AI & RoboticsNews

An AI reporter’s favorite books of 2020

The older I get, the more I wish I could stop time so I could read more books. Books that earn my time and attention are those that promise to enrich me as a person and deepen my understanding of AI for the work I do as senior AI staff writer at VentureBeat. This year, I read more than a dozen books, some published in recent months and others in years past, like The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu, a…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Let this eerily accurate AI dunk on your Spotify habits

If you’re a Spotify user, you might have checked out your 2020 listening data with Spotify Wrapped. It’s a straightforward celebration of your year in music and podcasts, a judgement-free overview of what you listened to. The Pudding, however, is distorting that…
AI & RoboticsNews

DeepMind's latest AI can master games without being told their rules

In 2016, Alphabet’s DeepMind came out with AlphaGo, an AI which consistently beat the best human Go players. One year later, the subsidiary went on to refine its work, creating AlphaGo Zero. Where its predecessor learned to play Go by observing amateur and professional matches, AlphaGo Zero mastered the ancient game by simply playing against itself. DeepMind then created AlphaZero, which…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Researchers release Melinda dataset to train AI systems for analyzing study methods

Curating biological studies is an important yet labor-intensive process performed by researchers in life sciences fields. Among other tasks, curators must recognizing experiment methods, identifying the underlying protocols that net the figures published in research articles. In other words, “biocurators” need to take figures, captions, and more into their consideration and make decisions…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Dubber acquires Speik to expand its AI call-recording service

Dubber Corporation Ltd., a provider of unified call recording and analytics software based in Australia, revealed that it’s acquiring Speik, a U.K.-based maker of call recording software that complies with Payment Card Industry (PCI) security mandates. Valued at $38 million, the deal is part of Dubber’s effort to create a widely available cloud-based voice recording service infused with…
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