The White House today detailed the establishment of 12 new research institutes focused on AI and quantum information science. Agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have committed to investing tens of millions of dollars in centers intended to serve as nodes for AI and quantum computing study.
Laments over…
Michael Kanaan: The U.S. needs an AI ‘Sputnik moment’ to compete with China and Russia
August 26, 2020
In his book, “T-Minus AI,” Michael Kanaan calls attention to the need for the U.S. to wake up to AI in the same way that China and Russia have — as a matter of national importance amid global power shifts.
In 1957, Russia launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit.
Motion capture — the process of recording peoples’ movements — traditionally requires equipment, cameras, and software tailored for the purpose. But researchers at the Max Planck Institute and Facebook Reality Labs claim they’ve developed a machine learning algorithm…
LinkedIn open-sources toolkit to measure AI model fairness
August 26, 2020
LinkedIn today released the LinkedIn Fairness Toolkit (LiFT), an open source software library designed to enable the measurement of fairness in AI and machine learning workflows. The company says LiFT can be deployed during training and scoring to measure biases in training data sets, and to evaluate notions of fairness for models while detecting differences in their performance across…
In the big data domain, researchers need to ensure that conclusions are consistently verifiable. But that can be particularly challenging in medicine because physicians themselves aren’t always sure about disease diagnoses and treatment plans.
To investigate how machine…
Apple has updated Final Cut Pro X with a slew of features and improvements. The editing suite can now use machine learning smarts to automate video cropping for social media-friendly formats, including square and vertical sizes.
Final Cut Pro can analyze clips for…
Microsoft gives devs an AI-powered tool to build reading accessibility into their apps
August 25, 2020
Microsoft today announced the general availability of Immersive Reader, an Azure Cognitive Services offering that allows developers to embed text reading and comprehension capabilities into apps to make them more inclusive. Immersive Reader is designed to help users — including those with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — improve their reading skills…
Socure raises $35 million to combat payments fraud with AI
August 25, 2020
Cloud-based identity verification and fraud prevention startup Socure today closed a $35 million round. CEO Tom Thimot told VentureBeat the funds will bolster Socure’s R&D efforts and help it expand its customer base.
Javelin Strategy reported that 6.64% of consumers…
Even as Google’s $2.1 billion acquisition hangs over Fitbit, the wearables company today announced three new devices. Fitbit Sense replaces Fitbit Ionic to become the company’s most advanced health smartwatch, with an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor for managing…
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say they’ve developed a system — RF-Diary — that can detect and caption the behaviors of people within a room from radio signals. They claim their approach can observe people through walls and other occlusions even in complete darkness, and that it learns to track those people’s interactions with objects…