – W 3
The announcement seemed too early for April Fools’, but a Yelp spokesperson confirmed with Synced that it was in fact a gag: “we typically use a joking tone when we write our release notes for the app store. Our latest note was meant in jest.”
From Beijing to Barcelona to Buenos Aires, startups like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Swiggy, Zomato and Go-Jek are revolutionizing urban food delivery. In the first quarter of 2018, food delivery accounted for 13 percent of Uber trips worldwide, and that figure is increasing.
Subscribe to Synced Global AI Weekly – CES Day One: AI Is Everywhere – CES 2019: What we’ve seen, and are still seeing,Continue Reading
The amount of news information a person can routinely access these days would have been unimaginable a hundred years ago. But we still have just 24 hours in a day, and only a single pair of eyes to read, and so the question arises: how to get as much valuable news as possible in a limited time?
Boston-based biotech and digital health tech company FDNA has developed a deep learning application, Face2Gene, which can help doctors spot rare genetic disorders.
10 AI News You Need To Know From December W 4 – January W 1
To welcome 2019 with some fresh AI insights, Synced posed three questions to forty researchers and experts at last month’s NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montréal, Canada.
Synced Global AI Weekly January 6th
It did not take long to see the first major AI talent reshuffling of 2019. Multiple sources are now confirming that reputed AI researcher Dr. Tong Zhang left his position as Executive Director of Tencent AI Lab effective December 31. Rumours suggest Zhang might return to teaching.
In the conclusion to our year-end series, Synced spotlights ten datasets that were open sourced in 2018 and takes a peek into the papers behind them. We hope this list can provide the AI community with insight into what 2019 might hold in store for big data.
The number of AI-related research papers has skyrocketed in recent years, outpacing papers from all other academic topics since 2000. This has, not unsurprisingly, resulted in a shortage of qualified peer reviewers in the machine learning community, particularly when it comes to conference paper submissions.
Text-based CAPTCHA remain one of the most visible and commonly used mechanisms for website security. As a sort of online gatekeeper that distinguishes between humans and bots, the little solvable image fields have critical commercial applications in blocking automatic spam and preventing e-transfer fraud; and can also stop bots from spreading fraudulent information, etc.
Japanese AI startup Preferred Networks (PFN) has developed a new processor dedicated to deep learning. The company unveiled the MN-Core chip, board, and server last week at SEMICON Japan 2018 in Tokyo.
The last year saw an explosion of artificial intelligence consumer products, from virtual assistants to image editors to AI mini-games. Synced has selected 10 AI apps that we believe brought a novel approach to tech or task in 2018.
Synced Global AI Weekly December 23rd
This summer Chinese beauty cam and photo editor specialist Meitu Inc. announced an FPGA-accelerated neural network computing project with young startup Snow Lake AI. The collaboration aims to boost computing speed on Meitu mobile phones by 30 times.
At the Huawei Intelligent Computing Conference yesterday in Beijing, the Chinese tech giant announced a new intelligent computing strategy for enterprises, launched the world’s first 7nm ARM-based data centre processor, and introduced a new-generation intelligent computing platform.
Apple is ramping up its ambitious AI strategy, announcing today that John Giannandrea — the former Google AI Chief that Apple poached this April — has joined the company’s executive team as Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
Tsinghua University and Beijing Innovation Center for Future Chips (BICFC) recently published their White Paper on AI Chip Technologies, “to inform readers about the competing technologies and the development trends of AI chips.”
The last 12 months saw unprecedented international public discourse around all things AI. As part of our year-end wrap-up, this week Synced looks at what ten notable people had to say about artificial intelligence in 2018: