The internet can be a difficult place to navigate for people who are blind or who have low vision. A large portion of content on the internet is visual, and unless website creators use alt text to label their images, it’s hard for users of screen readers or Braille displays to know what they show.
To address the issue, Google has announced a new feature for Chrome which will use…
Issa Rae is Google Assistant's newest celebrity voice
October 10, 2019
The long-promised John Legend voice eventually landed on Google Assistant back in April, now we’ve got the next celebrity voice offering in the form of the brilliant actress, writer and producer, Issa Rae. Just say, “Hey Google, talk like Issa,” or switch…
Nvidia’s AI prevents car high beams from producing glare
October 9, 2019
High-beam headlights cut through thick precipitation like a knife cuts through butter, but they’re a literal eyesore to oncoming drivers. That’s because most commercially available systems don’t automatically adjust to compensate for daytime brightness, and because…
Benchmarks made to measure the performance of AI systems that control robots are often limited to expensive hardware designed for industrial environments that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Researchers from UC Berkeley and Google Brain addressed this problem by introducing Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots (ROBEL), an open source platform designed to encourage rapid…
White sharks are being spotted off the Pacific coast more than ever before. A 2014 study found that, at minimum, California’s shark population now exceeds 2,000. And the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reports that since 1950, there’s been at least 158…
Rasa’s conversational AI can selectively ignore bits of dialogue to improve its responses
October 9, 2019
What might be the key to chatbots or voice-enabled assistants that respond in more natural, human-like ways? Researchers at Rasa, a Berlin, Germany-based startup developing a standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, believe selective attention might play an…
MIT-IBM developed a faster way to train video recognition AI
October 9, 2019
Machine learning has given computers the ability to do things like identify faces and read medical scans. But when it’s tasked with interpreting videos and real-world events, the models that make machine learning possible become large and cumbersome. A team from the MIT-IBM Watson Lab believe they have a solution. They’ve come up with a method that reduces the size of…
AI startups on pace to break funding records in 2019
October 9, 2019
Artificial intelligence’s potential to transform a growing range of industries has venture capitalists writing checks to promising startups at a rate that will likely set a new record in 2019 for the industry.
According to the Q3 2019 data from the National Venture Capital…
MIT CSAIL’s AI detects possible IP address hijacking
October 9, 2019
Border gateway protocol (BGP), a routing protocol used to transfer data and information between different host gateways, is fundamental to the internet’s design. Unfortunately, it’s flawed in two respects: It lacks route authentication and basic origin validation. That…
Machines struggle to make sense of scenes and language without detailed accompanying annotations. Unfortunately, labeling is generally time-consuming and expensive, and even the best labels convey an understanding only of scenes and not of language.
In an attempt to remedy the problem, Microsoft researchers conceived of an AI system that trains on image-text pairs in a fashion mimicking the way…
