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 approach. The committees and groups, from every sort of organization related to AI, that sought to address AI ethics were coming…
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…
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 manipulate the facial features of a historical figure, a politician, or a CEO using nothing but a webcam and still images.
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…
Social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest tap AI and machine learning systems to detect and remove abusive content, as does LinkedIn. The Microsoft-owned platform — which has over 660 million users, 303 million of whom are active monthly — today detailed its approach to handling profiles containing inappropriate content, which ranges from profanity to advertisements for…
This article is part of the Technology Insight series, made possible with funding from Intel.
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Most discussions of AI infrastructure start and end with compute hardware — the GPUs…
Whether it’s language, music, speech, or video, sequential data isn’t easy for AI and machine learning models to comprehend — particularly when it depends on extensive surrounding context. For instance, if a person or an object disappears from view in a video only to…
VCs double down on hot Seattle startup scene with $10 million Allen Institute AI Incubator investment
January 17, 2020
Some of the top investment firms in Silicon Valley and Seattle are joining up to put $10 million into the Allen Institute AI Incubator for early-stage AI startups. The news comes a day after Apple acquired Xnor. The edge computing AI startup was one of the first companies to receive financial support and mentorship from the incubator and was reportedly acquired for roughly $200 million.
The $10…
