AI & Robotics

Following 25 weeks of development, Canonical today released Ubuntu 19.10. Highlights include new edge capabilities for Kubernetes, an integrated AI developer experience, and the fastest GNOME desktop performance yet. You can download Ubuntu 19.10 from here. Kubernetes (stylized as k8s) was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Facebook AI Research today introduced ReAgent, a reinforcement learning toolkit for building decision-making AI that can receive feedback. ReAgent can assign scores to user actions and treat user input such as clicking on recommended content as training data. ReAgent is a small C++ library available for download on GitHub designed to be embedded in any application. The toolkit comes with a set of…

Healx, a company that said it’s using artificial intelligence (AI) to discover new drug treatments for rare diseases, has raised $56 million in a series B round of funding led by Atomico, with participation from Intel Capital, Balderton Capital, Global Brain, Btov Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Cambridge Innovation Capital’s Jonathan Milner. Founded out of Cambridge in 2014, Healx’s…

Robots with truly humanlike dexterity are far from becoming reality, but progress accelerated by AI has brought us closer to achieving this vision than ever before. In a research paper published in September, a team of scientists at Google detailed their tests with a robotic hand that enabled it to rotate Baoding balls with minimal training data. And at a computer vision conference in June, MIT…