AI & Robotics

Earlier this year, the independent research organisation of which I am the Director, London-based Ada Lovelace Institute, hosted a panel at the world’s largest AI conference, CogX, called The Ethics Panel to End All Ethics Panels. The title referenced both a tongue-in-cheek effort at self-promotion, and a very real need to put to bed the seemingly endless offering of panels, think-pieces, and…

This week we featured how Duolingo uses AI in every part of its app, including Stories, Smart Tips, podcasts, reports, and even notifications. The story is based on interviews with CEO Luis von Ahn and research director Burr Settles, who joined as the company’s first AI hire in 2013 (Duolingo was founded in 2012). While that story covers the AI in Duolingo specifically, which I think is relevant…

In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, scientists at IBM, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and health tech company Color find evidence that the presence of genetic mutations isn’t a reliable precursor to genetic diseases. They claim diseases can be so greatly influenced by other factors that the risk in carriers is sometimes as low as in that of noncarriers. The…

Adobe today announced the beta launch of new features for Adobe Character Animator (version 3.4), its desktop software that combines live motion-capture with a recording system to control 2D puppets drawn in Photoshop or Illustrator. Several — including Speech-Aware Animation and Lip Sync — are powered by Sensei, Adobe’s cross-platform machine learning technology, and leverage algorithms to…