The spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has prompted state and local governments around the U.S. to institute shelter-in-place orders and business closures. As millions suddenly find themselves confined to their homes, the shift has strained not only internet service providers, streaming platforms, and online retailers, but the utilities supplying power to the nation’s…
As pandemic-driven social distancing and self-isolation measures permeate society, safeguarding vulnerable people’s mental and physical well-being is more important than ever. The vast majority of elderly people would rather “age in place” in their own homes than move…
Researchers from Google Brain, Intel, OpenAI, and top research labs in the U.S. and Europe joined forces this week to release what the group calls a toolbox for turning AI ethics principles into practice. The kit for organizations creating AI models includes the idea of…
Language may help AI navigate new environments
April 18, 2020
In a new study published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, scientists at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute, an independent nonprofit dedicated to advancing AI, propose BabyAI++, a platform to study whether descriptive texts help AI to generalize across dynamic environments. Both it and several baseline models will soon be available on GitHub.
One of the most powerful…
AI Weekly: When to ship or shelve a coronavirus solution
April 18, 2020
Apple and Google’s common coronavirus contact tracing solution for smartphones continued to attract a lot of attention and debate over the course of the past week, and understandably so. It’s an unprecedented partnership between the world’s dominant smartphone…
Transform 2020, VentureBeat’s AI event of the year for enterprise decision-makers, is shifting to an online-only event to protect our community amid concerns around the coronavirus.
Transform 2020 will be held online July 15-17, expanding from two days to three. Each day…
Microsoft claims to have developed a system that correctly distinguishes between security and non-security software bugs 99% of the time, and that accurately identifies critical, high-priority security bugs on average 97% of the time. In the coming months, it plans to open-source the methodology on GitHub, along with example models and other resources.
The work suggests that such a system, which…
MIT’s AI suggests that social distancing works
April 16, 2020
In a preprint academic paper published in early April, MIT researchers describe a model that quantifies the impact of quarantine measures on the spread of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. Unlike most of the models that have so far been proposed, this one doesn’t rely on…
Vast Data, a company developing large-scale flash storage solutions, today announced that it raised $100 million at a $1.2 billion valuation (up three times since February 2019). CEO Renen Hallak says it’ll be used to drive expansion and lay runway for the startup’s…
Online learning startup Coursera today debuted CourseMatch, an AI tool that matches classes in schools’ on-campus course catalogs to relevant offerings in Coursera’s catalog. It’s a part of the startup’s Coronavirus Response Initiative that launched in early March, and Coursera says it’s intended to enable universities to facilitate learning as governments mandate the shutdown of…
