Why do customers buy products seemingly irrelevant to their web and voice assistant searches? That’s a good question — and one a team of Amazon researchers sought to answer in a study scheduled to be presented at the upcoming ACM Web Search and Data Mining conference in February. In the report, they say their analyses — which looked at purchases and “engagements,” the latter defined as…
Though it’s a coincidence that I’m writing this article roughly one year after my colleague Khari Johnson railed against the “public nuisance” of “charlatan AI,” the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) clearly inspired both missives. At the tail end of last…
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute say they’ve developed a system that taps machine learning to analyze online comments and pick out those that defend or sympathize with disenfranchised peoples. Although it hasn’t been commercialized…
Google hopes to tap AI and machine learning to make speedy local weather predictions. In a paper and accompanying blog post, the tech giant detailed an AI system that uses satellite images to produce “nearly instantaneous” and high-resolution forecasts — on average, with a roughly one kilometer resolution and a latency of only 5-10 minutes. The researchers behind it say it outperforms…
Canon's Robotic Camera System controls multiple DSLRs from afar
January 13, 2020
Pro photographers who need to control multiple cameras at once just got a useful tool — if they have the right camera. Canon has introduced a CR-S700R Robotic Camera system that lets you remotely steer multiple DSLRs from a PC. You can only use it for still photos…
On Monday, Waymo — the subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet that’s developing a full-stack driverless vehicle platform — announced that its cars have driven a combined 20 million autonomous miles to date, up from 10 million miles in October 2018. The metric…
Chinese court rules AI-written article is protected by copyright
January 13, 2020
A court in Shenzhen, China, has ruled that an article generated by artificial intelligence (AI) is protected by copyright, according to state news outlet China News Service, representing a notable milestone for AI’s credentials as a creative force.
For the past five years Chinese tech titan Tencent has published content produced by automated software called Dreamwriter, with a focus on business…
Obama-era tech advisors list potential challenges for the White House’s AI principles
January 13, 2020
Former Obama administration advisors say the White House regulatory AI principles announced this week are a good start in many ways, but they’re incorrect in their oversimplified mandate to avoid overregulation of private business use, and that the Trump administration…
This week, the White House released 10 AI Principles, intended as guidance for federal agencies while they consider how to appropriately regulate AI in the private sector. It’s an effort to reduce AI’s potential harms, which have come under scrutiny all over the world…
Brazil is emerging as a world-class AI innovation hub
January 13, 2020
Brazil’s government has big plans for AI, despite having come late to the party. In Oxford Insights’ AI Readiness Index 2019, Brazil was ranked 40 out of 192 countries, a sign that the South American powerhouse is moving up in the AI world. The report looks at how ready countries are to take advantage of the AI technologies PwC forecasts will add $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
The…
