AI & Robotics

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 operating system makers, but people are worried about privacy, and the notion that whatever tracking tool made in the name of…

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 data from studies about previous outbreaks, like SARS or MERS. Instead, it taps an AI algorithm trained to capture the number…

AI researchers in South Korea created an AI system named U-GAT-IT, an unsupervised learning model for image-to-image translation. They said U-GAT-IT outperforms four other top generative networks created with unsupervised learning in almost every instance. Image-to-image translation can improve applications ranging from image style transfers to inpainting, the process of predicting missing pixels…

Onfido, a provider of cloud-based identity verification tools, today announced that it raised $100 million in equity financing. CEO Husayn Kassai says the bulk of the fresh capital will be put toward product R&D and global expansion, including further market penetration in North America. “Unlike most tech companies, our first investment check was $20,000 back in 2012, and we made that last…