X, Alphabet’s experimental R&D lab, today detailed Project Amber, a now-disbanded project which aimed to make brain waves as easy to interpret as blood glucose. The goal was to develop objective measurements of depression and anxiety that could be used to support diagnoses, treatment, and therapies.
An estimated 17.3 million adults in the U.S. have had at least one major depressive episode…
AI Weekly: In a chaotic year, AI is quietly accelerating the pace of space exploration
November 26, 2020
The year 2020 continues to be difficult here on Earth, where the pandemic is exploding again in regions of the world that were once successful in containing it. Germany reported a record number of cases this week alongside Poland and the Czech Republic, as the U.S. counted…
Mastercard and Capital One talk conversational AI, and why fintech of every size must invest (VB Live)
November 26, 2020
Presented by DefinedCrowd
In fintech, customer experience is key to customer retention. Access this free VB Live event to learn how companies like MasterCard and Capital One implement AI strategies that transform how customer experience is done.
Access on demand for free…
Intel acquires AI software optimization platform SigOpt
November 26, 2020
Intel today announced it will acquire SigOpt, a San Francisco-based startup developing a platform to optimize AI software models. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close this quarter, weren’t disclosed, but Intel says it plans to use SigOpt’s technologies across its hardware products to accelerate, amplify, and scale AI software tools for developers.
The acquisition comes as Intel…
How the U.S. patent office is keeping up with AI
November 26, 2020
Technology keeps creating challenges for intellectual property law. The infamous case of the “monkey selfie” challenged the notion of not just who owns a piece of intellectual property, but what constitutes a “who” in the first place. Last decade’s semi-sentient…
Researchers at MIT say they’ve developed an algorithm that can diagnose COVID-19 by the sound of someone’s cough, even if that person is asymptomatic. In a paper published in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, the team reports that their approach…
PowerTransformer uses AI to rewrite text to correct gender biases in character portrayals
November 26, 2020
Unconscious biases are pervasive in text and media. For example, female characters in stories are often portrayed as passive and powerless while men are portrayed as proactive and powerful. According to a McKinsey study of 120 movies across 10 markets, the ratio of male to female characters was 3:1 in 2016, the same it’s been since 1946.
Motivated by this, researchers at the Allen Institute for…
Google’s AI converts webpages into videos
November 26, 2020
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…
Today, civil rights groups — including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund — filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on the grounds that a Trump executive order violates free speech rights and will “undermine efforts to foster diversity and inclusion in the…
Human API raises $20 million to standardize health records with AI
November 26, 2020
Human API, a San Mateo, California-based company developing an AI pipeline that structures health data into a standardized format, this week raised over $20 million. A spokesperson for the startup says the capital will be used to scale new products and services that support product design, risk stratification, clinical trial recruitment, population health management, patient monitoring, and…
