AI Technology & Industry Review
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.
A Google Brain research group has published a paper proposing a new method for evaluating generative models by using insights from competitive games between human players.
On August 8th Chinese Q&A website Zhihu — named after the Mandarin phrase “Do You Know?” — announced it had raised US$270 million in its Series E funding round. With 180 million registered users and 110 million answered posts, China’s biggest Q&A website and fourth-largest social media platform’s total valuation now stands at US$2.5 billion.
Three months after Chinese Internet giant Baidu announced that COO Qi Lu will step down in July due to “personal and family reasons”, Lu today unveiled his new adventure: Chief Executive Officer of Y Combinator China.
At the prestigious SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) conference in Vancouver yesterday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced Turing, an eighth-generation GPU architecture introducing ray tracing and AI capability to real-time graphics.
Artificial intelligence can now match or outperform human experts in diagnosis and referral on eye diseases, suggests a new paper from DeepMind. The UK-based, Google-owned research institute today released joint research results with the UK’s Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, which present a new AI technique in the context of OCT imaging. The paper was published on Nature Medicine’s website.
Robert S. Warren, MD is a Professor of Surgery and a specialist in gastrointestinal and liver cancer. Dr. Warren joined UCSF Medical Center in 1988. Highly respected by his peers, Dr. Warren was named to the list of U.S. News “America’s Top Doctors,” a distinction reserved for the top 1% of physicians in the nation for a given specialty.
MORE Health is a Silicon Valley-based company that provides access to top international physicians for patients faced with critical illnesses such as cancer or heart disease. The company was founded in 2013, and recently took a leap forward by partnering with Houston-based Melax Technologies…
The market for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles (AV) will rise from US$3 billion in 2015 to US$96 billion by 2025, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling from Harvard University and Alán Aspuru-Guzik from the University of Toronto have successfully applied machine learning models to speed up the materials discovery process. Their paper Inverse molecular design using machine learning: Generative models for matter engineering was published July 27 in Science Vol. 361.
Chinese AI maker startup Suiyuan Technology announced today that it has completed its Series Pre-A funding with nearly CN¥340 million (US$50 million). Funding was led by Tencent Holdings Ltd, Zhen Fund, Delta Capital, Yunhe Partners and Summitview Capital.
On the same day Baidu was announcing another quarter of strong earnings, the Chinese search engine giant’s stock prices suddenly tumbled on a report American rival Google is planning to launch a new search engine for the Chinese market.
Since 2010, the annual ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge has been the most widely recognized benchmark for testing image recognition algorithms. Tencent Machine Learning picks up the challenge with its new paper Highly Scalable Deep Learning Training System with Mixed-Precision: Training ImageNet in Four Minutes.
Scientists at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin in China have unveiled their prototype of a next-generation exascale supercomputer. The centre says the Tianhe-3 (天河3号) can perform at one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion calculations per second— the threshold for coveted “exascale” status.
ML has revolutionized vision, speech and language understanding and is being applied in many other fields. That’s an extraordinary achievement in the tech’s short history and even more impressive considering there is still no dedicated ML hardware.
At the annual Google Cloud Next conference which kicked off July 24 in San Francisco the company unveiled a series of AI-based product releases and enhancements for its analytics and machine learning tools, additional applications on G Suite, and new IoT products.
Meituan, one of China’s biggest group buying service providers, today announced an ambitious strategy to support autonomous delivery vehicles: “The company is going to use self-driving technologies to build the world’s largest interactive platform for intelligent delivery, and to speed up the development of unmanned delivery technology.”
Chinese IoT startup Tuya Smart has completed its Series C funding with nearly US$200 million, led by Future Fund, NEA, China Broadband Capital, Quadrille Capital and C.M.Capital. The company will apply the funds to its AI+IoT, Smart City, Smart Business and Smart Home technologies.
Facebook is working with a select group of advertisers to create augmented reality ads for its News Feed. When users activate an ad’s tap-to-try AR capability it can display for example how a pair of glasses would look on their face via the user’s webcam and screen. Facebook says it also intends to expand shopping support in Instagram Stories.
Four years after its founding, human-computer interaction and robotics company Rokid held its first major press conference on June 26 in Hangzhou. Dubbed “Rokid Jungle,” Founder and CEO Misa Zhu quipped that the presser was “a combination of Google IO and Apple WWDC.”
Last week, Singh posted a YouTube video, Making Amazon Alexa respond to Sign Language using AI, in which he smoothly communicates with Alexa using sign language. Alexa, which is installed in a laptop with a built-in camera, interprets Singh’s signed queries in real-time, converting them into text and delivering appropriate responses.
Founded in 2016, Foundry.ai provides cloud-based AI-powered software applications for C-Suite executives, particularly those with Forbes Global 2000 companies.
At the Big Data & Spatial Information Expo in Changsha city today, Chinese Internet giant JD demonstrated a series of intelligent technology applications, including Drones, Delivery Robots and Routing Inspection Robots, etc. The company also unveiled a new set of HD Maps.
Facebook AI chief Yann LeCun gave the keynote speech “Learning World Models: the Next Step towards AI” today at the 2018 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Stockholm, Sweden.
At the 56th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Melbourne, Australia this week President Marti Hearst announced the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL).
On July 10th, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang looking on, Siemens AG signed a partnership agreement with Alibaba Cloud — the cloud-computing arm of Internet conglomerate Alibaba — to bring an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) upgrade to China’s manufacturing industry.
Xilinx, the world’s leading designer and supplier of programmable logic devices, today announced its acquisition of DeePhi Tech — a Beijing-based chip startup with a focus on machine learning, specializing in deep compression, pruning, and system-level optimization for neural networks.
The 2018 International Joint Conference On Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) opened today in Stockholm, Sweden, with a record-setting 2,500 attendees gathering at the Stockholm International Fairs convention centre.
Shanghai-based computer vision company Yitu announced today that it has acquired an additional US$100 million in funding, with China Industrial Asset Management as the sole investor this round.
Getting lost can be a hassle when in unfamiliar places, and a common solution is to ask a local for directions. Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) wants to transform their AI learning algorithm into that savvy local guide.
The Government of India announced today that it has signed five memorandums of understanding (MoU) with South Korea to strengthen bilateral ties in the development of innovative technologies. The agreements were concluded at the Fourth India-Korea Science & Technology Ministers Steering Committee Meeting this week in New Delhi.
The Alan Turing Institute in the UK and France’s DATAIA Institute have concluded an arrangement to collaborate in the arena of artificial intelligence and data science, part of a five-year commitment between the two countries to improve digital services.
In the drive to unleash the full potential of artificial intelligence, data transmission has thus far been mostly overlooked. It was not viewed as a serious issue until the recent rise of AI ratcheted up demand for data processing.
At the recent IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Brisbane, Australia, the Best Student Paper award went to ETH Zurich Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL)’s Miguel de la Iglesia Valls et al. for Design of an Autonomous Racecar: Perception, State Estimation and System Integration.
At the recent youth and technology themed 2050 Conference in Hangzhou, Seemmo CTO Jianhui Wang delivered a talk called The Survival Guide for AI Companies.
China now has some 4,040 AI companies, according to a whitepaper released by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology at this weekend’s 22nd China International Software EXPO in Beijing.
OneClick.ai, a startup founded by two former Microsoft engineers in Seattle, is on a mission to make AI more accessible to businesses. “We design, build and deploy custom AI models as a scalable API that can be accessed from anywhere. Just prepare your data, and we’ll take care of the rest,” says co-founder and CTO Ning Jiang.
A business data search firm is bombarding China’s subways and business centres with ads. TianYanCha — literally SkyEye Search — has become the “go to” source for governments, consulting agencies, legal service providers, and media outlets who want to perform comprehensive business background checks.
China’s prestigious Tsinghua University is opening a dedicated AI research centre. The Tsinghua University Institute for Artificial Intelligence will be led by Dean Bo Zhang (张钹) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua Director of Academic Committee Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (姚期智), a Turing Award Laureate. The announcement was made at today’s Tsinghua-Google AI Symposium in Beijing.
IBM today announced it will release the world’s largest facial attribute dataset in order to fight bias in artificial intelligence systems used to recognize human faces. The dataset was built by IBM research scientists and contains one million images, five times the image count of the current largest facial attribute dataset. It will be publically available this fall.