AI Adds Colour to Grandma’s Cherished Memories
Tencent Youtu — literally translated as “image optimization lab” — is the image processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, and data mining research arm of Chinese tech giant Tencent Group.
Tag: AI
Baidu AI Can Clone Your Voice in Seconds
Baidu’s research arm announced yesterday that its 2017 text-to-speech (TTS) system Deep Voice has learned how to imitate a person’s voice using a mere three seconds of voice sample data.
It’s All in the Eyes: Google AI Calculates Cardiovascular Risk From Retinal Images
Now Google has introduced a surprising new use for retinal images: combined with artificial intelligence, they can also predict a patient’s risk of heart attack or stoke…
Celebrating Chinese New Year 2018: Synced Announces 30 Best AI Use Case Award
Synced celebrates the Chinese New Year 2018 by announcing our 30 Best AI Use Case Award. The Award recognizes companies that have applied AI in various industries or organizations.
China’s Lunar New Year’s Gala Wowed Watchers with AI Innovations
China is determined to win the global AI race. The country continues to spark technological breakthroughs and establish AI-powered infrastructures for its cities and transportation networks.
Augmenting Virtual Assistants with Personality and Personalization
People care most about having good content and being recognized by virtual assistants, the AI-powered human-machine conversational interfaces.
China’s AI-powered NetEase is Music to Your Ears
Chinese netizens are all ears for the company’s “hearty” AI-powered music recommendations. In an interview with Synced, NetEase Data Scientist Jia Xu and Product Manager Bowen Shen explained the NetEase system, which learns how to predict what songs will resonate with a user’s particular taste in music…
Boston Dynamics Robodog Opens a Door, Owns the Internet
SoftBank-owned robot-maker Boston Dynamics is once again wowing the internet. Its latest creation is a robodog named SpotMini which can deftly open doors with its head-mounted gripper arm…
Arm Launches Project Trillium, Two AI Processors
Ninety percent of AI-enabled devices shipped today are based on architecture developed by Arm, a leading UK-based chip intellectual property (IP) provider known for its CPU and GPU processors…
Google’s TPU Chip Goes Public in Challenge to Nvidia’s GPU
Google announced this morning that its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) — a custom chip that powers neural network computations for Google services…
Safety Regulations for Self-Driving Cars in America
California has hosted public road testing for more than 180 self-driving vehicles from 27 companies.
Alibaba City Brain Goes Rural: AI Pig Farming in Sichuan
Sichuan pig farming corporation Dekon Group and pig feed supplier Tequ Group’s new partnership with Alibaba Cloud to apply its AI-powered “ET Brain” to pig farming. The trio are investing tens of millions of USD in the project, which was announced on February 6, 2018.
Volvo’s Roadmap to Digitalization
The Volvo Concierge Services platform enables users to smoothly coordinate with third-party providers to book services such as on-the-spot fuel-ups or car washing.
Google Cloud’s Jia Li on AutoML’s First 30 Days
Who is using AutoML Vision, the “simple, secure and flexible ML service that lets you train custom vision models for your own use cases” that Google launched last month?
Program Lead Jake Lussier on Udacity’s New Flying Car Nanodegree
Online education platform Udacity thrilled flying car enthusiasts with its announcement of the world’s first flying car program.
Chinese-American Startup Partnership Promises a Self-Driving Electric SUV by 2020
Chinese electric car startup BYTON says it will produce a self-driving SUV by 2020. The bold pledge came with the announcement of a partnership with Aurora…
Spotlight on Eight African AI Startups
Synced has identified eight exciting startups bringing AI to Africa’s education, finance, and health revolutions.
Woebot Delivers a Daily Dose of Mental Wellness
Woebot is designed to identify, evaluate and treat mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and stress disorders based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), one of the most widely used mental health treatment frameworks.
The AAAI 2018 Keyword is “Learning”
AI academics from around the world are pouring into New Orleans for the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
CES 2018 Autonomous Driving Tech Review
At CES 2018, 555 companies or organizations participated in the “Automotive/Vehicle Technology” category, 23% of which were companies using autonomous driving technologies.
Will New EU Regulations Starve Data-Hungry Deep Learning Models?
The GDPR mandates that all customers or users are entitled to receive “specific information” regarding the decision. This raises the issue of AI interpretability, especially in deep learning systems.
Geoffrey Hinton on Images, Words, Thoughts, and Neural Patterns
The “Godfather of AI” Professor Geoffrey Hinton told a packed room of professionals and students today that machine learning is reinventing our relationship with our own thoughts.
Andrew Ng Launches $175 Million AI Fund
Andrew Ng today announced the foundation of “AI Fund,” aimed at supporting startups that can transform businesses with AI technologies.
Kuala Lumpur Gets Alibaba AI’s First Brain Implant
Alibaba’s cloud computing division Alibaba Cloud announced today that its AI-powered “ET City Brain” will be deployed in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in partnership with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), the country’s digital economy development agency, and Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL).
Tech Giants Talk Conversational AI at RE•WORK
At the RE•WORK AI Assistant Summit San Francisco yesterday, research scientists and engineers from Amazon, Apple and Google spoke on how they are addressing challenges and evolving their conversational AI systems.
China Aims to Get the Jump on AI Standardization
China has just released its “Artificial Intelligence Standardization White Paper.” The 98-page document was edited by the China Electronics Standardization Institute under the guidance of the National Standardization Management Committee Second Ministry of Industry.
Arm Accelerates its AI Efforts
Jem Davies, General Manager of the ARM Machine Learning Group, sat down with Synced to outline his company’s ambitious roadmap for machine learning development.
Amazon Go vs Alibaba Tao Cafe: Staffless Shop Showdown
Amazon and Alibaba’s brick-and-mortar-but-no-staff shops offer very different user experiences. To bring you first-hand feedback, Synced visited them.
Baidu Research Adds Elite AI Talents, New Labs
Baidu Research announced talent acquisition of Dr. Kenneth W. Church, Dr. Jun Hua, and Dr. Hui Xiong, and launched two new research labs.
CES 2018 Just Got AI’ed
Algorithms are taking center stage at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018, as exhibitors strive to out “smart” each other with AI-powered gadgets and appliances.
Baidu at CES: Developing AI at “China Speed”
China is undergoing a revolutionary transformation as AI rapidly penetrates industries from transportation to communication — a growth rate phenomenon that Baidu Group President & COO Qi Lu calls “China speed.”
Tech Giants Are Gobbling Up AI Startups
It’s no surprise that tech companies are eager to stay abreast of AI developments. When they’re not luring AI talents with huge compensation packages, they’re on the lookout for AI startups suitable for acquisition.
2017 in Review: 10 Leading AI Hubs
According to a study by Wuzhen Institute, there are 2,905 artificial intelligence companies in the United States, 709 in China, 366 in Britain, 233 in India, 228 in Canada, 173 in Israel, and 160 in Germany.
Google Opens China AI Center
Google is opening an artificial intelligence research lab in Beijing, Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud Fei-fei Li announced today at the Google Developer Conference in Shanghai.
LeCun vs Rahimi: Has Machine Learning Become Alchemy?
Google’s Ali Rahimi put it bluntly in his NIPS presentation: “Machine learning has become alchemy.” The words triggered Facebook’s Yann LeCun to fight back.
China’s Smart Speaker Market Heats Up
The lack of Mandarin interface in Echo and Google Home has prompted a number of Chinese companies to get in the game with their own smart speakers.
Vinci Sets the Tone for Smart Headphones
This week, Synced sat down with Wu, who is now Inspero’s CTO, and tried out the Vinci, the standalone intelligent headphones.
iPhone X Mask Dupe Raises AI Security Concerns
Machines have already beaten humans in image recognition accuracy, but they are also susceptible to errors. Last Friday, Vietnamese company Bkav announced they had outsmarted the AI-powered image recognition machine that unlocks the new iPhone X.
Video Understanding is a New Vista for AI
The success AI has achieved in image recognition has prompted tech companies to explore the new field of video understanding, in which machines are trained to answer questions like “Who is in this video?” or “What are the cats in the video doing?”
Hinton Proposes CapsNet
Today, the “Godfather of Deep Learning” Dr. Geoffrey Hinton published the paper Dynamic Routing Between Capsules on Arxiv. This is being hailed as a revolutionary work that could totally revamp computer vision research.