CES is right around the corner, and that means we’ll once again meet a slew of new home theater equipment. LG is unveiling its 2020 soundbar lineup right now, and a new headline feature for this year is “AI Room Calibration.” Exactly what separates this tech from non-AI automatic calibration we’ve seen is unclear, but LG is openly committed to applying machine learning and…
Amazon researchers use AI to improve the recognition of curved text
December 26, 2019
Optical character recognition (OCR), or the conversion of images of handwritten or printed text into machine-readable text, is a science that dates back to the early ’70s. But algorithms have long struggled to make out characters that aren’t parallel with horizontal…
Researchers want to use Mega Man 2 to evaluate AI
December 26, 2019
Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. Games — particularly video games — provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning…
Techno-thriller 'Mr. Robot' ends on a mind-melting high
December 25, 2019
(This article contains spoilers for ‘Mr. Robot’ season four)
When Mr. Robot debuted in June 2015, it was the show’s commitment to authentic hacking that attracted eyeballs. For so long, cybersecurity had been shortchanged on-screen — an ever-changing field that needed to be simplified, producers thought, for mainstream audiences and dramatic pacing. Mr. Robot was unique in…
Summarizing text is a task at which machine learning algorithms are improving, as evidenced by a recent paper published by Microsoft. That’s that’s good news — automatic summarization systems promise to cut down on the amount message-reading done by enterprise workers…
AI year in review: Opportunities grow, but ethics loom large
December 23, 2019
VentureBeat is excited to announce VB Transform 2020, to be held July 15-16 in San Francisco, California. Register now for an early bird 40% discount.
Artificial intelligence garnered a lot of attention from the usual players — governments, tech giants, and academics —…
Amplifying New Voices diversity training program finds permanent home with AIAS Foundation
December 23, 2019
Amplifying New Voices, a program that trains diverse game industry people to be good speakers, has found a permanent home with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Foundation, the nonprofit that stages the DICE Summit game event each February.
The group has staged its boot camps for training new voices such as women and underrepresented minorities. It has created workshops that focus on…
It’s nine in the morning on a rainy December 23, and my iPhone has just photographed a supermoon from my front door — no easy feat since the real moon is a distant and barely visible waning crescent today, and I’m shooting in pure daylight. Even by the latest and…
In August, Tencent announced it had developed an AI system capable of defeating teams of pros in a five-on-five match in Honor of Kings (or Arena of Valor, depending on the region). This was a noteworthy achievement — Honor of Kings occupies the video game subgenre known…
How the ‘big 5’ bolstered their AI through acquisitions in 2019
December 23, 2019
The AI talent grab is real. This year alone, Pinterest CTO Vanja Josifovski jumped ship to Airbnb, while Pinterest hired Walmart CTO Jeremy King to head up its engineering team. Moreover, all the big tech companies, including Google and Apple, have for some time been vacuuming up AI talent through acquisitions — a recent CB Insights report noted 635 AI acquisitions since 2010, topped by Apple…
