This week, nearly every major company developing autonomous vehicles in the U.S. halted testing in an effort to stem the spread of COVID-19, which has sickened more than 250,000 people and killed over 10,000 around the world. Despite the setback, according to some experts, pandemics like COVID-19 should hasten the adoption of driverless vehicles for […]
Google Translate launches Transcribe for Android in 8 languages
Google Translate today launched Transcribe for Android, a feature that delivers a continual, real-time translation of a conversation. Transcribe will begin by rolling out support for 8 languages in the coming days: English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai. With Transcribe, Translate is now capable of translating classroom or conference lectures with no […]
Nvidia researchers use AI to teach robots how to hand objects to humans
In a preprint research paper published this week, Nvidia researchers propose an approach for human-to-robot handovers in which the robot meets the human halfway, classifies the human’s grasp, and plans a trajectory to take the object from the human’s hand. They claim it results in more fluent handovers compared with baselines, and they say it […]
Amazon’s AI predicts context from search queries
Amazon is using AI and machine learning to predict context from customers’ queries. In a preprint paper accepted to the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval scheduled to take place this month, Amazon researchers describe a system that predicts activities like “running” from queries like “Adidas men’s pants.” It could help to […]
Microsoft researchers create AI ethics checklist with ML practitioners from a dozen tech companies
While speaking on a panel recently, Landing AI founder and Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng described a moment when he read the OECD’s AI ethics principles to an engineer, and the engineer told him the words give no instruction on how he should change how he does his job. That’s why, Ng said, any code […]
Overhaul raises $17.5 million to apply AI to supply chain management
Supply chain integrity platform provider Overhaul today announced that it’s raised $17.5 million, which CEO Barry Conlon said will be used to bolster its product offerings and grow its Austin-based team as well as its European headquarters in Ireland. It’ll also fuel the development of AI products to predict supply chain disruptions and recommend resolutions, […]
Facebook AI’s ‘other-play’ algorithm could improve autonomous vehicle performance
A team of Facebook AI Research researchers recently developed an algorithm — other-play (OP) — that constructs strategies that achieve high returns with agents that weren’t trained with other agents (a form of zero-shot coordination). If the claims pan out, the work could greatly improve the performance of autonomous cars, which leverage zero-shot coordination to […]
Facebook AI Researchers Found A Way To Give Quest More GPU Power
Facebook Researchers seem to have figured out a way to use machine learning to essentially give Oculus Quest apps 67% more GPU power to work with. However, Facebook informs us this is “purely research” (for now). The Oculus Quest is a standalone headset, which means the computing hardware is inside the device itself. Because of […]
Researchers’ state-of-the-art AI upscales and enhances videos
In a preprint paper published on the web this week, researchers affiliated with Microsoft Research Asia and the University of Science and Technology of China propose what they claim is a state-of-the-art AI technique for video enhancement and upscaling (i.e., boosting the resolution of footage while retaining quality). Their model (and others like it) could […]
The best 1440p graphics card for PC gaming
Most people play on 1080p monitors and aspire to game in 4K, but here in 2019, 2560×1440 resolution is the PC gaming sweet spot. 1440p provides a big leap in visual fidelity over 1080p, yet it won’t melt your graphics card as ferociously as a 4K display. Picking the best 1440p graphics card can be […]