As the continued spread of COVID-19 disrupts workplaces and travel plans around the globe, customer service centers are experiencing an unprecedented uptick in overall call volume. This week, travelers looking to modify their itineraries with Canadian airline WestJet experienced waits in excess of 10 hours. Banks and credit card companies, including Capital One, are seeing longer-than-average hold…
Ada Support, a Toronto-based company developing AI-driven customer experiences, today revealed that it nabbed a $44 million series B tranche. Cofounder and CEO Mike Murchison says it will be used to scale Ada’s platform and provide enhanced functionality across traditional…
Bnh.ai is a new law firm focused only on AI
March 19, 2020
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…
Skylum’s photo editing app Luminar has used AI and machine learning tricks to bolster its last two major releases, bringing AI sky enhancement and object removal tools to version 3, then ML-automated sky replacement and face cleaning tools to version 4. Today, the company is adding a new AI Augmented Sky tool and facial shine removal feature to its arsenal, as well as some improvements to past…
Members of the Google Brain team and Google AI this week open-sourced EfficientDet, an AI tool that achieves state-of-the-art object detection while using less compute. Creators of the system say it also achieves faster performance when used with CPUs or GPUs than other…
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…
Intel debuts Pohoiki Springs, a powerful neuromorphic research system for AI workloads
March 18, 2020
This morning, Intel announced the general readiness of Pohoiki Springs, a powerful self-contained neuromorphic system that’s about the size of five standard servers. It says the system will be available to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community via the cloud using Intel’s Nx SDK and community-contributed software components, giving them a tool to scale up their neuromorphic…
Over the past four years, the strongest demand for candidates with AI skills hasn’t come from IT departments, but from other business units within organizations. That’s according to a Gartner report that found that the number of AI jobs posted by IT was less than half of…
Coronavirus fears halt autonomous vehicle testing for Uber, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Waymo, and others
March 17, 2020
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…
Researchers detail TrojAI, a framework for hardening AI models against adversarial attacks
March 17, 2020
One way to test machine learning models for robustness is with what’s called a trojan attack, which involves modifying a model to respond to input triggers that cause it to infer an incorrect response. In an attempt to make these tests more repeatable and scalable, researchers at Johns Hopkins University developed a framework dubbed TrojAI, a set of tools that generate triggered data sets and…
