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A team of Google researchers recently detailed a framework called SimCLR, which improves previous approaches to self-supervised learning, a family of techniques for converting an unsupervised learning problem (i.e., a problem in which AI models train on unlabeled data) into a supervised one by creating labels from unlabeled data sets. In a preprint paper and accompanying blog post, they say that…

A team of Microsoft and Huazhong University researchers this week open-sourced an AI object detector — Fair Multi-Object Tracking (FairMOT) — they claim outperforms state-of-the-art models on public data sets at 30 frames per second. If productized, it could benefit industries ranging from elder care to security, and perhaps be used to track the spread of illnesses like COVID-19. As the team…

Last month, Microsoft announced that Teams, its competitor to Slack, Facebook’s Workplace, and Google’s Hangouts Chat, had passed 44 million daily active users. The milestone overshadowed its unveiling of a few new features coming “later this year.” Most were straightforward: a hand-raising feature to indicate you have something to say, offline and low-bandwidth support to read chat…

Google Cloud today announced the launch of the Rapid Response Virtual Agent program, a quick way to launch Contact Center AI agents for handling conversations with online chat or over the phone. The Rapid Response program also makes it easy to add COVID-19 related templates like Pathfinder. Made by Alphabet’s Verily with Google Cloud, the Pathfinder template incorporates World Health…