Baidu’s ERNIE 2.0 Beats BERT and XLNet on NLP Benchmarks
Today, the research division of the Chinese search giant released their updated ERNIE 2.0, a pretrained language understanding model with significant improvements.
Tag: China
Huawei’s First 5G Phone, the Mate 20 X 5G, Hits the Chinese Market
The wait is over. This morning Huawei released its first 5G phone, the Mate 20 X 5G, in China. The phone was launched earlier this year in Switzerland and several other countries.
Animated Selfies and Other AI Image Processing Magic
The new AI-powered Animate feature on Meitu’s signature selfie app brings still pictures to life with floral auras, resplendent butterflies, flowing hair, petal bursts, flame nebulas, fireworks and more.
Few-Shot and Federated Learning Among Trending Topics Discussed at Top Chinese AI Conference Shibei·GMIS 2019
The Shibei·GMIS 2019 Global Machine Intelligence Summit, a top-tier Chinese artificial intelligence conference, took place July 19 – 20 at the Shanghai Marriott Hotel Parkview.
Alibaba, Baidu and Xiaomi Open-Source Their SOTA Research
Synced Global AI Weekly July 7th
Baidu PaddlePaddle DL Framework & Huawei Kirin SoC: A Formidable Partnership
Baidu’s homegrown deep learning framework PaddlePaddle will empower Huawei’s Kirin smartphone chips, the company announced at the Baidu Create 2019 AI Developer Conference that kicked off today in Beijing.
Huawei 7nm Kirin 810 Beats Snapdragon 855 and Kirin 980 on AI Benchmark Test
At Huawei’s Nova 5 Series smartphone launch event yesterday the Chinese tech giant unveiled its new 7nm SoC, the Kirin 810.
AI Restores Photos of ’90s Hong Kong Film Stars
Earlier this month restored images of iconic Hong Kong film stars like Bridget Lin and Joey Wong began circulating on Chinese social media. An AI-enabled touch-up process revealed distinct facial contours and features in old and fuzzy or low-res photos, revisiting the comely visages that made the public fall in love with these ’90s stars.
Close Your Eyes and I’ll Scan You: Chinese Face Payment System Vulnerabilities
Everyone, however, sleeps. And Synced has found a simple way to challenge cutting-edge facial recognition security scans: just point a camera at the unaware subject while they are sleeping.
China Prohibits ‘Deepfake’ AI Face Swapping Techniques
China’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress has amended its Civil Code Personality Rights (Draft) to stipulate that no organization or individual may infringe the portrait rights of others by means of digital technology forgery.
A Look at China’s Growing Semiconductor Industry
In February Chinese AI semiconductor maker Horizon Robotics raised US$600 million in Series B funding from SK China, SK Hynix and big auto groups, making it the first in its field to reach the staggering valuation of US$3 billion.
Beep! Beep! Huawei Gets Into Car Systems
At the Auto Shanghai 2019 Key Tech Forum yesterday Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu unveiled the company’s plan to provide information and communication technology (ICT) to OEMs to help them build better vehicles.
Roadstar.ai: The Rise and Fall of a Self-Driving Startup
A year ago, Shenzhen-based self-driving start-up Roadstar.ai was cruising along promisingly. In May 2018 the company announced a US$128 million funding round led by Wu Capital and state-backed Shenzhen Capital Group — one of the largest autonomous driving investments ever in China.
Megvii Introduces Single-Path, One-Shot Method for NAS Design
Chinese AI unicorn Megvii Technology has proposed a new single-path, one-shot NAS design approach which makes various applications more convenient and achieves start-of-the-art performance on the large dataset ImageNet.
Elite Chinese Music School Now Offers PhDs in Music + AI
Now, China’s elite Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) has announced it is recruiting PhDs for a new Music AI and Information Technology program. CCOM says prospective students should have a background in Computer Science, AI, or Information Technology; along with musical abilities (instrument playing or singing).
iFLYTEK & HIT Reading Comprehension Model Betters Humans, Tops SQuAD2.0 Leaderboard
Chinese AI company iFLYTEK has bested the SQuAD2.0 challenge once again. The model “BERT + DAE + AoA” submitted by the joint iFLYTEK Research and HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology) laboratory HFL outperformed humans on both EM (exact match) and F1-score (fuzzy match) indexes to top the SQuAD2.0 leaderboard.
Robots Vs Robocalls
Robots pitching politics, charities, sales, surveys, and scams of every stripe and in every tongue. Increasingly that’s the voice on the other end of a global citizen’s next incoming telephone call.
Word Influence Analysis Tool ‘SyncedLeg’ Open-Sourced
SyncedLeg is a tool designed to help with that by mining influential keywords from the corpus with traffic data. A team of Synced interns developed the tool over an internal two-day Hackathon, naming it after their team “机器之腿” (“Machine’s leg” in Chinese).
Baidu’s ERNIE Tops Google’s BERT in Chinese NLP Tasks
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.
AI Biweekly: OpenAI Launches For-Profit Arm; Patents Pave a Digital Empire
10 AI News You Must Know From March W1 – W2
Bengio at Tsinghua University on Maturing Deep Learning and BabyAI
Last November Synced ran an interview with Yoshua Bengio, in which the deep learning maverick, Université de Montréal Professor and MILA Scientific Director discussed his research and commented on the current state of deep learning and AI.
The Tech Inside a Baidu Engineer’s AI-Powered Cat Shelter
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.
Beijing AI Targets “Hospital Scalpers”
It’s not uncommon to find scalpers at concert halls and sporting events, hawking admission tickets at inflated prices. Chinese hospitals however have been invaded by a more problematic breed of scalper — those who deal in the appointment registration tokens that hospitals use to process patient visits.
New Funding Pushes Chinese AI Chipmaker Horizon Robotics’ Valuation to $3Bn
Beijing-based AI chip startup Horizon Robotics today announced a staggering US$600 million in Series B funding led by South Korea conglomerate SK Group. The investment brings Horizon’s value to an estimated US$3 billion, making it the world’s highest-valued AI chip startup.
NAS-Generated Model Achieves SOTA In Super-Resolution
In its new paper Fast, Accurate and Lightweight Super-Resolution with Neural Architecture Search, Xiaomi’s research team introduces a deep convolution neural network (CNN) model using a neural architecture search (NAS) approach. Performance is comparable to cutting-edge models such as CARN and CARN-M.
Lunar New Year, AI Style
Welcome to the Year of the Pig! Lunar New Year is China’s biggest holiday, with this year’s celebrations picking up during the “Little Year” period in late January, peaking February 4 for New Year’s Eve, and continuing through February 19.
David vs Goliath: Clarifai CEO Matt Zeiler Takes On the Tech Giants
This is the first installment of the Synced Lunar New Year Project, a series of interviews with AI experts reflecting on AI development in 2018 and looking ahead to 2019. In this article, Synced chats with Clarifai Founder and CEO Matt Zeiler on recent progress in computer vision and his company’s plans for the future. Founded in New York in 2013, Clarifai produces advanced image recognition systems.
AI Is Personalizing Hotel Services
Synced surveyed several “future hotels” that are already applying AI in hospitality, to see how the tech can provide guests with a unique and satisfying experience.
World First: Huawei Unveils Groundbreaking 5G Chipset “Tiangang”
Huawei has announced the world’s first core chip for 5G base stations. The Chinese tech giant unveiled the new “Tiangang” chipset today in Beijing.
AI in 2018 Review; What to Expect in 2019
To welcome 2019 with some fresh AI insights, Synced posed three questions to forty researchers and experts at last month’s NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montréal, Canada.
Breaking Down the Tencent 2018 Cybersecurity Report
At the 2018 World AI Conference in Shanghai, Tencent Cybersecurity Group and the Cybersecurity Innovation Institute co-published their AI Empowers Cyberspace Security: Patterns and Practices report. The work was sponsored by the Shanghai government.
Tencent AI Lab Director Leaves
It did not take long to see the first major AI talent reshuffling of 2019. Multiple sources are now confirming that reputed AI researcher Dr. Tong Zhang left his position as Executive Director of Tencent AI Lab effective December 31. Rumours suggest Zhang might return to teaching.
Tencent AI Tops Human Players in “Arena of Valor”
In the latest of a string of bot versus human video game showdowns, Tencent AI Lab’s Strategical Collaborative AI “Juewu” has beat the world’s top human player in the mobile Real Time Strategy (RTS) game “Arena of Valor.” Tencent published the results in the paper Hierarchical Macro Strategy Model for MOBA Game AI.
Huawei Announces New AI Computing Strategy & Unveils World’s First 7nm ARM Data Centre Chip
At the Huawei Intelligent Computing Conference yesterday in Beijing, the Chinese tech giant announced a new intelligent computing strategy for enterprises, launched the world’s first 7nm ARM-based data centre processor, and introduced a new-generation intelligent computing platform.
AI Job Openings Surge 35X Since 2015
Over the last several years the world has witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in artificial intelligence research, development and deployment. There are now AI startups galore, most traditional industries are testing AI transformations, and governments around the world are writing ambitious strategic plans for the tech.
Chinese AI Unicorn Megvii Targets $500 Million in New Funding
According to Reuters, leading Chinese AI unicorn Megvii Technology (also known as Face++) has begun raising a new round of funding with a target of US$500 million. This would will bring the company’s value to an estimated US$3.5 billion.
Chinese Publisher Introduces AI Textbooks For Preschoolers
Photos of an artificial intelligence textbook for Chinese preschoolers have gone viral. Artificial Intelligence Experiment Materials is a 33-volume textbook series aimed at Chinese students from kindergarten to high school that was published this July by Henan People’s Publishing House.
Shanghai Tests Graph Recurrent Neural Networks for Traffic Prediction
A new study from Shanghai’s Transportation Information Center (STIC) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University uses Graph Recurrent Neural Networks (GRNN) for high-accuracy traffic prediction and city traffic control.
Peking University to Open New Campus With AI Focus
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.
Seven Sectors Where AI Can Make Transformative Changes In China
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.”