AI & Robotics

Researchers at AI startup SenseTime, Amazon, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong say they’ve developed a new framework for leveraging web data — OmniSource — that notches records in the video recognition domain. By overcoming barriers between data formats like images, short videos, and long untrimmed videos and adopting good practices like data balancing, it’s ostensibly able to…

AI-powered optimization software provider Concertio today announced that it has raised $4.2 million, which it says it will use to scale its platform that boosts app performance by tailoring x86 server settings. Customers won’t only benefit from faster, more stable apps and hardware as a result, says Concertio, but from lower infrastructure costs as well. Concertio’s Optimizer Runtime tool…

Last August, Microsoft Research Asia detailed an AI system dubbed Super Phoenix (Suphx for short) that could defeat Mahjong players after learning from only 5,000 matches. A revised preprint paper out this week delves a bit deeper, revealing that Suphx — whose performance improved with additional training — is now rated above 99.99% of all ranked human players on Tenhou, a Japan-based global…

A group of six influential women studying algorithmic bias, AI, and technology, released a spoken word piece titled “Voicing Erasure” to highlight racial bias in the speech recognition systems made by tech giants. Creators also made Voicing Erasure to recognize the exclusion and overlooked contributions of women scholars and researchers. “Racial disparities in automated speech recognition”…