L1ght, a fledgling AI startup that wants to help technology companies combat online toxicity, bullying, and abuse, has raised $15 million in a seed round of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Western Technology Investment.
The company’s substantial seed funding comes as tech companies are struggling to contain offensive and harmful behavior on their platforms.
U.K.’s top cop calls for government to legislate police use of AI
February 25, 2020
(Reuters) — Britain’s most senior police officer on Monday called on the government to create a legal framework for police use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Speaking about live facial recognition, which police in London started using in January…
NeurIPS requires AI researchers to account for societal impact and financial conflicts of interest
February 24, 2020
For the first time ever, researchers who submit papers to NeurIPS, one of the biggest AI research conferences in the world, must now state the “potential broader impact of their work” on society as well as any financial conflict of interest, conference organizers told…
Google’s AI detects adversarial attacks against image classifiers
February 24, 2020
Defenses against adversarial attacks, which in the context of AI refer to techniques that fool models through malicious input, are increasingly being broken by “defense-aware” attacks. In fact, most state-of-the-art methods claiming to detect adversarial attacks have been counteracted shortly after their publication. To break the cycle, researchers at the University of California, San Diego…
Karius raises $165 million to identify infectious diseases with AI
February 24, 2020
Approximately 9% of the U.S. population has been diagnosed with an infectious disease. Worldwide, these diseases are the second-leading cause of death after heart disease, and they’re responsible for more deaths annually than cancer.
Mickey Kertesz and Tim Blauwkamp —…
MIT CSAIL’s radars map hidden features to help driverless cars navigate snowy terrain
February 24, 2020
Inclement weather — particularly rain and snow — threaten to stop autonomous vehicles in their tracks. That’s because precipitation covers cameras critical to the cars’ self-awareness and tricks sensors into perceiving obstacles that aren’t there. Plus, bad weather…
AI is not just another technology project
February 23, 2020
AI, unlike any other initiative is a business transformation enabler and not another technology system implementation that business users need to be trained on. Traditionally, businesses choose either the classic waterfall approach of linear tasks, or the agile approach, where teams review and evaluate solutions as they are tested out.
In contrast, implementing AI technology requires a different…
AI discovers antibiotic that kills even highly resistant bacteria
February 23, 2020
The use of AI to discover medicine appears to be paying off. MIT scientists have revealed that their AI discovered an antibiotic compound, halicin (named after 2001‘s HAL 9000), that can not only kill many forms of resistant bacteria but do so in a novel way.
Spin Master's new NinjaBots are cute little killers
February 22, 2020
Do you remember the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon from the ’80s? Shredder’s minions were all featureless humanoid robots, which our heroes could could slice and dice without guilt. At this year’s Toy Fair, Spin Master’s new product answers…
ProBeat: AI is helping Microsoft rethink Office for mobile
February 21, 2020
Microsoft this week launched an Office app that replaces Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Android and iOS. Merging three apps into one, while adding more features, is quite the achievement. The new Office app is not just for consuming content and maybe a little light editing on the side, but actually creating content on the go. Most interestingly, a lot of these features fundamentally require AI and…
