AI & Robotics

Recogni, a startup designing an AI-powered vision recognition module for autonomous vehicles, today announced it raised $48.9 million. The company says the funds will help it bring its perception product to market while expanding the size of its engineering and go-to-market teams. CEO RK Anand believes that self-driving cars have a compute problem. While the models that guide the cars’…

AI shapes people’s lives on a daily basis. It sets prices in retail stores and makes recommendations ranging from movies to romantic partners. But it’s an open question whether AI can become a trusted advisor or even a corrupting force, influencing people’s behavior potentially to the point where they break ethical rules. A fascinating study published by researchers at the University of…

In the data science community, we’re witnessing the beginnings of an infodemic — where more data becomes a liability rather than an asset. We’re continuously moving towards ever more data-hungry and more computationally expensive state-of-the-art AI models. And that is going to result in some detrimental and perhaps counter-intuitive side-effects (I’ll get to those shortly). To avoid…

Since the start of the pandemic, there’s been an influx of papers on epidemic forecasting. Indeed, as of February, a search for “COVID forecasting” on Google Scholar yields over 14,000 results. But while many researchers compare their approaches against traditional modeling strategies, forecasts are highly sensitive to the implementation, which requires a well-defined benchmark. Researchers…