Google today launched Google Duplex, its AI chat agent that can arrange appointments over the phone, in Spain to automate the updating of business hours across Google Search and Google Maps. For the first time, it’s speaking in Spanish — Duplex previously only spoke in English.
The expansion follows a pilot in New New Zealand and Duplex’s quiet expansion to the U.K., Australia, and Canada.
In a recent study conducted in collaboration with Calico Life Sciences, Google researchers built a “genome-wide” machine learning model for the regulation of gene expression — the process by which information from a gene is used to create functional protein or RNA —…
In a new preprint study published this week on Arxiv.org, researchers at the University of Cambridge, University College London, Ecole de Guerre Economique in Paris, the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, and The Family Federation of Finland propose two AI…
During a workshop hosted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020, taking place on the web this week, panelists discussed how AI and machine learning might be — and already has been — applied to agricultural challenges. As several experts pointed out, countries around the world face a food supply shortfall — an estimated 9% of the population (697 million…
Salesforce’s AI Economist taps reinforcement learning to generate optimal tax policies
April 29, 2020
Salesforce today announced the AI Economist, a research environment designed to elucidate how economic design might be improved with techniques from the field of AI and machine learning. The goal is to help economists, governments, and others design tax policies that…
CB Insights: AI funding held steady in Q1 thanks to Waymo, but early-stage startups suffered
April 29, 2020
The global pandemic put a sharp brake on venture capital deals for AI startups in Q1 2020, as investors fled early-stage deals and doubled down on the very largest private companies.
According to a new report by CB Insights, AI startups globally raised $8.4 billion in the…
Autonomous building tech startup BrainBox AI today announced the closure of a $12 million Canadian (~$8.59 million) convertible debt round, which it plans to put toward expansion in North America (particularly its home market of Canada) and international markets like the U.K., Ireland, and Australia. The cash infusion comes as companies unaffected by shelter-in-place orders aim to head off the…
Researchers from Harvard University and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab have released Clevrer, a data set for evaluating AI models’ ability to recognize causal relationships and carry out reasoning.
A paper sharing initial findings about the CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation…
During the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020 this week, which as a result of the pandemic took place virtually, Turing Award winner and director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms Yoshua Bengio provided a glimpse into the future…
In a pair of papers accepted to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020, MIT researchers investigated new ways to motivate software agents to explore their environment and pruning algorithms to make AI apps run faster. Taken together, the twin approaches could foster the development of autonomous industrial, commercial, and home machines that require less computation…
