2020 was an eventful year, not least of which because of a pandemic that shows little sign of abating. The AI research community experienced its own tribulations, capped off by Google’s firing of ethicist Timnit Gebru and a spat over AI ethics and “cancel culture” involving retired University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos. Facebook chief […]
Sony AI launches the Gastronomy Flagship Project to apply AI to cooking
In April 2020, Sony launched Sony AI, an organization with offices in Japan, the U.S., and Europe undertaking AI R&D with a focus on gaming, imaging, sensing, and more in collaboration with Sony’s other business units. Today, Sony AI unveiled its first major research initiative in the Gastronomy Flagship Project, which aims to enhance the […]
Facebook’s improved AI isn’t preventing harmful content from spreading
Facebook claims it’s becoming better at detecting — and removing — objectionable content from its platform, despite the fact that misleading, untrue, and otherwise harmful posts continue to make their way into millions of users’ feeds. During a briefing with reporters ahead of Facebook’s latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, which outlines the actions Facebook took […]
Google’s AI lets users search language-agnostic knowledge bases in their native tongue
Entity linking fulfills a key role in grounded language understanding. Given a text mention of an entity (e.g., the word “helpful”), an algorithm identifies the entity’s corresponding entry in a knowledge base (such as a Wikipedia article). To extend its usefulness, researchers at Google propose a new technique where language-specific mentions resolve to a language-agnostic […]
AI Weekly: The election
In the United States, there was nothing else this week except for the presidential election. More people voted in this election than in any other previous U.S. presidential election — a total of 143,518,226 votes and counting. As we close out a long, stressful week, it appears all but a formality that Joe Biden and […]
Google launches Document AI suite of parsing and processing tools in preview
Google this morning launched the Document AI (DocAI) platform, a console for document processing hosted in Google Cloud, in preview. The company says it’s aimed at automating and validating documents by extracting data from documents and making them available to business apps and users. Companies spend an average of $20 to file and store a […]
IBM and Pfizer claim AI can predict Alzheimer’s onset with 71% accuracy
Pfizer and IBM researchers claim to have developed a machine learning technique that can predict Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms develop. By analyzing small samples of language data obtained from clinical verbal tests, the team says their approach achieved 71% accuracy when tested against a group of cognitively healthy people. Alzheimer’s disease begins with vague, […]
Silent Eight leverages AI to detect and solve financial fraud
Silent Eight, a cybersecurity startup leveraging AI to combat fraud, today closed a $15 million funding round. The company says the funds will be used to accelerate current hiring efforts and fuel customer acquisition as it expands to new geographies. While technologies like embedded chip cards and two-factor authentication have helped reduce financial fraud, the […]
This AI was created to beat the hardest game of 2020
You may already be aware that Spelunky 2 is one of the best games of the year. You may also be aware that it is very, very difficult. One wrong step or a misplaced whip swing can easily send you back to the very beginning. Part of what makes the Spelunky games so challenging is […]
When AI hurts people, who is held responsible?
Following a Maricopa County Grand Jury decision, last month the woman behind the wheel of a semi-autonomous Uber vehicle was charged with negligent homicide for the 2018 killing of Elaine Herzberg. The backup driver being charged following the first autonomous vehicle fatality appears to be a first, and it promises to be a landmark case […]