COVID-19 waits for no one, and the speed of its spread has forced the world to act quickly. From world governments to individual households, all of sudden everyone has had to scrap plans, make new ones, and try to hang on to some kind of new normal as the pandemic causes more unexpected and rapid shifts.
Looking at the tech world, it’s been quite a sight to watch everyone move so fast. As I…
McGill University researchers say they’ve developed a technique to train a remote-controlled, offroad car to drive on terrain from aerial and first-person imagery. Their hybrid approach accounts for terrain roughness and obstacles using on-board sensors, enabling it to…
If, like many people these days, you’re trying to get a firmer understanding of what AI is and how it works but are secretly panicking a little because you’re struggling with terminology so opaque that you’re lost before you get to Markov chains, you may want to crack…
In a paper scheduled to be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Learning Representations, Amazon researchers propose an AI approach that greatly improves performance on certain meta-learning tasks (i.e., tasks that involve both accomplishing related goals and learning how to learn to perform them). They say it can be adapted to new tasks with only a handful of labeled training…
Google releases SimCLR, an AI framework that can classify images with limited labeled data
April 10, 2020
A team of Google researchers recently detailed a framework called SimCLR, which improves previous approaches to self-supervised learning, a family of techniques for converting an unsupervised learning problem (i.e., a problem in which AI models train on unlabeled data) into…
Ferrum, a startup developing an AI patient safety platform to prevent medical errors, today announced that it secured $9 million in seed funding. According to CEO Pelu Tran, who’s also a technology pioneer at the World Economic Forum, the plan is to use the capital…
After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal
April 10, 2020
When we came out of the financial crisis of 2008, cloud computing kicked into high gear and started to become a pervasive, transformational technology. The current COVID-19 crisis could provide a similar inflection point for AI applications. While the implications of AI continue to be debated on the world stage, the rapid onset of a global health crisis and concomitant recession will accelerate…
A team of Microsoft and Huazhong University researchers this week open-sourced an AI object detector — Fair Multi-Object Tracking (FairMOT) — they claim outperforms state-of-the-art models on public data sets at 30 frames per second. If productized, it could benefit…
Google today announced the release of a new data set — the Free Universal Sound Separation data set, or FUSS for short — intended to support the development of AI models that can separate distinct sounds from recording mixes. The use cases are potentially endless, but if…
How Microsoft Teams will use AI to filter out typing, barking, and other noise from video calls
April 10, 2020
Last month, Microsoft announced that Teams, its competitor to Slack, Facebook’s Workplace, and Google’s Hangouts Chat, had passed 44 million daily active users. The milestone overshadowed its unveiling of a few new features coming “later this year.” Most were straightforward: a hand-raising feature to indicate you have something to say, offline and low-bandwidth support to read chat…
