On Thursday afternoon, the United States became the country with the greatest number of known COVID-19 cases in the world. With millions out of work and the spread of the virus taking its toll, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and in anguish without ever getting off the couch.
Inadequately supplied frontline healthcare workers are the heroes in the trenches of this war, but the world’s scientific…
Seattle-based Textio is introducing new AI-powered tools this week that detect and help employers remove language from job applications that can make older people, women, or people of color feel excluded. With exclusionary language removed, and increasing accommodation…
This month, under the strain millions of people self-quarantined by COVID-19 have placed on broadband infrastructure, Facebook, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Netflix, and YouTube agreed to temporarily reduce download speeds and video streaming quality in countries around the…
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates an automated future that’s already on its way. It serves as a wake-up call to all AI, robotics, and driverless car startups: stop building eye-dazzling demos and talking about the future possibility of general-use AI. Instead, focus on deploying real-world solutions that can run 24 hours a day with minimum human intervention and deliver true value to…
A preprint paper coauthored by Uber AI scientists and Jeff Clune, a research team leader at San Francisco startup OpenAI, describes Fiber, an AI development and distributed training platform for methods including reinforcement learning (which spurs AI agents to complete…
IBM’s AI generates new footage from video stills
March 27, 2020
A paper coauthored by researchers at IBM describes an AI system — Navsynth — that generates videos seen during training, as well as unseen videos. While this in and of itself isn’t novel — it’s an acute area of interest for Alphabet’s DeepMind and others — the…
DarwinAI wants to help identify coronavirus in x-rays, but radiologists aren’t convinced
March 25, 2020
Canadian startup DarwinAI and researchers from the University of Waterloo are open-sourcing COVID-Net, a convolutional neural network made for detecting COVID-19 in x-ray imagery. Since coronavirus emerged as a threat to people around the world, a global community of healthcare and AI researchers have produced a number of AI systems for identifying COVID-19 in CT scans.
Companies from Alibaba to…
In a blog post and accompanying paper, researchers at Google detail an AI system — MetNet — that can predict precipitation up to eight hours into the future. They say that it outperforms the current state-of-the-art physics model in use by the U.S. National Oceanic and…
In a study published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, Google and University of California, Berkely researchers propose a framework that combines learning-based perception with model-based controls to enable wheeled robots to autonomously navigate around obstacles.
Google and the Oxford Internet Institute explain artificial intelligence basics with the ‘A-Z of AI’
March 25, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating just about every facet of society, from detecting fraud and surveillance to helping countries battle the current COVID-19 pandemic. But AI is a thorny subject, fraught with complex terminology, contradictory information, and general confusion about what it is at its most fundamental level. This is why the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), the social and…
