AI Technology & Industry Review
Today is April Fool’s Day, and despite Microsoft’s efforts to ban such pranks, many tech companies could not resist joining in the centuries-old spoofing tradition. However, given the already incredible achievements of cutting-edge AI technologies, some of today’s hoaxes actually look pretty convincing.
Baidu has released ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration), a new knowledge integration language representation model which outperforms Google’s state-of-the-art BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) in Chinese language tasks.
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.
At CES 2019 in Las Vegas today Chinese tech giant Baidu introduced Apollo Enterprise, a new suite of customizable autonomous driving and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) solutions for mass production vehicles. The company also released Apollo 3.5, the latest and most sophisticated iteration of its open autonomous driving platform, which now supports complex urban and suburban driving environments.
The team behind MLPerf has announced the machine learning benchmark’s first set of results. MLPerf is a broad machine learning benchmark designed to measure the best performance of each participant with its own resources on a specific task.
Baidu CEO Robin Li today gave the world a peek at China’s first Level 4 autonomous driving passenger cars, co-developed by Baidu and carmaker FAW Hongqi. Li introduced the vehicles at the 2018 Baidu World Conference in Beijing. The cars will enter mass production by the end of 2019, and their road debuts will be in Beijing and FAW Hongqi’s hometown of Changchun.
Baidu today announced plans for a comprehensive self-driving taxi and bus service in Changsha, the capital of southern Hunan province and birthplace of Mao Zedong. Baidu has signed a partnership agreement with the Changsha Municipal People’s Government and Hunan Xiangjiang New Area Development Group that aims to reinvent the local commute.
Today, we are excited to announce STACL (Simultaneous Translation with Anticipation and Controllable Latency), the first simultaneous machine translation system with anticipation capabilities and controllable latency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the Baidu Create 2018 AI developer conference which kicked off today in Beijing, the company announced a series of AI-based innovations and product releases that seem designed to regain public trust.
The Baidu Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Lab has released a paper which proposes a neural conditional random field (NCRF) process for cancer metastasis detection on Whole Slide Images (WSIs).
Microsoft is working on a bias-detecting tool which can alert people if an AI algorithm might be treating them unfairly based on their race or gender. As more and more decisions are being made by or based on AI, the detection of unfair biases has become an important public issue.
Baidu announced this morning that COO Qi Lu will leave his position in July due to “personal and family reasons.” Baidu also promoted Dr. Haifeng Wang to Senior Vice President and General Manager of Baidu AI Group.
Leading television manufacturer Skyworth has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Chinese internet giant Baidu. In the deal announced March 17, Baidu will invest CN¥1.01 billion (US$159.7 million) in Skyworth’s Smart TV unit Coocaa; while its AI assistant system DuerOS will be integrated into Skyworth’s agenda-setting Super AI TV.
In response to a growing shortage of AI talents, Zhang announced that Baidu will train over 100,000 AI talents with expertise in engineering and product development over the next three years.
Chinese media is reporting that Baidu will launch a series of self-driving delivery tests in cooperation with Meituan-Dianping, a group-buying service for local food and retail businesses. The first tests will take place in Xiongan, about 100 kilometres southwest of Beijing…
China’s self-driving industry has just welcomed another major player: Alibaba Group is developing Level 4 autonomous driving technology and is ready to test its self-driving cars on public roads, Chinese media reported today.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a computer simulation as “the use of a computer to represent the dynamic responses of one system by the behaviour of another system modeled after it.”
It came as somewhat unexpected news when on March 22nd the Beijing Municipal Government gave tech unicorn Baidu the green light to test driverless cars on the city’s public roads.
Apollo Scape was released under Baidu’s autonomous driving platform Apollo, which Baidu hopes will become “the Android of the auto industry.” Apollo gives developers access to a complete set of service solutions and open-source codes and…
Today Baidu announced Institute of Quantum Computing, which will conduct applied research and development on software and information technologies
Baidu announced today that self-driving startup JingChi has joined its open-source autonomous driving platform Apollo as a cooperative partner. JingChi’s new CEO Tony Han said in a statement, “JingChi is pleased to join Apollo, and is willing to grow fast with Apollo’s help.”
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.
At CES 2018, 555 companies or organizations participated in the “Automotive/Vehicle Technology” category, 23% of which were companies using autonomous driving technologies.
Yuanqing Lin’s AI startup Aibee.ai — or AI2B, AI to business — has landed US $25 million in angel round funding. The company was founded by the former Director of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), and provides general AI solutions such as computer vision and image and speech recognition for companies in education, finance, retail, real estate and other sectors.
Baidu Research announced talent acquisition of Dr. Kenneth W. Church, Dr. Jun Hua, and Dr. Hui Xiong, and launched two new research labs.
CES exhibitors promoted everything from AI-powered vehicles to smart refrigerators and robot puppies. But the tech driving these diverse products was the same: the virtual assistant, a conversational AI that can understand human speech and generate humanlike responses.
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.”
Myntra Applies AI to Clothing Design; San Jose Negotiates With Partners to Deploy Autonomous Vehicle Transit; Can Google Street View Images See the Future?; Ctrip and Baidu Launch AI Pocket Chinese-English Translator; Canada To Use AI to Track Suicide Trends on Social Media
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.
Datasets such as ImageNet have proved essential for image recognition. Chinese search giant Baidu now wants to bring the same power to conversational AI, the tech behind our rapidly-expanding voice-based human-machine interfaces.
Synced recently attended a Baidu meet-up at the company’s newly-opened Silicon Valley offices, where details were released on the latest iteration of the Apollo platform, Apollo 1.5.
Andrew Ng, one of the top minds in deep learning, loves teaching. And so, the Stanford University professor decided toContinue Reading
Chinese tech companies with high revenue streams are pumping money into R&D and recruiting talents in the US with newly founded facilities.
“The Internet is just an appetizer, whereas AI is the real entrée. The latter is not a part of the internet, not the second stage of the internet; it is technological revolution comparable to the industrial revolution.” – Robin Li, CEO of Baidu.
Rapid rise of AI industry drives extremely huge demand for talents, Chinese AI talents in US are driving attention from worldwide tech giants.