Under ideal circumstances, a smartphone’s AI assistant can not only understand the words you’re saying but also the appropriate context they’re meant in, such as the difference between answering “when will 2020 be over” in either a number of days, or the remaining hours until a 24-hour clock strikes 20:20. But context awareness can be challenging for AIs, which is why researchers are…
Uber claims its AI enables driverless cars to predict traffic movement with high accuracy
April 16, 2020
In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org this week, researchers at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) propose an AI technique to improve autonomous vehicles’ traffic movement predictions. It’s directly applicable to the driverless technologies that…
Google’s AI enables robots to make decisions on the fly
April 16, 2020
In a paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, a team of researchers from Google Brain, Google X, and the University of Calfornia at Berkeley describe an extension to existing AI methods that enable an agent — for instance, a robot — to decide which…
Health care organizations use Nvidia’s Clara federated learning to improve mammogram analysis AI
April 16, 2020
A group of health care organizations in the United States and Brazil have used federated learning to improve AI mammography classification models for recognizing tumors and breast tissue density assessment. An Nvidia spokesperson declined to share specific performance details, but said a combined effort led to better classification model performance than models made by any of the individual health…
Google today released a natural language processing systems benchmark — Xtreme — with nine tasks that require reasoning about semantics across 40 languages and 12 language families. Researchers at the tech giant assert it can evaluate whether AI models capture knowledge…
In a recent paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Facebook, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign propose Active Neural Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Active Neural SLAM), a hierarchical approach for teaching AI…
Google’s new Pixel 4 app uses AI to map your face in 3D
April 11, 2020
Google today released a demo app that visualizes a real-time point cloud from uDepth, the stereo depth sensor built into the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. As the tech giant explains in a lengthy post, uDepth taps machine learning to identify users while protecting against spoof attacks; it supports a number of features, including post-processing photo retouching and depth-based scene segmentation as…
Microsoft Teams is getting a bunch of new features this year. Robert Aichner, Microsoft Teams group program manager, recently told us how Microsoft is building the most interesting one: real-time noise suppression, which uses machine learning to filter out background noise…
Researchers propose Falcon, a privacy-preserving communication protocol for AI training and inference
April 11, 2020
In an academic paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, a team of researchers from Princeton, Microsoft, the nonprofit Algorand Foundation, and Technion propose Falcon, an end-to-end framework for secure computation of AI models on distributed systems.
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…
