Researchers at MIT say they’ve developed an algorithm that can diagnose COVID-19 by the sound of someone’s cough, even if that person is asymptomatic. In a paper published in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, the team reports that their approach distinguishes between infected and healthy individuals through “forced-cough” recordings contributed via smartphones…
How the U.S. patent office is keeping up with AI
November 26, 2020
Technology keeps creating challenges for intellectual property law. The infamous case of the “monkey selfie” challenged the notion of not just who owns a piece of intellectual property, but what constitutes a “who” in the first place. Last decade’s semi-sentient…
PowerTransformer uses AI to rewrite text to correct gender biases in character portrayals
November 26, 2020
Unconscious biases are pervasive in text and media. For example, female characters in stories are often portrayed as passive and powerless while men are portrayed as proactive and powerful. According to a McKinsey study of 120 movies across 10 markets, the ratio of male to…
Google’s AI converts webpages into videos
November 26, 2020
Researchers at Google say they’ve developing an AI system that can automatically convert webpages into short videos. It extracts assets like text and images and their design styles including fonts, colors, and graphical layouts from HTML sources and organizes the assets into a sequence of shots, maintaining a look and feel similar to the source page as it does so.
Google envisions the system…
Today, civil rights groups — including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund — filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on the grounds that a Trump executive order violates free speech rights and will “undermine efforts to foster diversity and inclusion in the…
Alethea AI makes it easy to create AI avatars from a single photo
November 26, 2020
Synthetic humans are a thing of the future, and the latest project to come along in pursuit of that is Alethea AI, a startup that can create photorealistic AI-generated avatars from a single photo. The company is unveiling its AI Avatar Studio today.
You can see what they…
Human API raises $20 million to standardize health records with AI
November 26, 2020
Human API, a San Mateo, California-based company developing an AI pipeline that structures health data into a standardized format, this week raised over $20 million. A spokesperson for the startup says the capital will be used to scale new products and services that support product design, risk stratification, clinical trial recruitment, population health management, patient monitoring, and…
Intel today quietly launched Intel Geospatial, a cloud platform that features data engineering solutions, 3D visualizations, and basic analytics tools for geovisual workloads. Intel says it’s designed to provide access to 2D and 3D geospatial data and apps through an…
MIT CSAIL’s Roboat II is an autonomous platform large enough to carry human passengers
November 26, 2020
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say they’ve created an autonomous river vessel — Roboat II — that’s capable of carrying passengers across fast-moving bodies of water. It’s the latest addition to a fleet of…
Ketos raises $18 million to monitor drinking water quality with AI
November 26, 2020
Water analytics startup Ketos today announced it raised $18 million in funding. The capital will be put toward further advancing the company’s cloud-based software platform and hardware, as well as expanding Ketos’ team ahead of future growth.
It takes 13,737 to 21,926 gallons of water to produce a car, according to the Grace Communications Foundation. Leather shoes require roughly 3,626…
