AI Technology & Industry Review
The 2018 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) kicked off today in Montréal. In their opening remarks this afternoon the NeurIPS organizing committee announced the conference’s major best paper selections and other awards. Four submissions shared top honors in the best paper category.
The winter holiday shopping season has begun, and just as department stores are dressing up their window displays, so are e-commerce companies working on the product recommendation systems they use to identify and target online shoppers’ wants and needs.
Another video game has succumbed to the strength of artificial intelligence. Uber researchers announced yesterday that their AI has completely solved Atari’s Montezuma’s Revenge, a classic game that involves moving a character from one room to another while killing enemies and collecting jewels in a 16th century Aztec-like pyramid.
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine’s Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI2R) announced today they are sharing a standardized set of AI tools and baselines and MRI data as part of their joint research project fastMRI.
The big news from Google in the last two weeks includes the CEO change in Google Cloud’s business and new efforts in the Google Health department. After three years as the CEO of Google Cloud, Diane Greene announced that she will step down.
ImageNet Pre-training is common in a variety of CV (Computer Vision) tasks, as something of a consensus has emerged that pre-training can help a model learn transferrable information that can be useful for target tasks.
Demand-based price fluctuations are nothing new: even a century ago cinemas charged less for matinee screenings than for more popular evening shows, and room rates at a beach resort naturally varied by season.
American chip company Xilinx is an industry pioneer, with 34 years of experience and counting. And yet the company remains a niche supplier lacking the star power of chip giants like Intel, whose processors are found in most PCs; or Nvidia, whose GPU are the choice for most AI applications.
Japanese global trading giant Mitsui & Co. and leading deep learning startup Preferred Networks (PFN) have announced a joint venture in the US to provide Biomedical/Healthcare Solutions, including Cancer Diagnostic Services, based on deep learning technology.
Intel’s open-source programming function computer vision library OpenCV has released the first stable version in its 4.0 line. The community has waited for more than 3.5 years for the update.
Just two weeks before its 32nd annual meeting and one month after it said it wouldn’t, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has changed in its official acronym — from “NIPS” to “NeurIPS.”
Synced Global AI Weekly Nov 18th
A Google engineer has used AI to enable humans to throw virtual punches and kicks at the tough guys in popular fighting video game Mortal Kombat3. Instead of jabbing at a controller, the user fights via a web camera, with the AI rendering their air strikes to an onscreen clone in real time. You punch and kick, and Kano goes down.
Head of R&D of Google Cloud AI Jia Li has left her position with the company. Li informed Synced in a text message yesterday and the Google team confirmed her departure this morning.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the long-range, human-intelligence-level target of contemporary AI researchers worldwide. It’s believed AGI has the potential to meet basic human needs globally, end poverty, cure diseases, extend life, and even mitigate climate change. In short, AGI is the tech that could not only save the world, but build a utopia.
China’s respected Peking University will open a new campus with a focus on artificial intelligence and engineering, Xinhuanet has reported. The new campus is set to occupy an area of nearly 4.15 million square metres (approximately 128 football fields) and will be located in Changping, a district situated in the suburbs of northwest Beijing.
10 Things You Must Know from November W 1 – W 2
To address the aging problem farmers are turning to “smart agriculture” labour-saving techniques and devices and large-scale production. Artificial intelligence is playing an important role in accelerating and improving the technologies driving Japan’s smart agriculture.
Synced surveyed a number of 2019 AI residency programs that may be of interest to readers.
Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago have published a paper which identifies the risk of bad actors using smartphones’ WiFi signals to “see” through walls and surreptitiously track humans in their private rooms and offices.
In a Politburo group study session last week Chinese President Xi Jinping identified seven sectors where AI promises huge potential, asserting “AI is a key driving force of the new round of scientific revolution and industrial reform.”
The 5th World Internet Conference kicked off in Wuzhen, Zhejiang, China today, with state-run Xinhua News Agency and leading search service provider Sogou jointly unveiling the world’s first “AI Synthetic Anchor,” a highly realistic AI-generated newscaster.
In the 1950s the philosophy informing the futuristic vision of autonomous vehicles was to “make the road guide the car” via electronics and mechanical devices embedded in high tech roadways.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued official guidelines on the patenting of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The guidelines became valid on November 1st, 2018.
Google DeepMind has announced that its project with London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital will now include working with clinicians to predict eye diseases before symptoms occur.
Tencent AI Lab unveiled its new intelligent microscope for pathological analysis yesterday at the Tencent Global Partner Conference in Nanjing. The device represents a huge step in the company’s ongoing commitment to ramp up its R&D in AI + medicine.
RE•WORK organized the second Canadian edition of its RE•WORK Global DL Summit Series in Toronto on October 25 – 26. The event attracted over 600 attendees from more than 20 countries who joined conversations with leading AI and Deep Learning experts.
A founding member of Google Brain and the mind behind AutoML, Quoc Le is an AI natural: he loves machine learning and loves automating things. Le used millions of YouTube thumbnails to develop an unsupervised learning system that recognized cats when he was a Stanford University PhD in 2011.
10 Things You Must Know from October W 3 – W 4
A new paper from Julia Computing Co-Founder and CTO Keno Fischer and Senior Research Engineer Elliot Saba introduces a method and implementation for offloading sections of Machine Learning models written in Julia programming language to TPUs.
In April the NIPS organizing committee announced that it was considering a name change and began collecting opinions and suggestions from the AI research community. Yesterday, the final results of the poll were disclosed along with the announcement that there would be no name change.
Tencent AI Lab has announced an open-source NLP dataset comprising vector representations for eight million Chinese words and phrases. The dataset aims to provide large-scale and high-quality support for deep learning-based Chinese language NLP research in both academic and industrial applications.
Stanford University has announced that the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) and Stanford Vision Lab Dr. Fei-Fei Li will co-direct the California university’s new Human-Centered AI Initiative (HAI).
According to the National Retail Federation there were approximately 3.8 million retail stores that provided more than 42 million jobs in the US in 2016. Retail store sales are forecasted to grow 3.4 percent this year, although this trails the 7-10 percent sales rise expected from E-commerce sites.
Adding Baidu’s voice will broaden PAI’s understanding of global AI technologies and their ethical implications. Chinese companies are pushing forward with a wide adoption of AI technologies across industries from healthcare to transportation and beyond.
The slogan of Arlington, Texas is “American Dream City,” and as residents start their commute this morning some may wonder if they are in fact dreaming. A fleet of futuristic autonomous vehicles today began chauffeuring Arlingtonites along city streets in self-driving startup Drive.ai’s latest public road testing project.
DeepMind announced today that it is open-sourcing its TRFL (pronounced ‘truffle’) library, which contains a variety of building blocks useful for developing reinforcement learning (RL) agents in TensorFlow.
Beijing-based self-driving startup Momenta has closed its latest funding round to boost its total funding to over US$200 million. The company bills itself as China’s most valuable autonomous driving startup, with an estimated worth of US$1 billion.
Xilinx believes one solution is its recently-released, cutting-edge 7nm programmable chip Versal. The chip is based on Xilinx Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) technology and built with 7nm FinFET manufacturing process technology, integrating the Arm Cortex-A72 and Cortex-R5, an AI engine and DSP engine.
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.