AI & RoboticsNews

iFarm Raises $4 million to automate urban farming with AI and drones

iFarm has raised $4 million to expand its automated system that uses AI and drones to grow fruits and vegetables in enclosed spaces. Gagarin Capital led the round of funding, which included investment from Matrix Capital, Impulse VC, IMI.VC, and some business angels. The Finnish startup has developed a vertical agricultural system called iFarm Growtune. By growing food closer to consumers and in…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Facebook gamifies data collection to boost conversational AI

Facebook once piloted a text-based fantasy role-playing game to improve the conversational models powering things like its chatbots and smart speakers. In a preprint paper, researchers at the company describe a game that iterates between collecting data and retraining models on the collected data, with a metric that evaluates and compares models using players’ continuation rates (i.e., how long…
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AI & RoboticsNews

How Duolingo uses AI in every part of its app

Language learning has surged during the pandemic. Duolingo, which is synonymous with gamified language learning, saw its fastest growth period this March with a 101% global increase in new users. From those who simply have more time on their hands to students trying to keep…
AI & RoboticsNews

Researchers claim their AI can hear if a speaker is wearing a mask

Researchers at Duke Kunshan University, Wuhan University, Lenovo, and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou claim to have developed an AI system that detects whether a person is wearing a mask from the sound of their muffled speech. They say that in experiments, it achieves 78.8% accuracy on one metric, demonstrating that sound could be a useful means of enforcing mask-wearing during the…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Machine learning groups form Consortium for Python Data API Standards to reduce fragmentation

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 from the Python ecosystem it came from. ONNX is a group initially formed by Facebook and Microsoft in 2017 to power…
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