Ever heard of FlyHash? It’s an algorithm inspired by fruit flies’ olfactory circuits that’s been shown to generate hash codes — numeric representations of objects — with superior performance compared with classical algorithms. Unfortunately, because FlyHash uses random projections, it can’t learn from data. To overcome this limitation, researchers at Princeton, the University of San…
Facebook’s AI learns the relationships between physical places from first-person video footage
January 21, 2020
Computer vision systems generally excel at detecting objects but struggle to make sense of the environments in which those objects are used. That’s because they separate observed actions from physical context — even those that do model environments fail to discriminate…
Snyk raises $150 million at $1 billion valuation for AI that protects open source code
January 21, 2020
Snyk, a cybersecurity platform that helps developers find vulnerabilities in their open source applications, has raised $150 million in a round of funding led by New York-based private equity firm Stripes, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Coatue, Tiger Global…
IBM unveils Policy Lab, advocates ‘precision regulation’ of AI
January 21, 2020
During a panel discussion hosted by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday with Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Coordination Chris Liddell, and OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria, IBM formally announced the IBM Policy Lab, an initiative aimed at providing policymakers with recommendations for emerging problems in technology. The company…
Soft Robotics raised another $23 million to continue developing its solutions to the seemingly intractable problems gripping and sorting machines face.
As work published by MIT and others has established, picker robots struggle with complex poses and unfamiliar objects.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls for 'sensible regulation' of AI
January 20, 2020
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai takes his sweet time getting to the point in a new Financial Times editorial. But when he gets there, he leave’s little room for interpretation: “…there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to…
Supplier discovery often isn’t a walk in the park. According to a survey by Thomasnet, nearly 50% of buyers have worked with a supplier that unexpectedly went out of business. That’s why in 2015, four German entrepreneurs — Christian Heinrich, Fabian Heinrich, Gregor Stühler, and Lee Galbraith — founded Scoutbee, which develops and sells access to an AI-driven supplier discovery…
No matter the claimed robustness of AI and machine learning systems in production, none are immune to adversarial attacks, or techniques that attempt to fool algorithms through malicious input. It’s been shown that generating even small perturbations on images can fool the…
One of the trends that came into sharp focus in 2019 was, ironically, a woeful lack of clarity around AI ethics. The AI field at large was paying attention to ethics, creating and applying frameworks for AI research, development, policy, and law, but there was no unified…
Lioness AI sex toy can teach you about your orgasms
January 20, 2020
Lioness has been pioneering sex tech since 2017, but CES 2020 was the first time the company was allowed to exhibit its AI-enabled sex toy at one of the world’s biggest tech shows.
The Consumer Technology Association backtracked on its earlier policies and allowed sex-positive sex tech companies to display their wares at CES, which took place earlier this month in Las Vegas.
In the health and…