Life insurance isn’t as popular as it once was, despite the fact that a majority of people consider it to be important. Over 80% of consumers agreed in a recent survey that people need a life insurance policy, yet just 62% say they have one themselves. In fact, only 44% of U.S. households held individual life insurance as of 2010 — a 50-year low — compared with the 72% of Americans who owned…
Google taps AI to improve news results in Search
December 11, 2019
Google says it’s implementing AI and machine learning techniques to improve story suggestions in Google Search. In a blog post this morning, the tech giant announced that users in the U.S. in English (with more languages and locations to come in the next few months) who…
AI Index 2019 assesses global AI research, investment, and impact
December 11, 2019
Leaders in the AI community came together to release the 2019 AI Index report today, an annual attempt to examine the biggest trends shaping the AI industry, breakthrough research, and AI’s impact to society.
It also examine trends like AI hiring practices, private…
LeanDNA raises $15 million for AI factory inventory and delivery management software
December 11, 2019
Factories regularly face inventory shortages and missed deliveries, but they’re wounds of a self-inflicted nature. Just ask Richard Lebovitz, the founder of LeanDNA, who previously founded Factory Logic, which was acquired by SAP for an undisclosed amount. He’s the founder and CEO of LeanDNA, an Austin, Texas-based startup building a cloud-based actionable intelligence platform for factory…
ELLIS launches $220 million initiative to keep AI talent in Europe
December 11, 2019
The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) today announced the selection of 17 cities in 10 European countries and Israel where it’s establishing project that it hope grows into AI research institutes keen on societal impact.
Each selected site…
Gosu.ai’s raises $2.8 million for AI-based coaching for gamers in League of Legends
December 10, 2019
Gosu.ai, the AI-driven video game coach, has raised $2.8 million for its AI-based video coach that helps players get better at playing League of Legends.
The news comes after the company last week unveiled its plans for a desktop voice assistant that proactively offers…
MIT and IBM’s ObjectNet shows that AI struggles at object detection in the real world
December 10, 2019
Object recognition models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, but they’ve got a long way to go where accuracy is concerned. That’s the conclusion of a joint team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM, which recently released a data set — ObjectNet — designed to illustrate the performance gap between machine learning algorithms and humans.
Unlike many…
DeepMind’s Dreamer AI learns from the past to predict the future
December 10, 2019
Some AI systems achieve goals in challenging environments by drawing on representations of the world informed by past experiences. They generalize these to novel situations, enabling them to complete tasks even in settings they haven’t encountered before. As it turns out…
This week at NeurIPS, the biggest AI research conference in the world, attendees of the Queer in AI workshop could choose multiple stickers for their badges. There were stickers for preferred gender pronouns, and next to the nonprofit’s rainbow brain logo stickers was a…
Google Assistant can create alarms based on weather and time of day
December 10, 2019
An update on its way to Lenovo Smart Clock will add a Google Assistant option that can switch up the alarm ringtone based on factors such as the time of day and the weather. In fact, Google’s AI can create and curate the piano ringtones for you.
Machine learning tech from the Magenta project powers the feature, which is called Impromptu. Google gave an example of a somewhat upbeat tune you…
