AI & RoboticsNews

Microsoft backs AI in healthcare with a $40 million program

January 30, 2020
Microsoft’s deepening health tech strategy now includes a significant commitment to AI. The company is starting a $40 million AI for Health program that should help researchers and key organizations improve the quality of life for people around the planet. The five-year initiative will use AI to improve diagnosis, prevention and treatment, as you might have expected, but it’ll…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Nest is testing detecting HVAC problems with AI

January 29, 2020
Owners of Nest-branded thermostats will soon see their systems improved with a new feature designed to detect problems in heating and cooling (HVAC) systems. Google today announced that it’s testing algorithms tailored to identify “unusual patterns” related to HVAC…
AI & RoboticsNews

Microsoft launches $40 million AI for Health grant program (updated)

January 29, 2020
In June 2017, Microsoft launched AI for Earth, a $50 million program that’s provided cloud-based tools and services to dozens of startups working to protect the planet. Subsequently, the Seattle tech giant expanded the scope of its “AI for good” work with AI for Accessibility (in May 2018),  AI for Humanitarian Action (in September 2018), and AI for Cultural Heritage (July 2019), all of…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Why Google Assistant supports so many more languages than Siri, Alexa, Bixby, and Cortana

January 29, 2020
Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana recognize only a narrow slice of the world’s most widely spoken languages. It wasn’t until fall 2018 that Samsung’s Bixby gained support for German, French, Italian, and Spanish — languages spoken by over 600 million people worldwide. And it took years for Cortana to become fluent in Spanish, French, and…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google brings cross-platform AI pipeline framework MediaPipe to the web

January 29, 2020
Roughly a year ago, Google open-sourced MediaPipe, a framework for building cross-platform AI pipelines consisting of fast inference and media processing (like video decoding). Basically, it’s a quick and dirty way to perform object detection, face detection, hand tracking, multi-hand tracking, hair segmentation, and other such tasks in a modular fashion, with popular machine learning frameworks…
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