Soft Robotics raised another $23 million to continue developing its solutions to the seemingly intractable problems gripping and sorting machines face.
As work published by MIT and others has established, picker robots struggle with complex poses and unfamiliar objects. That’s because they not only have to locate objects and understand how to grasp them, but because they’ve got to set them…
Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls for 'sensible regulation' of AI
January 20, 2020
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai takes his sweet time getting to the point in a new Financial Times editorial. But when he gets there, he leave’s little room for interpretation: “…there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to…
Supplier discovery often isn’t a walk in the park. According to a survey by Thomasnet, nearly 50% of buyers have worked with a supplier that unexpectedly went out of business. That’s why in 2015, four German entrepreneurs — Christian Heinrich, Fabian Heinrich, Gregor…
No matter the claimed robustness of AI and machine learning systems in production, none are immune to adversarial attacks, or techniques that attempt to fool algorithms through malicious input. It’s been shown that generating even small perturbations on images can fool the best of classifiers with high probability. And that’s problematic considering the wide proliferation of the “AI as a…
One of the trends that came into sharp focus in 2019 was, ironically, a woeful lack of clarity around AI ethics. The AI field at large was paying attention to ethics, creating and applying frameworks for AI research, development, policy, and law, but there was no unified…
Lioness AI sex toy can teach you about your orgasms
January 20, 2020
Lioness has been pioneering sex tech since 2017, but CES 2020 was the first time the company was allowed to exhibit its AI-enabled sex toy at one of the world’s biggest tech shows.
The Consumer Technology Association backtracked on its earlier policies and allowed…
World Economic Forum launches toolkit to help corporate boards build AI-first companies
January 17, 2020
The value of building data-driven businesses with AI at their core is well known today, and business executives are rushing to implement the technology into their operations and gain a competitive advantage, but it’s not as simple as creating a data lake and creating AI models.
A large number of AI companies attempting to implement more AI models or build AI-first businesses have experienced…
SenseTime’s AI generates realistic deepfake videos
January 17, 2020
Deepfakes — media that takes a person in an existing image, audio recording, or video and replaces them with someone else’s likeness — are becoming increasingly convincing. In late 2019, researchers at Seoul-based Hyperconnect developed a tool (MarioNETte) that could…
Amazon details the AI behind Alexa’s Whisper Mode
January 17, 2020
In October 2018, months after a brief reveal, Amazon brought Whisper Mode to select third- and first-party Alexa devices. It expanded the feature to all locales in November 2019, such that all smart home appliances powered by Alexa — the company’s virtual assistant —…
Meet the new twist on data encryption that promises better privacy and security for AI
January 17, 2020
Presented by Intel
AI and privacy needn’t be mutually exclusive. After a decade in the labs, homomorphic encryption (HE) is emerging as a top way to help protect data privacy in machine learning (ML) and cloud computing. It’s a timely breakthrough: Data from ML is doubling yearly. At the same time, concern about related data privacy and security is growing among industry, professionals and…
