Google Assistant for Android has just become a lot more useful for people with vision and reading problems, as well as for those learning new languages. The tech giant has rolled out a new feature that gives it the capability to read web pages aloud. Google says the feature brings together many of its advancements in speech technology, making it sound more natural than other more run-of-the-mill…
The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus is a fluid situation changing by the day, and even by the hour. The growing worldwide public health emergency is threatening lives, but it’s also impacting businesses and disrupting travel around the world. The OECD warns that…
FiveAI has raised $41 million in venture capital as the startup seeks to turn the self-driving research it has conducted into commercial products and services.
The U.K.-based startup has created a technology stack to power autonomous vehicles. The company uses AI and machine…
Health Data Analytics Institute nabs $16 million for AI platform that predicts outcomes
March 4, 2020
AI excels at making sense of data. Health Data Analytics Institute (HDAI) is a case in point — its AI-powered platform analyzes over a billion patient encounters to improve health care outcomes. After several years of operating quietly under the radar, the company today revealed that it has raised $16 million, which it will use to launch an API that widens access to its clinical prediction…
An algorithm could make CPUs a cheap way to train AI
March 3, 2020
AI is the backbone of technologies such as Alexa and Siri — digital assistants that rely on deep machine learning to do their thing. But for the makers of these products — and others that rely on AI — getting them “trained” is an expensive and…
Podcast: Solving AI’s black box problem
March 2, 2020
What happens when you don’t know why a smart system made a specific decision? AI’s infamous black box system is a big problem, whether you’re an engineer debugging a system or a person wondering why a facial-recognition unlock system doesn’t perform as accurately on…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) — two-part AI models consisting of a generator that creates samples and a discriminator that attempts to differentiate between the generated samples and real-world samples — have been applied to tasks from video, artwork, and music synthesis to drug discovery and misleading media detection. They’ve also made their way into ecommerce, as Amazon…
OECD on AI Policy Observatory launch: ‘The technology is not terribly well understood by policy makers’
March 2, 2020
The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development has officially launched its AI Policy Observatory, a project whose mission is to share best practices around the creation of artificial intelligence regulations. The interactive website contains a wealth of information…
Scientists dream of storing captured CO2 emissions underground, but it can be tricky to find pockets for storing those emissions — Earth’s seismic “hum” makes it difficult to spot the low-frequency waves that would best help map the subterranean…
This week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a year-one report card on its American Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Earlier this month, the European Commission (EC) published a major set of proposals for its strategy on AI. Both of these follow AI principles and regulations proposed in May 2019 by the multi-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and…
