If you ever wondered how we’ll populate the metaverse, look no further than Hour One, an Israeli startup that is making replicas of people with AI avatars. These avatars can be a near-perfect visual likeness of you and speak with words fed to them by marketers who want to sell you something. An avatar can speak on your behalf in a digital broadcast when you’re at home watching TV.
Such…
Machine learning groups form Consortium for Python Data API Standards to reduce fragmentation
August 18, 2020
Deep learning framework Apache MXNet and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) today launched the Consortium for Python Data API Standards, a group that wants to make it easier for machine learning practitioners and data scientists no matter which framework, library, or tool…
Browsers including Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome have begun providing protections against cross-site tracking methods employing cookies and IP addresses. It’s an encouraging development, but there’s a fear it will push trackers to adopt more opaque, “stateless”…
Ahead of the Hot Chips conference this week, photonics chip startup Lightmatter revealed the first technical details about its upcoming test chip. Unlike conventional processors and graphics cards, the test chip uses light to send signals, promising orders of magnitude higher performance and efficiency.
The technology underpinning the test chip — photonic integrated circuits — stems from a…
This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series: Automation and jobs in the new normal.
In early spring 2020, Smithfield, Tyson, and other industrial food suppliers warned that upwards of millions of pounds of meat could disappear from the U.S. supply…
At the Hot Chips 2020 conference, which was held virtually this year, IBM announced the IBM Power10. It’s the successor to the Power9 and represents the next generation of the company’s processor family. IBM claims that the Power10 delivers up to three times greater…
Aside from staying alive and healthy, the biggest concern most people have during the pandemic is the future of their jobs. Unemployment in the U.S. has skyrocketed, from 5.8 million in February 2020 to 16.3 million in July 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s not only the lost jobs that are reshaping work in the wake of COVID-19; the of many of the remaining jobs has…
Using AI to uncover “risky” behaviors among parolees is problematic on many levels. Nevertheless, researchers will soon embark on an ill-conceived effort to do so at Tippecanoe County Community Corrections in Indiana. Funded by a grant from the Justice Department and in…
A team of AI researchers have created a way for humans to train robots to use cheap, freely available materials in order to scale the collection of training data and enable widespread adoption. The experiment utilizes reacher-grabber devices on a pole, the kind people with…
Researchers use AI classifiers to expose potential vulnerabilities in Microsoft remote desktop
August 13, 2020
Microsoft’s encrypted Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) contains vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to detect activities, keystrokes, and mouse movements in 30-second traces. That’s according to a preprint study from researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, who claim the protocol’s design exposes “fine-grained” actions on which machine learning models could be…
