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…
After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal
April 10, 2020
When we came out of the financial crisis of 2008, cloud computing kicked into high gear and started to become a pervasive, transformational technology. The current COVID-19 crisis could provide a similar inflection point for AI applications. While the implications of AI…
Ferrum, a startup developing an AI patient safety platform to prevent medical errors, today announced that it secured $9 million in seed funding. According to CEO Pelu Tran, who’s also a technology pioneer at the World Economic Forum, the plan is to use the capital…
Google releases SimCLR, an AI framework that can classify images with limited labeled data
April 10, 2020
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…
In a paper scheduled to be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Learning Representations, Amazon researchers propose an AI approach that greatly improves performance on certain meta-learning tasks (i.e., tasks that involve both accomplishing related…
How Microsoft Teams will use AI to filter out typing, barking, and other noise from video calls
April 10, 2020
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…
MIT and makers of the app Private Kit: Safe Paths say they’ve overcome an Android and iOS interoperability issue that will make the COVID-19 contact tracking app able to track people in close proximity with others using Bluetooth. MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory says it accomplished the feat last week.
Currently, Private Kit logs location history using GPS for 28 days. Bluetooth proximity apps record…
Google today announced the release of a new data set — the Free Universal Sound Separation data set, or FUSS for short — intended to support the development of AI models that can separate distinct sounds from recording mixes. The use cases are potentially endless, but if…
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…
Google launches braille keyboard for Android devices
April 10, 2020
Google today announced the launch of a virtual braille keyboard for Android that’s designed to enable those with low vision or blindness to type on their phones without additional hardware. The tech giant says it collaborated with braille developers and users to create it, and to ensure it can be used anywhere a user would normally type — including social media, text messaging, and email…
