AI & Robotics

Researchers at Google say they’ve developing an AI system that can automatically convert webpages into short videos. It extracts assets like text and images and their design styles including fonts, colors, and graphical layouts from HTML sources and organizes the assets into a sequence of shots, maintaining a look and feel similar to the source page as it does so. Google envisions the system…

Synthetic humans are a thing of the future, and the latest project to come along in pursuit of that is Alethea AI, a startup that can create photorealistic AI-generated avatars from a single photo. The company is unveiling its AI Avatar Studio today. You can see what they did with my photo, with my permission, in the video embedded in this story. They made me sing the I See Fire song from The…

Water analytics startup Ketos today announced it raised $18 million in funding. The capital will be put toward further advancing the company’s cloud-based software platform and hardware, as well as expanding Ketos’ team ahead of future growth. It takes 13,737 to 21,926 gallons of water to produce a car, according to the Grace Communications Foundation. Leather shoes require roughly 3,626…

Facebook launched an independent oversight board and recommitted to privacy reforms this week, but after years of promises made and broken, nobody seems convinced that real change is afoot. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to decide shortly whether to sue Facebook, sources told the following a $5 billion fine levied last year. In other investigations, the Department of Justice filed…