AI & Robotics

In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org this week, researchers at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) propose an AI technique to improve autonomous vehicles’ traffic movement predictions. It’s directly applicable to the driverless technologies that Uber itself is developing, which must be able to detect, track, and anticipate surrounding cars’ trajectories in order to…

Google today released a natural language processing systems benchmark — Xtreme — with nine tasks that require reasoning about semantics across 40 languages and 12 language families. Researchers at the tech giant assert it can evaluate whether AI models capture knowledge shared across languages, which can be useful for a growing number of natural language applications. The goal is to spur on…

Microsoft Teams is getting a bunch of new features this year. Robert Aichner, Microsoft Teams group program manager, recently told us how Microsoft is building the most interesting one: real-time noise suppression, which uses machine learning to filter out background noise during calls. Because the feature isn’t final, we also had a secondary discussion about the user experience. It’s one…

McGill University researchers say they’ve developed a technique to train a remote-controlled, offroad car to drive on terrain from aerial and first-person imagery. Their hybrid approach accounts for terrain roughness and obstacles using on-board sensors, enabling it to generalize to environments with vegetation, rocks, and sandy trails. The work is preliminary, but it might hold promise for…