AI News
The latest news and reviews on artificial intelligence software, hardware and AI research.
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Your next craft beer might be named by a neural network
Researcher Janelle Shane has used AI to come up with names for paint colors, metal bands and guinea pigs in the past. She's even used it to generate wonderfully weird pickup lines. Now, she's turned her AI naming capabilities towards beer.
Facebook translations are now entirely powered by AI
Facebook has been working on changing how it translates text in posts and comments and today it announced that its transition is complete. It means that translations should be quite a bit more accurate going forward.
YouTube will isolate offensive videos that don't violate policies
YouTube has been working on ways to manage offensive and extremist content that do and do not violate its policies, and some steps it has taken include AI-assisted video detection and removal as well as input from more experts. Today, in a blog post, the company provided more detail about its ongoing efforts.
Kuri robot will (hopefully) record your family's precious moments
If you're a parent, you probably dread the thought of missing an important moment in your child's life. Do you really want to be in the other room when your little one takes those first steps? Mayfield Robotics thinks it can be there even when you can't. It's adding yet another feature to its upcoming Kuri home robot that will record moments independently. The tiny companion will use a mix of machine learning and image recognition to determine when it should start capturing video, using your preferences as a guide. Ideally, this will catch your kids' playtime or an impromptu dance party without asking you to lift a finger -- and the more it records, the more it should understand your tastes.
Visit a kiosk in the UK to diagnose your cold
We have app doctors that can help diagnose you from your phone and in the future, we very well might have AI physicians, but the UK is now offering another option -- medical kiosks. A company called MedicSpot has set up tiny clinics in pharmacies across the UK that virtually connect you to a real physician and are stocked with all of the necessary equipment for an examination. The mini clinic has a blood pressure cuff, stethoscope, pulse oximeter, thermometer and a camera that can give the doctor a look into your throat and ears. The doctor can even write you a prescription if need be.
Microsoft is getting its own AI-powered photo search
Microsoft's upcoming Photos app is getting AI image search so that it can spot and classify objects, much like Google Photos and Apple Photos can. Spotted by Windows Central, the latest Insider Preview version of the app now has a search bar that you can use to enter terms like "flower," "wine bottle," and "bar." It will then use a cloud-based image recognition algorithm to pick and sort out those items in your photo collection, much as the rival apps do.
'Marjorie Prime' imagines a world where AI keeps us from grieving
Despite humanity's astounding technological advances, the one thing that we've never been able to invent our way out of is our own mortality. But what if you never actually had to lose the ones you love? That's the premise of upcoming sci-fi flick Marjorie Prime, where advances in AI make the human grieving process a thing of the past. Struggling to come to terms with the death of her husband, the movie's main character, Marjorie, uses a computer program to immortalize him as a piece of AI.
DeepMind researchers create AI with an ‘imagination’
Being able to reason through potential future events is something humans are pretty good at doing, but that kind of ability is a real challenge when it comes to training AI. Taking those reasoning skills and using them to create a plan is even more difficult, but the Google DeepMind team has begun to tackle this problem. In a recent blog post, researchers describe new approaches they've developed for introducing "imagination-based planning" to AI.
Google AI could keep baby food safe
Google's artificial intelligence technology can help the food industry beyond picking better cucumbers. In one company's case, it could prevent your child from getting sick. Japanese food producer Kewpie Corporation has revealed that it's using Google's TensorFlow to quickly inspect ingredients, including the diced potatoes it uses in baby food. The firm and its partner BrainPad trained the machine learning system to recognize good ingredients by feeding it 18,000 photos, and set it to work looking for visual 'anomalies' that hint at sub-par potatoes. The result was an inspection system with "near-perfect" accuracy, culling more defective ingredients than humans alone -- even with a conveyor belt shuttling potatoes along at high speed.
Will we be able to control the killer robots of tomorrow?
From ship-hunting Tomahawk missiles and sub-spying drone ships to semi-autonomous UAV swarms and situationally-aware reconnaissance robots, the Pentagon has long sought to protect its human forces with the use of robotic weapons. But as these systems gain ever-greater degrees of intelligence and independence, their increasing autonomy has some critics worried that humans are ceding too much power to devices whose decision-making processes we don't fully understand (and which we may not be entirely able to control).
The next HoloLens will use AI to recognize real-world objects
We're all excited about the gaming potential of HoloLens, but Microsoft is also fixated on enterprise AR, much like Google now is with Glass. During a talk at the CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) conference in Hawaii, Microsoft Research VP Harry Shum revealed that it will be boosted by an AI co-processor on its holographic processing unit (HPU). The aim is to give the headset object and voice recognition skills that work in real time without the need for a cloud connection.
After Math: Do you see?
It was an illustrative week for machine vision. Sony's high-speed eyes allow robots to see at 1000 FPS, IBM trained a neural network to spot schizophrenia, and MIT's AI knows what's in your meal just by looking at it. Numbers, because how else do you measure your myopia?
IBM's AI can predict schizophrenia by looking at the brain's blood flow
Schizophrenia is not a particularly common mental health disorder in America, affecting just 1.2 percent of the population (around 3.2 million people), but its effects can be debilitating. However, pioneering research conducted by IBM and the University of Alberta could soon help doctors diagnose the onset of the disease and the severity of its symptoms using a simple MRI scan and a neural network built to look at blood flow within the brain.
Intel puts Movidius AI tech on a $79 USB stick
Last year, Movidius announced its Fathom Neural Compute Stick — a USB thumb drive that makes its image-based deep learning capabilities super accessible. But then in September of last year, Intel bought Movidius, delaying the expected winter rollout of Fathom. However, Intel has announced that the deep neural network processing stick is now available and going by its new name, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick. "Designed for product developers, researchers and makers, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick aims to reduce barriers to developing, tuning and deploying AI applications by delivering dedicated high-performance deep-neural network processing in a small form factor," said Intel in a statement.
MIT's AI knows what's in your cookies just by looking at them
Imagine an app that can help you figure out how to replicate what you're eating in a restaurant and help track your calorie intake just by taking a picture of your plate. A team of MIT CSAIL researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that has the potential to evolve into that kind of application. They call the AI Pic2Recipe, because it can predict the ingredients and recipe used to make a dish from a single snapshot. If that sounds familia, it's probably because of "See Food," the fictional app that made an appearance in HBO's Silicon Valley, and a new-ish Pinterest feature that recognizes the most prominent ingredients in a picture of food.
Apple launches a machine learning blog to placate its researchers
Apple hasn't always been very open about its technology or its research, but the company surprised everyone last year when AI director Russ Salakhutdinov announced that Apple would begin publishing its machine learning research. Shortly thereafter, it published its first AI paper in an academic journal and today Apple takes its transparency another step with the debut of its Machine Learning Journal.
Samsung's Bixby voice assistant is ready to help in the US
The voice component of Samsung's Bixby assistant has been a long time in coming. The company was quick to boast about its AI helper at the Galaxy S8 launch, but revealed that the signature voice feature wouldn't arrive until later in the spring... and even then, it only had a full launch in South Korea. Americans had to make do with a preview. At last, though, it's becoming widely available: Samsung is officially rolling out Bixby's voice assistance to S8 and S8 Plus owners in the US. Every American with one of the flagship phones will get to talk to Bixby once an update arrives "tonight." There have been a few tweaks to this official release, too.
Blanca Li dances with robots to better understand them
Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking are deeply concerned about AI, but the tech and its ramifications are poorly understood by the public. That disconnect prompted Blanca Li and her dance company to create a choreography for eight dancers called Robot. Produced with Softbank's robotics division and Japanese artists Maywa Denki, it attempts to explore "the interactions between [humans and robots], in an absurd and poetic way."
Police body cams will soon use AI to find missing people
Motorola Solutions -- not to be confused with smartphone maker Motorola -- is adding machine learning to its surveillance equipment used by law enforcement personnel. Cops in Chicago's Waukegan police department are already suiting up with the company's Si500 body cams. But those same cameras could soon pack AI that could help officers identify objects and missing people. A prototype device is in the works with Neurala, a deep learning startup that recently integrated its software with drones to track poachers in Africa.
Amazon's Alexa lands on the HTC U11, and it works like it should
As promised, HTC is finally making it possible for owners of its U11 smartphone to install Amazon's Alexa. Starting today, those in the US who need yet another voice interface can download the HTC Alexa app from the Google Play Store -- we're told localized versions of Alexa are coming to other countries in the coming weeks. For those keeping count, that brings the U11's virtual assistant count to three: Google Assistant is also on-board, along with HTC's non-chatty Sense Companion.
