AI & RoboticsNews

Google’s Tree Canopy Lab taps AI to help cities plan tree-planting projects

Google today announced the launch of Tree Canopy Lab for Los Angeles, a tool that combines AI and aerial imagery to help cities see their current tree canopy coverage and plan future tree-planting projects. Google says that Tree Canopy Lab, which is a part of the company’s Environmental Insights Explorer platform, could make it easier for cities to measure, plan, and reduce carbon emissions and…
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AI & RoboticsNews

AliveCor raises $65 million to detect heart problems with AI

AliveCor, a startup developing algorithms that detect atrial fibrillation, bradycardia, tachycardia, and other health issues from heart rate readings, today raised $65 million in funding. The company says the proceeds will be used to bolster go-to-market efforts as AliveCor kicks off a partnership with Omron to provide at-home blood pressure monitoring tech to customers. Over the past few months…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Researchers investigate why popular AI algorithms classify objects by texture, not by shape

In a paper accepted to the 2020 NeurIPS conference, Google and Stanford researchers explore the bias exhibited by certain kinds of computer vision algorithms — convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — trained on the open source ImageNet dataset. Unlike humans, ImageNet-trained CNNs tend to classify images by texture rather than by shape. Their work indicates that CNNs’ bias toward textures may…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Facebook’s redoubled AI efforts won’t stop the spread of harmful content

Facebook says it’s using AI to prioritize potentially problematic posts for human moderators to review as it works to more quickly remove content that violates its community guidelines. The social media giant previously leveraged machine learning models to proactively take down low-priority content and left high-priority content reported by users to human reviewers. But Facebook claims it now…
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