In a recent paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Facebook, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign propose Active Neural Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Active Neural SLAM), a hierarchical approach for teaching AI agents to explore environments. They say that it leverages the strength of both classical and AI-based path- and goal-planning…
Google’s new Pixel 4 app uses AI to map your face in 3D
April 11, 2020
Google today released a demo app that visualizes a real-time point cloud from uDepth, the stereo depth sensor built into the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. As the tech giant explains in a lengthy post, uDepth taps machine learning to identify users while protecting against spoof…
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…
Researchers propose Falcon, a privacy-preserving communication protocol for AI training and inference
April 11, 2020
In an academic paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, a team of researchers from Princeton, Microsoft, the nonprofit Algorand Foundation, and Technion propose Falcon, an end-to-end framework for secure computation of AI models on distributed systems. They claim that it’s the first secure C++ framework to support high-capacity AI models and batch normalization, a technique…
COVID-19 waits for no one, and the speed of its spread has forced the world to act quickly. From world governments to individual households, all of sudden everyone has had to scrap plans, make new ones, and try to hang on to some kind of new normal as the pandemic causes…
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…
If, like many people these days, you’re trying to get a firmer understanding of what AI is and how it works but are secretly panicking a little because you’re struggling with terminology so opaque that you’re lost before you get to Markov chains, you may want to crack open Janelle Shane’s new book. She recently sat down with VentureBeat to talk about the book, whose title, You Look Like a…
In a paper scheduled to be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Learning Representations, Amazon researchers propose an AI approach that greatly improves performance on certain meta-learning tasks (i.e., tasks that involve both accomplishing related…
Google releases SimCLR, an AI framework that can classify images with limited labeled data
April 10, 2020
A team of Google researchers recently detailed a framework called SimCLR, which improves previous approaches to self-supervised learning, a family of techniques for converting an unsupervised learning problem (i.e., a problem in which AI models train on unlabeled data) into…
Ferrum, a startup developing an AI patient safety platform to prevent medical errors, today announced that it secured $9 million in seed funding. According to CEO Pelu Tran, who’s also a technology pioneer at the World Economic Forum, the plan is to use the capital infusion to refine the company’s product as Ferrum makes engineering, sales, and marketing hires.
That could be good news for…
