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 female characters was 3:1 in 2016, the same it’s been since 1946. Motivated by this, researchers at the Allen Institute for…

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 did with my photo, with my permission, in the video embedded in this story. They made me sing the I See Fire song from The…

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 autonomous boats developed by CSAIL, MIT Senseable City Lab, and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions…

The definition of success for startups and Big Tech companies alike has long been summed up by three words: hockey stick growth. Speedy gains in terms of both users and revenue is the dream for any company looking to scale. But according to a paper recently published by Google senior research scientist Alex Hanna and independent researcher Tina Park, a growing number of AI researchers say…