The recipe for proteins — large molecules consisting of amino acids that are the fundamental building blocks of tissues, muscles, hair, enzymes, antibodies, and other essential parts of living organisms — are encoded in DNA. It’s these genetic definitions that circumscribe their three-dimensional structures, which in turn determines their capabilities. But protein “folding,” as it’s…
Ethical AI isn’t the same as trustworthy AI, and that matters
November 29, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are facing increased scrutiny due to their aptitude for amplifying both good and bad decisions. More specifically, for their propensity to expose and heighten existing societal biases and inequalities. It is only right, then, that…
Designed to deceive: Do these people look real to you?
Kashmir Hill and Jeremy White, The New York Times
Fake personas on the internet are nothing new, but completely fake people that appear to be alarmingly real in photographs or animations are becoming increasingly common.
Kamua’s AI-powered editor helps marketers embrace vertical video
November 28, 2020
A new AI-powered video-editing platform is preparing for launch, designed to help businesses, marketers, and creators automatically transform landscape-shot videos into a vertical format suitable for TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and all the rest.
Founded out of London in 2019, Kamua wants to be aligned with tools such as Figma, a software design and prototyping tool for product managers who lack…
AI Weekly: The state of machine learning in 2020
November 28, 2020
It’s hard to believe, but a year in which the unprecedented seemed to happen every day is just weeks from being over. In AI circles, the end of the calendar year means the rollout of annual reports aimed at defining progress, impact, and areas for improvement.
The AI Index…
A pair of new robotics studies from Google and the University of California, Berkeley propose ways of finding occluded objects on shelves and solving “contact-rich” manipulation tasks like moving objects across a table. The UC Berkeley research introduces Lateral Access…
YouTube chapters can help you quickly navigate a video, but you often don’t have that luxury when creators have to add them by hand. There might not be as much of a rush going forward. The 9to5Google team reports that YouTube is testing automatic, AI-generated video chapters, A machine learning system creates the chapters by looking for text. In other words, a producer who’s been thoughtful…
If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a poet but don’t quite have the lyrical and rhythmic skills one might require, Google’s Verse by Verse tool can help you to craft the most delectable verse. The company’s latest experiment with AI-driven poetry…
Google Assistant can finally schedule your smart lights
November 26, 2020
Google Assistant already works with Hue and other smart lights, but functionality has been limited to turning them on and off, using them with alarms and a few other features. Now, you can schedule lights and other electric devices to turn on and off at specific and even…
Google is testing an artificial intelligence system designed to help blind and vision-impaired people to run races by themselves. Project Guideline, which is an early-phase research program, is an attempt to give those people more independence. They wouldn’t necessarily need to rely on a tethered human guide or a guide dog to help them around a course.
To use the system, a runner attaches an…
