The IEEE Standards Association has released a report calling for engineers to consider the impact their work will have on climate change, children, and society. It’s a push toward “utilizing emerging technologies in a way that prioritizes people and planet over power and profits.”
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is one of the largest organizations for computer…
Worlds gets $10 million to help enterprises observe their physical environments with AI
February 6, 2020
Worlds, whose AI helps large organizations observe their physical spaces to ensure security, safety, and productivity, has raised $10 million in a first round of funding.
The Dallas-based startup uses multiple cameras to track spaces in 3D over time, providing a more…
Google’s ML-fairness-gym lets researchers study the long-term effects of AI’s decisions
February 6, 2020
Determining whether an AI system is maintaining fairness in its predictions requires an understanding of models’ short- and long-term effects, which might be informed by disparities in error metrics on a number of static data sets. In some cases, it’s necessary to…
Following Twitter, Google and YouTube have become the latest companies to send a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, the startup behind a controversial facial recognition program that more than 600 police departments across North American use. Clearview came under scrutiny earlier this year when The New York Times showed that the company had been scraping billions of images on the…
Google Assistant can now say where your Tile is
February 5, 2020
Tracking gadget Tile has been a boon to the forgetful, and now it’s set to get even more helpful. Previously, you could use Google Assistant to ring your Tile, so finding your keys or wallet was a matter of listening out for the beep. Now, though, it’s able to…
Cherre raises $16 million to analyze real estate data with AI
February 5, 2020
Real estate data collection and analytics costs can total in the millions of dollars. That’s why in 2016, L.D. Salmanson founded Cherre, a startup that leverages AI to cost-effectively resolve property data from disparate public and private sources. After raising $9…
IDC predicts that worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by 2025, which will invariably put a strain on infrastructure as organizations look to sort, search, scan, and otherwise derive value from this data. That’s where NGD Systems comes in — it’s an Irvine, California-based company offering a computational storage drive tailor-made for on-device AI and machine workloads. To lay a…
How AI helped upscale an antique 1896 film to 4K
February 4, 2020
When the 50-second silent short film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat premiered in 1896, some theatergoers reportedly ran for safety at the sight of a projected approaching train, thinking that a real one would burst through the screen at any moment…
If Amazon has its way, companies will soon tap Amazon Web Services (AWS) en masse to create voices tailored to their brands. The Seattle tech giant today launched Brand Voices, a fully managed service within Amazon Polly, Amazon’s cloud service that converts text into…
Kaskada raises $8 million to facilitate AI feature engineering
February 4, 2020
Feature engineering — the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data — is essential to tuning machine learning performance. It’s also typically arduous and involves rewriting features before they’re deployed, which is why in 2018 Ben Chambers and Davor Bonaci cofounded Kaskada, which uses mining techniques to compute and serve AI features in real time.
Today the…
