AI Technology & Industry Review
The company made a series of AI-related announcements today at the Huawei Connect 2018 Conference in Shanghai, introducing two AI chips and a machine learning framework. Huawei’s AI push is expected to intensify its battle with domestic rivals Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu in the AI market.
A typical JD motorcycle deliveryman in Shanghai delivers 100 packages per day, racing along the city’s waterfront, navigating tiny alleyways and darting between the city’s skyscrapers. That may seem impressive but JD is still striving to improve motorcycle delivery efficiency with new tech — much of it AI-powered.
Yi Wang will never forget Thursday, September 27, 2018. That’s the day that Liulishuo, the AI-driven English tutoring startup he founded in 2012, went public on the Nasdaq (NYSE:LAIX), raising US$72 million under an estimated market cap of US$600 million.
Leading Graph Database company Neo4j organized GraphConnect 2018 on September 20 in New York City to introduce their latest products and developments — foremost among them the new Neo4j 3.5 Graph Platform.
This August, thousands of Chinese middle school students participated in a two-day “AI teacher vs. Human teacher” competition. Students were separated into two groups: one received math tutoring from experienced teachers, the other from an intelligent learning system.
At the first-ever PyTorch Developer Conference today in San Francisco, Facebook released a preview of PyTorch 1.0, its open source AI software framework designed to trailblaze “a seamless path from AI research to production.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Leading Chinese AI startup 4Paradigm has announced a strategic partnership with Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital on AI application in healthcare, especially chronic health conditions.
Electrifying an entire dance club is easy if you have killer moves like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. But for the rest of us, not so much. We may shake our butts and swing our arms, but let’s face it: some people just can’t dance. But now there’s hope, thanks to AI.
CGI is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary culture. Filming for example a battle scene between warriors and mystic creatures in Wakanda involves much more than just dressing and directing actors.
Last August at the Dota 2 International tournament in Seattle, OpenAI introduced an AI bot that upset the world’s top 1v1 human player. The San Francisco-based AI research institute is now at the International 2018 in Vancouver, where their team of state-of-the-art bots is battling professional human teams in a highly anticipated best-of-three 5v5 Dota 2 showdown.
At a press conference in Beijing today US chipmaker Intel and Chinese tech pioneer ByteDance announced they will collaborate on setting up an AI research lab, talent training, and development of AI applications.
Nvidia and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have open-sourced their video-to-video synthesis model. By using a generative adversarial learning framework, the method can generate high-resolution, photorealistic and temporally coherent results with various input formats, including segmentation masks, sketches, and poses.
Blockchain hardware, software, and services company Bitmain confirms it will build a data center in Rockdale, Texas and invest US$500 million in the United States over the next seven years. Bitmain will launch a local training program and hire more than 400 employees.
Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang today unveiled the company’s long-waited next-generation graphic processing unit (GPU) cards for games, Geforce RTX.
Computers are now excellent at recognizing images of human faces, cats and dogs — but struggle when it comes to detecting continuous actions, for example determining if a character in a video might be “dancing the tango.” Computers also fall short in detecting nuanced expressions of human emotions.
New York-based investment corporate D. E. Shaw Group yesterday announced that esteemed University of Washington Professor of Computer Science Pedro Domingos will join the firm as a Managing Director and lead its new Machine Learning Research Group.