After years toiling away in secret on a car project, Tim Cook has for the first time elaborated on the company’s plans in the automotive market. “We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in a June 5 interview.
“It’s a core technology that we view as very important.” He likened the effort to “the mother of all AI projects,” saying it’s “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.” The prospect of self-driving cars has seen a slew of technology companies push into the auto industry, according to McKinsey & Co. Alphabet’s Waymo unit has signed partnerships with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Lyft to develop the technology.
Read moreA business school in Paris will soon begin using artificial intelligence and facial analysis to determine whether students are paying attention in class. The software, called Nestor, will be used two online classes at the ESG business school beginning in September.
LCA Learning, the company that created Nestor, presented the technology at an event at the United Nations in New York last week. The idea is to use the data that Nestor collects to improve the performance of both students and professors. The software uses students’ webcams to analyze eye movements and facial expressions and determine whether students are paying attention to a video lecture.
Read moreTesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is launching a new company called Neuralink with the intention of connecting computers directly to human brains.
The billionaire entrepreneur, whose other interests include sending humans to Mars, is exploring “neural lace” technology – the implanting of tiny electrodes into the brain that could be used to give direct computing capabilities. Musk has not officially announced the new company but after the Journal’s report he tweeted confirming more news of Neuralink would come out next week.
Read moreFei-Fei Li, chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud, came on stage at Google’s Next Cloud conference today to talk about the current and next-generation applications of AI that Google’s working on.
These technologies will make a difference in self-driving cars and healthcare, sure, but also Snapchat’s filters and Google Photos’ search capabilities. But the big highlight came when she announced a new way to allow software to parse video. This new “Video Intelligence API” was demoed onstage, and it offered the kind of “whoa” moment you expect from a Google keynote.
Read moreAs our ability to create AI grows, it's important that we assess how it behaves in different situations. DeepMind, Google's AI division in London, has been concerned with one aspect in particular: what happens when two or more AI have similar or conflicting goals.
The team wanted a test similar to the "Prisoner's Dilemma," a popular game that pits two suspects against one another. In this scenario, you're given a choice: testify against the other person and you'll go free, while they have to serve three years. If you both say yes independently, however, you'll serve two years in jail. It's a dilemma without a simple answer.
Read moreA Japanese tech company has trained an AI to give love advice to troubled hearts. NTT Resonant, which operates the Goo web portal and search engine, created a system called Oshi-el to answer people’s relationship questions, like a virtual agony aunt.
The researchers chose to focus on this genre of query as “non-factoid” questions are difficult for AI to address. “Most chatbots today are only able to give you very short answers, and mainly just for factual questions,” says Makoto Nakatsuji at NTT Resonant. Nakatsuji and his team trained their algorithm using almost 190,000 questions and 770,000 answers from the company’s Oshiete goo forum.
Read moreBMW and IBM's artificial intelligence system, known as Watson, are to collaborate on creating a new way for drivers to communicate with their cars.
The partnership will be based in Munich, home to both the carmaker and the Watson division, which recently received $200m of investment from IBM to bring cognitive computing to Internet of Things devices. Thanks to the increasing popularity of advanced software and embedded internet connections, cars are fast becoming the largest and most complex IoT device many of us will own. A fleet of four BMW i8 hybrid sports cars will be used as a testbed for new technologies created by the collaboration.
Read moreMark Zuckerberg set himself an ambitious personal project for 2016 – build a connected artificial assistant to help him automate certain tasks at home, including things like controlling the lights, watching for visitors and operating appliances.
Zuckerberg said on Facebook that his task actually turned to be “easier than [he] expected” in some ways – which should come as no surprise given that a good percentage of you out there reading this right now can accomplish all those things using readily available devices like Amazon’s Echo. To be fair, most Echo owners didn’t build their own Alexa service from scratch, and that’s what Zuckerberg set out to do.
Read moreArtificial intelligence researchers at Apple are going to start publishing some of their work and engaging more with the wider academic community.
Russ Salakhutdinov, director of AI research at Apple and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, made the announcement at the NIPS conference. The Californian tech giant has traditionally kept research breakthroughs to itself, seeing any developments as valuable intellectual property, so this is a major change in direction. Companies like Google and Facebook already allow their employees to publish their research across a number of fields, including AI.
Read moreArtificial intelligence is getting its teeth into lip reading. A project by Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford applied deep learning to a huge data set of BBC programmes to create a lip-reading system that leaves professionals in the dust. The AI system was trained using some 5000 hours from six different TV programmes.
First the University of Oxford and DeepMind researchers trained the AI on shows that aired between January 2010 and December 2015. Then they tested its performance on programmes broadcast between March and September 2016. By only looking at each speaker’s lips, the system accurately deciphered entire phrases.
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