Smartphones and social media have often been called our era’s cigarettes — an addictive, destructive cancer to society. Children are particularly susceptible to the corruption permeating the digital world, whether they’re soaking in misinformation or battling a barrage of bullying and abuse.
But while the internet can be toxic, for millions of young people globally the only world they’ve…
AI Weekly: Facial recognition, deepfakes, privacy, and jobs automation defined 2019
December 27, 2019
As the year draws to a close, it’s instructive to look back at the months preceding to see what the future has in store. History is cyclical in nature, and this is true of the field of AI. Consider that backpropagation, an algorithm widely used in the training of machine…
Microsoft proposes AI that improves when you smile
December 27, 2019
Positive affectivity, or the characteristic that describes how people experience affects (e.g., sensations, emotions, and sentiments) and interact with others as a consequence, has been linked to increased interest and curiosity as well as satisfaction in learning. Inspired…
Ubisoft uses AI to teach a car to drive itself in a racing game
December 27, 2019
Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from industrial robotics to drug discovery. But while firms including OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind have investigated its efficacy in video games like Dota 2, Quake III Arena, and StarCraft 2, few to date have studied its use under constraints…
CES is right around the corner, and that means we’ll once again meet a slew of new home theater equipment. LG is unveiling its 2020 soundbar lineup right now, and a new headline feature for this year is “AI Room Calibration.” Exactly what separates this…
Amazon researchers use AI to improve the recognition of curved text
December 26, 2019
Optical character recognition (OCR), or the conversion of images of handwritten or printed text into machine-readable text, is a science that dates back to the early ’70s. But algorithms have long struggled to make out characters that aren’t parallel with horizontal…
Researchers want to use Mega Man 2 to evaluate AI
December 26, 2019
Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. Games — particularly video games — provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning Environment, a collection of over 55 Atari 2600 games designed to test a broad range of AI techniques. More recently, San…
Techno-thriller 'Mr. Robot' ends on a mind-melting high
December 25, 2019
(This article contains spoilers for ‘Mr. Robot’ season four)
When Mr. Robot debuted in June 2015, it was the show’s commitment to authentic hacking that attracted eyeballs. For so long, cybersecurity had been shortchanged on-screen — an ever-changing…
Summarizing text is a task at which machine learning algorithms are improving, as evidenced by a recent paper published by Microsoft. That’s that’s good news — automatic summarization systems promise to cut down on the amount message-reading done by enterprise workers…
AI year in review: Opportunities grow, but ethics loom large
December 23, 2019
VentureBeat is excited to announce VB Transform 2020, to be held July 15-16 in San Francisco, California. Register now for an early bird 40% discount.
Artificial intelligence garnered a lot of attention from the usual players — governments, tech giants, and academics — throughout 2019. But it was also a big year for business AI, with even more growth expected ahead. In a March KPMG survey…
