Following the success of its Stranger Things and Dark Crystal games, Netflix is adding another title to its gaming catalog: The 3% Challenge, based on hit Brazilian series 3%. The free-to-play episodic game, coming to Amazon Alexa today and Google Assistant later this week, is a prequel to the Netflix series, taking players into a dystopian future where citizens of the impoverished Inland…
Umbo Computer Vision, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that offers autonomous video security systems to businesses, has raised $8 million in what it’s calling a “post-A” round of funding co-led by Translink Capital and Susquehanna International Group, with…
(Reuters) — The U.S. government expanded its trade blacklist to include some of China’s top artificial intelligence startups, punishing Beijing for its treatment of Muslim minorities and ratcheting up tensions ahead of high-level trade talks in Washington this week.
The…
A growing body of research suggests that the facial movements of almost anyone can be synced to audio clips of speech, given a sufficiently large corpus. In June, applied scientists at Samsung detailed an end-to-end model capable of animating the eyebrows, mouth, and eyelashes, and cheeks in a person’s headshot. Only a few weeks later, Udacity revealed a system that automatically generates…
Facebook’s AI uses schemas to teach robots to manipulate objects in less than 10 hours of training
October 7, 2019
How might a two-armed robot go about accomplishing a task like opening a bottle? Invariably, it’ll need to hold the bottle’s base with one hand while grasping the cap with the other and twisting it off. That high-level sequence of steps is what’s known as a schema, and…
How to operationalize AI ethics
October 7, 2019
Last week, I moderated a panel at TWIMLcon about how teams and organizations can operationalize responsible AI that combined perspectives from three people from different corners of the tech and AI community.
Rachel Thomas is best known as cofounder of fast.ai, a popular…
Machines have a tougher time summarizing text than you’d think, at least where the summarization is abstractive rather than extractive. While the extraction requires merely concatenating sentences, abstraction involves the task of paraphrasing using novel sentences. Progress has been made in the news domain recently, perhaps owing to the abundance of corpora on which algorithmic systems can be…
AI in messaging: Hard to solve, but full of promise
October 6, 2019
There is a huge whitespace waiting to be filled by the tech companies that recognize the power and potential of messaging.
Roughly 63% of people prefer to share information on “dark social,” or closed, private messaging environments like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
“Let’s not use society as a test-bed for technologies that we’re not sure yet how they’re going to change society,” warned Carly Kind, director at the Ada Lovelace Institute, an artificial intelligence (AI) research body based in the U.K. “Let’s try to think…
AI Medical Service raises $42.9 million to detect cancerous lesions from endoscope footage
October 4, 2019
AI Medical Service, a Tokyo-based provider of AI-powered endoscopic screening products, today announced that it’s raised $42.9 million in a series B funding round led by Globis Capital Partners, with participation from World Innovation Lab (WIL), IGV’s Sony Innovation Fund, and undisclosed existing and previous investors. The fresh funds come on the heels of the startup’s $9 million funding…