Tech companies might have trouble establishing groundwork for the ethical use of AI, but the Defense Department appears to be moving forward. The Defense Innovation Board just published draft guidelines for AI ethics at the Defense Department that aim to keep the emerging technology in check. Some of them are more practical (such as demanding reliability) or have roots in years-old policies…
Samsung’s Bixby assistant won’t be the reason you buy (or don’t buy) your next Samsung-manufactured smartphone, smart refrigerator, smart router, or smart speaker. And Samsung is finally coming to terms with that.
This was the implicit thread underlying the 2019…
Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence program AlphaStar will battle attendees at BlizzCon 2019 in matches of the classic Blizzard real-time strategy game StarCraft 2.
In the Blizzard Arcade section of the fan event in Anaheim, California, Blizzard has set up machines…
Watch Google’s AI teach a picker robot to assemble objects
October 31, 2019
Manipulating objects in a range of shapes isn’t machines’ forte, but it’s a useful skill of any robot tasked with navigating the physical world. To advance the state-of-the-art in this domain, researchers at Google, Stanford, and Columbia recently investigated a machine learning system dubbed Form2Fit, which aims to teach a picker robot with a suction arm the concept of assembling objects…
The Defense Innovation Board, a panel of 16 prominent technologists advising the Pentagon, today voted to approve AI ethics principles for the Department of Defense. The report includes 12 recommendations for how the U.S. military can apply ethics in the future for both…
DeepMind AI now keeps up with 'StarCraft II' Grandmasters
October 31, 2019
DeepMind’s StarCraft II AI can already hang with human players, but now it’s ready to handle the best of the best. The team has revealed that its AlphaStar AI can play one-on-one matches in the real-time strategy game at a Grandmaster level for all three…
RhythmNet uses AI to estimate your heart rate using your face
October 30, 2019
A wearable heart rate monitor is one thing, but what about a system that’s able to estimate a person’s heartbeat from footage of their face alone? That’s what researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences set out to design in a preprint paper published on Arxiv.org. In it, they describe RhythmNet, an end-to-end trainable heart rate estimator that taps AI and photoplethysmography (PPG) —…
SiriusXM radio finally plays nice with the Google Assistant
October 30, 2019
Starting next week, SiriusXM will be available through Google Assistant-powered hardware in the US and Canada. That means you can ask “Hey Google, play Howard 100 on SiriusXM or request an artist channel with something like “Hey Google, play The Beatles Channel…
Strong writing makes all the difference about whether a Hollywood show turns out like Game of Thrones or Pee-Wee Herman’s Big Adventure. That’s why Ron Howard and Brian Glazer’s Imagine Entertainment opened an incubator for writers called Imagine Impact.
The film and…
MIT CSAIL’s swarm of robotic cubes can shapeshift at will
October 30, 2019
Collaborative robots have captured the public’s imagination for decades, and it’s no wonder — machines can achieve incredible feats by working together as a team. One need look no further for evidence than a new study from the MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), which was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and Amazon’s robotics division.
