Google is quickly putting its wildlife-spotting AI to good use. The internet giant has launched a Wildlife Insights tool that helps conservationists track wildlife by not only parsing their photos, but sharing them in a searchable public website. The AI automatically tosses out photos that are highly unlikely to include animals and tries to label the animals it does spot, dramatically speeding…
Google’s AI can identify wildlife from trap-camera footage with up to 98.6% accuracy
December 17, 2019
With respect to climate change, poaching, and encroachment on natural habitats, some animal populations have fared far worse than others. It’s estimated that the populations of more than 4,000 species shrunk by 60% between 1970 and 2014, and a recent United Nations global…
Anyscale, a company promising to let application developers more easily build so-called “distributed” applications that are behind most AI and machine learning efforts, has raised $20.6 million from investors in a first round of funding.
The company has some credibility…
Voximplant raises $10 million to automate call campaigns with AI
December 17, 2019
Can the cloud-based unified communications market, which is anticipated to reach $167.1 billion by 2025, be materially transformed by AI? Alexey Aylarov, Andrey Kovalenko, and Sergey Poroshin firmly believe so. They’re the founders of Voximplant, a startup developing products that imbue web and mobile apps with voice, text, and video chat. Voximplant provides the required infrastructure and…
AI and machine learning are powerful tools for the synthesis of speech. As countless studies have demonstrated, only a few minutes — and in the case of state-of-the-art models, a few seconds — are required to imitate a subject’s prosody and intonation with precision.
(Reuters) – SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said on Tuesday Japan should make artificial intelligence (AI) a mandatory subject for college entrance exams, to counter the yawning gap with the United States and China in the nascent field.
Japanese students “don’t…
What's on TV this week: 'Joker,' 'Mr. Robot' and 'The Witcher'
December 17, 2019
This week the billion-dollar villain movie Joker is becoming available digitally, while Netflix is preparing to release season one of its The Witcher adaptation. If neither of those are for you then there’s still a lot to pay attention to when it comes to streaming. This week the entire Studio Ghibli catalog is going on sale over VOD for the first time, Disney has shifted The…
Gecko Robotics raises $40 million for industrial inspection robots
December 16, 2019
Industrial robotics startup Gecko Robotics has raised $40 million in a series B round of funding led by Drive Capital, with participation from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Y Combinator, and Next47. Notable angel investors in this round include Mark Cuban, SoftBank senior…
Intel's latest acquisition is a $2 billion push into AI
December 16, 2019
Intel just spent approximately $2 billion to acquire Israel-based AI firm Habana Labs. The partnership will “turbo-charge” Intel’s AI offerings for data centers, Intel said in a press release.
Habana Labs makes programmable deep learning accelerators. Its…
At the Tackling Climate Change workshop at this year’s NeurIPS conference, some of the top minds in machine learning came together to discuss the effects of climate change on life on Earth, how AI can tackle the urgent problem, and why and how the machine learning community should join the fight.
The panel included Yoshua Bengio, MILA director and University of Montreal professor; Jeff Dean…
