AI & Robotics

Google today made available Neural Tangents, an open source software library written in JAX, a system for high-performance machine learning research. It’s intended to help build AI models of variable width simultaneously, which Google says could allow “unprecedented” insight into the models’ behavior and “help … open the black box” of machine learning. As Google senior research…

Amazon is using AI and machine learning to predict context from customers’ queries. In a preprint paper accepted to the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval scheduled to take place this month, Amazon researchers describe a system that predicts activities like “running” from queries like “Adidas men’s pants.” It could help to improve the quality of search…

COVID-19 officially became a global pandemic on Wednesday. As public health officials and governments respond; businesses brace for losses; and events like trade shows, SXSW, and Google’s I/O shutter around the world, the disease is also impacting scientific conferences. Ironically, a coronavirus conference got canceled this week, and on Tuesday the International Conference on Learning…

Coinciding with the kickoff of the 2020 TensorFlow Developer Summit, Google today published a pipeline — Objectron — that spots objects in 2D images and estimates their poses and sizes through an AI model. The company says it has implications for robotics, self-driving vehicles, image retrieval, and augmented reality — for instance, it could help a factory floor robot avoid obstacles in real…