(Reuters) — Huawei will stop making its flagship Kirin chipsets next month, financial magazine Caixin said on Saturday, as the impact of U.S. pressure on the Chinese tech giant grows. U.S. pressure on Huawei’s suppliers has made it impossible for the company’s HiSilicon chip division to keep making the chipsets, key components for mobile phone, […]
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America is poised to invest billions of dollars to remain the leader in artificial intelligence as well as quantum computing. This investment is critically needed to reinvigorate the science that will shape our future. But in order to get the most from this investment, we have to create an environment that will produce innovations that […]
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The fervor around state-of-the-art AI language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 hasn’t died down. If anything, it’s gaining steam. Melanie Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Portland State University, found evidence that GPT-3 can make primitive analogies. Raphaël Millière, a philosopher of mind and cognitive science at Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society, asked […]
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In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, scientists at the King’s College London Department of Informatics used natural language to show evidence of pervasive gender and religious bias in Reddit communities. This alone isn’t surprising, but the problem is that data from these communities are often used to train large language models like […]
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It’s been a month since U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Trump administration was considering banning TikTok. Plenty has happened since, but the situation really accelerated last weekend. In the span of a couple hours, we learned that President Trump was planning to sign an order directing China’s ByteDance to divest its ownership […]
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The facial recognition APIs offered by Google, Microsoft, and IBM exhibit gender bias when tested on self-portraits of people wearing partial face masks. That’s according to data scientists at marketing communications agency Wunderman Thompson, who found that popular computer vision services like Cloud Vision API and Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision more often misidentify the […]
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Depictions of artificial intelligence in popular culture as mostly white can carry a number of consequences, including the erasure of people who are not white, according to research released today by researchers from the University of Cambridge. The authors say the normalization of predominant depictions of AI as white can influence people aspiring to enter the […]
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A month after announcing changes to ML Kit, its toolset for developers to infuse apps with AI, Google today launched the Digital Ink Recognition API on Android and iOS to allow developers to create apps where stylus and touch act as inputs. As the name implies, the API — which is powered by the same […]
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Google today launched Android 11 Beta 3, the seventh and final preview of its next mobile OS version. Beta 3 puts Android 11 into release candidate status, which means Google is done putting the finishing touches on the new platform. This is the last chance developers have to make sure their apps and games are […]
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IBM says it has made progress toward developing ways to estimate the severity of Parkinson’s symptoms by analyzing physical activity as motor impairment increases. In a paper published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, scientists at IBM Research, Pfizer, the Spivack Center for Clinical and Translational Neuroscience, and Tufts created statistical representations of patients’ movement […]
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StreetLight Data, a big data platform that helps cities unlock mobility insights from location data collated from smartphone apps, has raised $15 million in a series D round of funding. The raise comes as cities around the world are having to adapt to a “new normal,” one where social distancing measures require new ways to […]
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In April, Salesforce detailed the AI Economist, a research environment designed to elucidate how economic design might be improved with AI. The company pledged to eventually make available the codebase in open source, and today marks the release of the initial version. Studies have shown that income inequality gaps can negatively impact economic growth, opportunity, […]
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Moscow-based tech giant Yandex today announced it has expanded testing of its self-driving cars to Ann Arbor, Michigan. A fleet of Yandex’s driverless vehicles recently hit Ann Arbor city streets, including the company’s fourth-generation autonomous Hyundai Sonatas created in partnership with Hyundai Mobis. Yandex says it had planned to provide rides in its autonomous taxis […]
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Digital health startup Infermedica today nabbed $10.25 million to further develop its platform for symptom diagnosis. The company, which claims to have performed more than 6 million health checks to date, says it will put the proceeds toward R&D and international expansion in the U.S. and Germany. The demand for triaging solutions has risen substantially […]
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The promise of conversational AI is that, unlike virtually any other form of technology, all you have to do is talk. Natural language is the most natural and democratic form of communication. After all, humans are born capable of learning how to speak, but some never learn to read or use a graphical user interface. […]
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Researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Michigan propose an AI framework they claim can be used to deliver recommendations via smartphone that encourage healthier lifestyles. By personalizing the recommendations and making data on other users available to bolster training, they claim their approach reduces regret — i.e., the number of actions taken when […]
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AI-powered document processing platform PandaDoc today raised over $15 million in additional funding, bringing its series B round to $30 million. The company says the capital will bolster its go-to-market efforts as it doubles down on product research and development. Companies spend an average of $20 to file and store a single document, by some […]
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Enterprise natural language processing (NLP) technologies vendor Expert System today secured $29.4 million in funding, $20 million of which came from institutional investors. (The remaining $9.4 million arose through the exercise of shareholder rights.) The company says it plans to use the proceeds to accelerate growth in the U.S. and to develop new tools supporting […]
Read More Enterprise natural language processing (NLP) technologies vendor Expert System today secured $29.4 million in funding, $20 million of which came from institutional investors. (The remaining $9.4 million arose through the exercise of shareholder rights.) The company says it plans to use the proceeds to accelerate growth in the U.S. and to develop new tools supporting […]
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Zencity, a platform that meshes AI with big data to give municipalities insights and aggregated feedback from local communities, has raised $13.5 million from a slew of notable backers, including lead investor TLV Partners, Microsoft’s VC arm M12, and Salesforce Ventures. Gathering data through traditional means, such as surveys or Town Hall meetings, can be […]
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Sight Diagnostics, which is developing an AI-powered blood analysis machine, this week nabbed $71 million in funding. This more than doubles the startup’s total raised, and a spokesperson says it will be used to accelerate Sight’s operations globally — with a focus on the U.S. — as it advances R&D for the detection of conditions […]
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Brainworks has launched Medio Smart Health web application that tracks your heart rate using a camera and can screen you for COVID-19 symptoms. The free web application uses AI-enhanced, non-contact measurement of your vital signs to help automate digital healthcare, said Phillip Alvelda, CEO of Emeryville, California-based Brainworks, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our goal […]
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(Reuters) — A U.S. judge on Tuesday sentenced former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski to 18 months in prison for stealing a trade secret from Google related to self-driving cars months before becoming the head of Uber’s rival unit. U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said Levandowski, who was convicted on Tuesday following a […]
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Last week, Voicebot.ai reported that Adam Cheyer, a founding member of the startups that built both Siri and Bixby, left Samsung after a two-year stint at the company. Cheyer himself corroborated the report today, telling VentureBeat that he has no next plans as of yet. Cheyer’s departure coincides with a minor exodus from the Bixby […]
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Members of Congress put forward a bill today named the National Biometric Information Privacy Act, which would make it illegal for businesses to collect, purchase, or trade biometric information obtained from customers without permission. This includes face prints used in facial recognition as well as voice prints for AI assistant personalization as well as eye […]
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Just how comprehensively do natural language processing (NLP) pipelines support widely spoken languages? A recent study coauthored by researchers at Clarkson University and Iona College sought to investigate the degree to which NLP tools understand eight dialects: English, Chinese, Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, and the Senegalese language Wolof. Their findings suggest there are caveats […]
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In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, Micorosft researchers propose an AI technique they call domain-specific language model pretraining for biomedical natural language processing (NLP). By compiling a “comprehensive” biomedical (NLP) benchmark from publicly available data sets, the coauthors claim they managed to achieve state-of-the-art results on tasks including named entity recognition, evidence-based […]
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Kite, which suggests code snippets for developers in real time, today debuted integration with JupyterLab and support for teams using JupyterHub. Data scientists can now get code completions powered by Kite’s deep learning, which is trained on over 25 million open-source Python files, as they type in Jupyter notebooks. Using AI to help developers is […]
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Startup Isima today emerged from stealth with $10 million in funding to launch a data convergence platform called BiOS. The company asserts its solution can reduce or even eliminate disparate databases while improving overall speed and reliability. IDC expects the global big data analytics market to be worth $274.3 billion by 2022, and Forbes found […]
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Syntiant, a startup developing AI edge hardware for voice and sensor solutions, today closed a $35 million round. CEO Kurt Busch says the funds will be used to ramp up production throughout the remainder of 2020. According to a report published by Meticulous Research, the speech and voice recognition hardware market is expected to reach […]
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Imperial College London researchers claim they’ve developed a voice analysis method that supports applications like speech recognition and identification while removing sensitive attributes such as emotion, gender, and health status. Their framework receives voice data and privacy preferences as auxiliary information and uses the preferences to filter out sensitive attributes which could otherwise be extracted […]
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