Keeping abreast of shopping trends online is straightforward enough — whole categories of startups achieve this with predictive modeling. But what about when that shopping takes place in-store? Tracking the behaviors of mall, outlet, and department store shoppers is of critical importance to physical store brands, particularly considering that the percentage of brick-and-mortar sales increased…
Amazon researchers use AI to improve Alexa’s joke selection
December 9, 2019
What do Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana have in common? They tell jokes of varying cleverness, most of which are the work of writing teams operating behind the scenes. They’re entertaining, but preliminary research suggests they also play a part in making…
Medical imaging is among the most popular application of AI and machine learning, and with good reason. Computer vision algorithms are naturally adept at spotting anomalies experts sometimes miss, in the process reducing wait times and lightening clinical workloads. Perhaps…
This week marks the kickoff of Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the largest AI and machine learning conferences globally. NeurIPS 2017 and NeuIPS 2018 received 3,240 and 4,854 research paper submissions, respectively, and this year’s event — which takes place from December 8 to December 14 in Vancouver — is on track to handily break those records. (Submissions this…
Nvidia trains AI to transform 2D images into 3D models
December 9, 2019
Nvidia Research created an AI system that can predict 3D properties of 2D images without any 3D training data. The work will be presented at the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, where researchers in academia and industry share the latest in…
AI Weekly: Amazon plays the long game in health care AI
December 6, 2019
Today concludes Amazon’s re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, where the Seattle company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) division unveiled enhancements heading down its public cloud pipeline. Just Tuesday, Amazon announced the general availability of AWS Outposts, a fully…
AI-powered Lego sorter knows the shape of every brick
December 6, 2019
For some people, rummaging through a bunch of Lego bricks is part of the fun. But if you’ve got an enormous collection or take on complicated builds, you probably have a system for sorting your pieces. Your solution probably doesn’t involve AI, though. YouTube user Daniel West combined his love for Lego with his engineering skills to build a universal Lego sorter that uses a neural…
Facebook taught an AI the 'theory of mind'
December 6, 2019
When it comes to competitive games, AI systems have already shown they can easily mop the floor with the best humanity has to offer. But life in the real world isn’t a zero sum game like poker or Starcraft and we need AI to work with us, not against us. That’s…
Facebook’s Hanabi-playing AI achieves state-of-the-art results
December 6, 2019
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) says they’ve created the latest AI to achieve state-of-the-art performance when playing the card game Hanabi. The AI system achieves a score of 24.61 out of 25 while the previous best got 23.92 out of 25. In February, researchers from Google…
Google Assistant will place your Dunkin' orders, finally
December 6, 2019
Google just added a handful of voice control features to Google Assistant. You can now manage notes and lists in select third-party apps, ask Assistant to search your photos, search for podcasts by topic and set reminders for the whole family. You can also place Dunkin’ Donuts orders — just what everyone was hoping for.
If you have the Dunkin’ App on your Android phone, you can…
