The debate over whether to ban or place moratoriums on the use of facial recognition started last year in cities like San Francisco, but the debate reignited this week when Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he’s open to a moratorium on facial recognition. “It [facial recognition regulation] can be immediate, but maybe there’s […]
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On Sunday, the Financial Times published an op-ed penned by Sundar Pichai titled “Why Google thinks we need to regulate AI.” Whether he wrote it himself or merely signed off on it, Pichai clearly wants the world to know that as the CEO of Alphabet and Google, he believes AI is too important not to […]
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Ever wish you could automatically dub foreign film dialogue into another tongue? Amazon’s on the case. In a paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers from the tech giant detailed a novel “speech-to-speech” pipeline that taps AI to align translated speech with original speech and fine-tune speech duration before adding background noise […]
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Amazon-backed autonomous vehicle company Aurora is in search of better metrics by which to compare driverless system safety. In a Medium post this morning, CEO Chris Urmson noted that the commonly used disengagement number, which indicates how often a vehicle switched from autonomous to manual mode, doesn’t adequately capture improvements or their impact over time. […]
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While most of the world focuses on deploying and improving the performance of early 5G networks, small groups of telecom engineers are working to establish what 6G networks will bring a decade from now. As one of the earliest cellular pioneers, Japanese carrier NTT Docomo today weighed in with predictions on what 6G will look like […]
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(Reuters) — British police are to start operational use of live facial recognition cameras in London, despite warnings over privacy from rights groups and concerns expressed by the government’s own surveillance watchdog. “The use of live facial recognition technology will be intelligence-led and deployed to specific locations in London,” the city’s Metropolitan Police said in […]
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There’s plenty in the way of competition with respect to the audio transcription market, which is estimated to be worth $31.82 billion by 2025. But AISense — the startup behind speech-to-text service Otter — managed to carve out a niche for itself in the four years since its founding. Its funding reflects this — the […]
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Intel reported strong fourth-quarter earnings and revenues that beat Wall Street’s expectations today. And Bob Swan, CEO of the biggest maker of PC and datacenter processors, said in an analyst call today that the company had gained market share and was confident in its future. In 2019, Swan said Intel generated $3.8B in AI-based revenue. […]
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It’s official: For the fifth year in a row, Google will host its annual I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. (The event previously took place in San Francisco.) The dates — May 12 to May 14 — appeared after savvy social media users solved a series of online puzzles that went […]
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Following hot on the heels of rival Waymo, Uber announced that it’s bringing self-driving cars to a new city: Washington D.C. In Medium post today, Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) — the skunkworks group responsible for autonomous vehicles research — said that it will deploy a fleet of three cars in the nation’s capital starting […]
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Can privacy and security be preserved in the course of large-scale textual data analysis? As it turns out, yes. A team of Amazon researchers in a recently published study proposed a way to anonymize customer-supplied data. They claim that their approach, which works by re-phrasing samples and basing the analysis on the new phrasing, results […]
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Presented by Avnet Connected things are no longer the exception. They’re the rule. Nowhere was this clearer to me than at CES this year, where virtually every thing on the floor — every robot, wearable, screen, vehicle, appliance, furnishing — was either somehow connected to the internet or at least was on track to be […]
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Phiar, a Palo Alto-based startup that is using artificial intelligence and augmented reality to enhance vehicular navigation, is finally making its long-awaited AR driving app available for the first time — albeit in a limited fashion. The company today announced the start of a private beta program for iPhone users, and plans to expand the […]
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Waymo, the Google parent company Alphabet subsidiary whose autonomous vehicles have driven more than 20 million miles, is expanding its geographic footprint into Texas and New Mexico. In a tweet this morning, Waymo announced it will begin testing self-driving trucks on “promising” commercial routes in the states as it pursues new transportation solutions, primarily along […]
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Edge AI startup Kneron today said it’s raised $40 million led by Horizon Ventures. The funding will be used to grow Kneron’s algorithms made especially for on-device machine learning and semiconductor design operations. Kneron released the KL520, a chip made especially for deployment of AI on devices like smart home or IoT devices last year, […]
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Engaging and managing online groups can be the stuff of nightmares, but it is generally worth it — communities on average generate a 6,469% return on investment for organizations, according to one report. Fortunately for those who don’t want to get involved with the logistical nitty-gritty, there’s Hivebrite, a startup developing a rebrandable community creation […]
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Large open source projects on Github have intimidatingly long lists of problems that require addressing. To make it easier to spot the most pressing, GitHub recently introduced the “good first issues” feature, which matches contributors with issues that are likely to fit their interests. The initial version, which launched in May 2019, surfaced recommendations based […]
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We’ve all been there: You’re snapping pics with your phone — perhaps of a high-speed bike ride or of a hockey match — and don’t think to check whether the autofocus is in lockstep with the action. It isn’t, as you later discover, and you’re stuck with a gallery of unusably blurry photos. In search […]
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Platforms that let shoppers virtually try on cosmetics, apparel, and accessories have exploded in popularity over the past decade, and it’s easy to see why. According to a survey conducted by banking company Klarna, 29% of shoppers prefer to browse for items online before actually buying them, while 49% are interested in solutions that take […]
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As part of an annual look at global AI investment trends, CB Insights today reports that AI startups raised a record $26.6 billion in 2019 spanning more than 2,200 deals worldwide. That’s compared to roughly 1,900 deals totaling $22.1 billion in 2018 and about 1,700 deals totaling $16.8 billion in 2017. The reported high in […]
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Artificial intelligence startups appear to be booming. Global venture capital increased 20% in 2019, while acquisitions jumped 24.8% from the previous year. According to a new report from CB Insights, AI companies raised $26.58 billion across 2,235 deals in 2019, up from 1,940 deals the previous year that totaled $22.148 billion. The 2019 numbers included […]
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Machine learning algorithms aren’t just technological novelties relegated to tasks like picking out faces in crowded places. In the enterprise, they can surface patterns and relationships that would otherwise have been missed. To do just that, Outlier.ai’s business analysis platform extracts data from internal and external sources and analyzes it to spot critical changes in […]
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ServiceNow today announced that it’s acquired Loom Systems to strengthen automated insights for customers using the Now platform for digitizing workflows to quickly fix IT issues. Loom Systems CEO Gabby Menachem and part of the Loom Systems team will join ServiceNow as part of the deal. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. […]
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