This month, under the strain millions of people self-quarantined by COVID-19 have placed on broadband infrastructure, Facebook, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Netflix, and YouTube agreed to temporarily reduce download speeds and video streaming quality in countries around the world. Nearly 90 out of the top 200 U.S. cities saw internet speeds decline in the past week, according to BroadbandNow. And…
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates an automated future that’s already on its way. It serves as a wake-up call to all AI, robotics, and driverless car startups: stop building eye-dazzling demos and talking about the future possibility of general-use AI. Instead, focus on…
A preprint paper coauthored by Uber AI scientists and Jeff Clune, a research team leader at San Francisco startup OpenAI, describes Fiber, an AI development and distributed training platform for methods including reinforcement learning (which spurs AI agents to complete…
IBM’s AI generates new footage from video stills
March 27, 2020
A paper coauthored by researchers at IBM describes an AI system — Navsynth — that generates videos seen during training, as well as unseen videos. While this in and of itself isn’t novel — it’s an acute area of interest for Alphabet’s DeepMind and others — the researchers say the approach produces superior quality videos compared with existing methods. If the claim holds water, their…
DarwinAI wants to help identify coronavirus in x-rays, but radiologists aren’t convinced
March 25, 2020
Canadian startup DarwinAI and researchers from the University of Waterloo are open-sourcing COVID-Net, a convolutional neural network made for detecting COVID-19 in x-ray imagery. Since coronavirus emerged as a threat to people around the world, a global community of…
In a blog post and accompanying paper, researchers at Google detail an AI system — MetNet — that can predict precipitation up to eight hours into the future. They say that it outperforms the current state-of-the-art physics model in use by the U.S. National Oceanic and…
In a study published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, Google and University of California, Berkely researchers propose a framework that combines learning-based perception with model-based controls to enable wheeled robots to autonomously navigate around obstacles. They say it generalizes well to avoiding unseen buildings and humans in both simulation and real-world environments and that…
Google and the Oxford Internet Institute explain artificial intelligence basics with the ‘A-Z of AI’
March 25, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating just about every facet of society, from detecting fraud and surveillance to helping countries battle the current COVID-19 pandemic. But AI is a thorny subject, fraught with complex terminology, contradictory information, and…
Fritz brings on-device AI to Android and iOS
March 25, 2020
Fritz AI, a startup providing an AI and machine learning development platform for Android and iOS, today announced that it has raised $5 million. CEO Dan Abdinoor says that the capital will accelerate Fritz’s expansion as it launches its product out of early access, which…
Pinterest launches Today tab with curated topics, fights coronavirus misinformation with AI
March 25, 2020
In a bid to brighten the mood as the torrent of COVID-19 news continues unabated, Pinterest has announced the launch of Today in the U.S. and U.K., a new tab with curated topics and trending topic pins. While information from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control about topics like handwashing is slated to feature prominently in the coming weeks, the Today tab will also show…
