AI & Robotics

When VentureBeat asked Andrew Burt why he was starting an AI-focused law firm, Burt was quick to clarify that it’s about AI analytics. But that didn’t answer the underlying question of why the world needs a law firm focused so precisely on this one key area. “The thesis behind the law firm is that traditional legal expertise on its own is not sufficient,” said Burt, a Yale Law School…

In a preprint paper, Microsoft researchers describe a machine learning system that reasons out the correct actions to take directly from camera images. It’s trained via simulation and learns to independently navigate environments and conditions in the real world, including unseen situations, which makes it a fit for robots deployed in search and rescue missions. Someday, it could help those…

Following Waymo’s announcement that it would limit its ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona and autonomous car testing on public California roads in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, several competitors adopted similar measures this week. Uber, GM’s Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, and Pony.ai are among the companies that have suspended driverless vehicle programs in the hopes of limiting contact…

The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a repository of more than 29,000 scholarly articles about coronavirus family viruses from around the world, is being released today for free. The result of work by Microsoft Research, the Allen Institute for AI, the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), and others…