Though it’s a coincidence that I’m writing this article roughly one year after my colleague Khari Johnson railed against the “public nuisance” of “charlatan AI,” the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) clearly inspired both missives. At the tail end of last year’s show, Khari called out a seemingly fake robot AI demo at LG’s CES press conference, noting that for society’s…
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute say they’ve developed a system that taps machine learning to analyze online comments and pick out those that defend or sympathize with disenfranchised peoples. Although it hasn’t been commercialized…
Google hopes to tap AI and machine learning to make speedy local weather predictions. In a paper and accompanying blog post, the tech giant detailed an AI system that uses satellite images to produce “nearly instantaneous” and high-resolution forecasts — on average…
Canon's Robotic Camera System controls multiple DSLRs from afar
January 13, 2020
Pro photographers who need to control multiple cameras at once just got a useful tool — if they have the right camera. Canon has introduced a CR-S700R Robotic Camera system that lets you remotely steer multiple DSLRs from a PC. You can only use it for still photos, but you can zoom, pan, tilt and roll when you’re trying to capture a sporting event from multiple angles. The absence…
On Monday, Waymo — the subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet that’s developing a full-stack driverless vehicle platform — announced that its cars have driven a combined 20 million autonomous miles to date, up from 10 million miles in October 2018. The metric…
Chinese court rules AI-written article is protected by copyright
January 13, 2020
A court in Shenzhen, China, has ruled that an article generated by artificial intelligence (AI) is protected by copyright, according to state news outlet China News Service, representing a notable milestone for AI’s credentials as a creative force.
For the past five years…
Obama-era tech advisors list potential challenges for the White House’s AI principles
January 13, 2020
Former Obama administration advisors say the White House regulatory AI principles announced this week are a good start in many ways, but they’re incorrect in their oversimplified mandate to avoid overregulation of private business use, and that the Trump administration could face an uphill battle in its appeal to the rest of the world.
Though the Trump administration has developed a reputation…
This week, the White House released 10 AI Principles, intended as guidance for federal agencies while they consider how to appropriately regulate AI in the private sector. It’s an effort to reduce AI’s potential harms, which have come under scrutiny all over the world…
Brazil is emerging as a world-class AI innovation hub
January 13, 2020
Brazil’s government has big plans for AI, despite having come late to the party. In Oxford Insights’ AI Readiness Index 2019, Brazil was ranked 40 out of 192 countries, a sign that the South American powerhouse is moving up in the AI world. The report looks at how ready…
Cyber risk, which commonly refers to any risk of financial loss, disruption, or damage to the reputation of an organization resulting from the failure of its systems, is one of the top five concerns among IT teams, according to a Microsoft survey. That’s not surprising considering that the average cost of a cyber attack was $1.1 million in 2018, an increase of 52% from 2017.
It’s with this in…