Synced

11/09/2019

For an AI system to acquire knowledge the way humans generally do it would need to interact with its surroundings and extract information through its own attention and analysis choices. That’s the idea behind a new paper from Microsoft Research, Polytechnique Montreal, MILA and and the University of Montreal. QAit — Question Answering with Interactive Text introduces an AI system that “learns” to answer questions by interacting with and gathering information from its environment.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/qait-ai-learns-by-interacting-with-its-environment-7d5ca1cc9e66

For an AI system to acquire knowledge the way humans generally do it would need to interact with its surroundings and extract information…

10/09/2019

Every September Huawei and Apple proudly unveil the new chipsets that will empower their high-end smartphones. Huawei debuted their Kirin 990 last week at IFA in Berlin; and today it was Apple’s turn to introduce the A13 Bionic, the latest iteration of its smartphone chipset. The A13 Bionic chipset will be embedded into Apple’s new iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max.

“A13 Bionic is the fastest chip ever in a smartphone, that quickly handles the tasks that matter most to people every day,” boasted Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller this morning at the Apple’s annual product conference in Cupertino, California.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/ai-chip-duel-a13-bionic-vs-kirin-990-5g-13e74d6824c4

Every September Huawei and Apple proudly unveil the new chipsets that will empower their high-end smartphones. Huawei debuted their Kirin…

10/09/2019

A team of researchers from the Chinese gaming giant NetEase have developed a method to automatically create players’ in-game characters from a standard portrait photo. They break down the details of their method the paper Face-to-Parameter Translation for Game Character Auto-Creation.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/chinese-gaming-giant-netease-leverages-ai-to-create-3d-game-characters-from-selfies-487f8de0f0c7

In role-playing games (RPGs) such as the modern crime classic Grand Theft Auto, many players create their in-game characters based on…

09/09/2019

The development and maintenance team behind Python 2 has started the countdown to the end of the popular programming language. In an official statement released today on python.org, the volunteer team that manages the programming language announced they will sunset Python 2 on January 1, 2020.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/r-i-p-python-2-october-16-2000-january-1-2020-6d68d436b3c2

The development and maintenance team behind Python 2 has started the countdown to the end of the popular programming language. In an…

09/09/2019

China’s goal of becoming the world’s leading AI innovation center by 2030 is based on an ambitious blueprint that encourages individual cities to develop and strengthen their AI ecosystems with the help of academic institutions, tech enterprises, and hefty local and national government investment.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/top-10-chinese-cities-for-ai-development-beijing-ranks-1-220be79f103

China’s goal of becoming the world’s leading AI innovation center by 2030 is based on an ambitious blueprint that encourages individual…

06/09/2019

In collaboration with Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from top universities, Facebook today announced the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) with the aim of finding innovative deepfake detection solutions to help the media industry spot videos that have been morphed by AI models.
https://syncedreview.com/2019/09/06/facebook-introduces-dataset-challenge-to-counter-deepfakes/

In collaboration with Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from top universities, Facebook today announced the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) with the aim of finding innovative deepfake…

06/09/2019

In recent years Huawei has used the IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin) — one of Germany’s oldest industrial exhibitions — to showcase the company’s newest SoC (system on a chip) releases for its flagship smartphones.

Huawei did not disappoint when the IFA 2019 opened this morning, announcing the new Kirin 990 5G, whose built-in 5G modem makes it the world’s first-ever 5G flagship chipset. The Kirin 990 5G and Kirin 990 SoCs will power Huawei’s next-generation flagship smartphone the Mate 30, which is due to be unveiled Sept. 19 in Munich, Germany.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/huawei-introduces-worlds-first-flagship-5g-soc-in-challenge-to-samsung-and-qualcomm-f667bdd331b6

In recent years Huawei has used the IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin) — one of Germany’s oldest industrial exhibitions — to…

05/09/2019

Snow White’s evil stepmother utters one of animation’s classic lines: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” If the old hag were an artificial intelligence, she’d probably spend the entire film just attempting to locate that mirror — which, as it happens, is a relatively difficult computer vision challenge.

A group of Chinese researchers have come up with a novel method for identifying mirrors in images which outperforms state-of-the-art detection and segmentation methods on targeted baselines.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-ai-knows-where-you-are-c3d908fd53d1

Snow White’s evil stepmother utters one of animation’s classic lines: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” If the…

04/09/2019

AI is now integrated into countless scenarios, from tiny drones to huge cloud platforms. Every hardware platform is ideally paired with a tailored AI model that perfectly meets requirements in terms of performance, efficiency, size, latency, etc. However even a single model architecture type needs tweaking when applied to different hardware, and this requires researchers spend time and money training them independently.

Popular solutions today include either designing models specialized for mobile devices or pruning a large network by reducing redundant units, aka model compression. A group of MIT researchers (Han Cai, Chuang Gan and Song Han) have introduced a “Once for All” (OFA) network that achieves the same or better level accuracy as state-of-the-art AutoML methods on ImageNet, with a significant speedup in training time.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/one-network-to-fit-all-hardware-new-mit-automl-method-trains-14x-faster-than-sota-nas-1120c6787eb8

AI is now integrated into countless scenarios, from tiny drones to huge cloud platforms. Every hardware platform is ideally paired with a…

03/09/2019

A recently released Chinese deepfake mobile application, “ZAO,” enables just about anyone to easily swap faces with popular characters such as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Jack Dawson in The Titanic, and so on. Read the full story at bit.ly/2lXWzyB

03/09/2019

Cloning a voice typically requires collecting hours of recorded speech to build a dataset then using the dataset to train a new voice model. But not anymore. A new Github project introduces a remarkable Real-Time Voice Cloning Toolbox that enables anyone to clone a voice from as little as five seconds of sample audio.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/clone-a-voice-in-five-seconds-with-this-ai-toolbox-f3f116b11281

Cloning a voice typically requires collecting hours of recorded speech to build a dataset then using the dataset to train a new voice…

03/09/2019

What Happened Last Week: Jack Ma and Elon Musk Debate AI in Shanghai; Apple Makes A Rare Apology; Self-Driving Taxi Concerns | Stay updated on AI, Sign up for our weekly newsletter: bit.ly/2M8SkwX
https://medium.com/syncedreview/jack-ma-and-elon-musk-debate-ai-in-shanghai-apple-makes-a-rare-apology-self-driving-taxi-concerns-82aae9e186a8

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02/09/2019

If the great Charlie Chaplin were alive today he might well marvel at the artificial intelligence enabled colour versions of his comedy masterpieces such as Modern Times or The Idle Class. A recent research paper from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology presents a fully automatic method for colourizing black-and-white films without any human guidance or references.
Read the full story at bit.ly/2lshpG8

31/08/2019

Many companies around the world are asking the same question: How to objectively and efficiently identify the best candidates from a huge pile of resumes?
Artificial intelligence can help companies navigate a global human resource market that is projected to reach US$30 billion by 2025, due in large part to technological proliferation. A trained AI system is capable of scanning resumes, extracting keywords, scoring and ranking candidates, and even helping with interviews.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/why-ai-is-reading-your-resume-and-what-can-you-do-about-it-75410b8dd8b3

The human recruiting process has a long timeframe and high complexity, but can simplified into four key words: searching, screening…

30/08/2019

In recent years artificial intelligence systems have successfully challenged human players in the ancient board game Go, the card-based betting game Texas Hold’em, and even in complex video game environments such as Dota and StarCraft. Now, a Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) team has taken on the traditional Chinese tile-based game of chance, bluffs, and strategy, Mahjong.

At the Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on August 29, Microsoft’s Global Executive Vice President Harry Shum officially introduced MSRA’s Suphx (“Super Phoenix”) as “the most powerful Mahjong AI in history,”
https://medium.com/syncedreview/meet-microsoft-suphx-the-worlds-strongest-mahjong-ai-a0b0a63eb871

In recent years artificial intelligence systems have successfully challenged human players in the ancient board game Go, the card-based…

29/08/2019

In the classic party game “Who Am I?” players ask yes or no questions in an attempt to guess which celebrity name is written on a card stuck to their forehead. It’s a good bit of fun, but these days many people are more concerned that advanced public surveillance systems might identify them just as easily as if they were displaying such a name card. Now, researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University and Huawei Moscow Research Center have introduced a wearable card designed to perform the opposite function — concealing a person’s identity from facial recognition systems.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/adversarial-patch-on-hat-fools-sota-facial-recognition-82e8c4f83498

In the classic party game “Who Am I?” players ask yes or no questions in an attempt to guess which celebrity name is written on a card…

29/08/2019

A new research paper from Berlin-based unicorn fashion and technology company Zalando uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce high-resolution images of virtual fashion models ready to model clothes of any style.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/ai-creates-fashion-models-with-custom-outfits-and-poses-a27d5784651f

Being a fashion model isn’t as easy as it looks. Good looks go a long way, but presenting an outfit in the best possible light also…

28/08/2019

Synced Report Collection: Neural Networks is a supervised machine learning model that originated in the 1950s. To read the complete Trends of AI Technology Development, click here: http://bit.ly/334fNUq

28/08/2019

Most insiders Synced interviewed agreed that machine learning training methods which require less labeled data — such as weakly supervised learning, few-shot learning and unsupervised learning — are achieving some promising results.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/data-annotation-the-billion-dollar-business-behind-ai-breakthroughs-d929b0a50d23

When Lei Wang became a data annotator two years ago her job was fairly simple: Identifying people’s gender in images. But since then Wang…

27/08/2019

Simply put, “adversarial examples” are small image modifications designed to fool an image classifier. Although modern neural networks are trained to defend against common adversarial distortions — for example Lp-bounded distortions — these networks can still be fairly easily fooled by adversarial attacks that use other types of input distortions.

To ramp up the robustness of neural networks, researchers from OpenAI have introduced a novel method that evaluates how well a neural network classifier performs against adversarial attacks that were not seen during their training. The study evaluates classifiers’ performance against a robust defense benchmark which has knowledge of the distortion type, and introduces a summary metric called UAR (Unforeseen Attack Robustness), which measures robustness against such unforeseen distortion attacks.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-method-evaluates-model-defense-against-unforeseen-adversarial-examples-29b3bfd0f453

Simply put, “adversarial examples” are small image modifications designed to fool an image classifier. Although modern neural networks are…

26/08/2019

Last year Shawe-Taylor was appointed to the new UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) position of Chair in Artificial Intelligence. In a recent interview with Synced, the 66-year-old British AI veteran spoke on his role at UNESCO, emerging AI trends and the tech’s unseemly side, human-centered AI research, and the progress of AI in Europe. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/humans-dont-realize-how-biased-they-are-until-ai-reproduces-the-same-bias-says-unesco-ai-chair-9968bb1f5da8

While machine learning today is dominated by deep neural network research, in the 1990s neural approaches were not recognized as reliable…

25/08/2019

Synced Report: The technologies in AI: we have identified 23 different AI technologies and categorized them into four domains. Get the complete Trends of AI Technology Development report at http://bit.ly/334fNUq

25/08/2019

When we place an order with UberEats we expect the to food arrive within 20 minutes, tops. If we buy a T-shirt on Amazon, we can have it delivered to our door in a matter of hours. As consumers everywhere shift to online shopping and food ordering, suppliers are facing increasing competition and demand for faster and more reliable delivery services. Our current labor-intensive delivery methods may not be up to the challenge, but AI-powered methods are.

The development and integration of autonomous delivery systems is rapidly emerging as the leading solution for increasing delivery speed, efficiency and capacity. According to multinational consulting firm McKinsey & Company, by the year 2025 some 85 percent of last-mile deliveries will be carried by autonomous vehicles.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/autonomous-delivery-moves-from-research-labs-to-the-streets-dc25a9c897f8

When we place an order with UberEats we expect the to food arrive within 20 minutes, tops. If we buy a T-shirt on Amazon, we can have it…

23/08/2019

After a year of development, Huawei today announced the commercial availability of the Huawei Ascend 910 AI computing chip and the machine learning framework MindSpore. Huawei says the Ascend 910 is the world’s fastest AI processor, packing twice the performance of rival Nvidia’s Tesla v100.

Billed as the single chip with the greatest computing density, Ascend 910 delivers performance of up to 256 teraFLOPS under FP16 and 512 teraOPS under IN8 with declared max power consumption of 310W. In comparison, the GPU Tesla V100 delivers up to 125 teraFLOPS with a max power consumption of 300W, while Google’s TPU 2.0 with four ASICs can reach 180 teraFLOPS.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/huaweis-first-commercial-ai-chip-doubles-the-training-performance-of-nvidia-s-flagship-gpu-86e4d0078f6f

After a year of development, Huawei today announced the commercial availability of the Huawei Ascend 910 AI computing chip and the machine…

23/08/2019

Researchers from MIT Media Lab and Adobe Research recently introduced a real-time interactive augmented video system that enables presenters to use their bodies as storytelling tools by linking gestures to illustrative virtual graphic elements.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/mit-adobe-introduce-real-time-ar-tool-for-storytelling-a9a2b43014ab

From prehistoric times, when our ancestors traded tales around the fire, storytelling has been an essential element in human communication…

22/08/2019

Growing public awareness and concerns over data privacy are pushing tech companies to explore new ways to advance machine learning models without centralizing people’s personal data. One of the world’s largest financial companies, Alibaba subsidiary Ant Financial, recently introduced Shared Machine Learning (SML) as their solution for data privacy.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/shared-machine-learning-ant-financials-solution-for-data-privacy-8069cffe7bb6

Growing public awareness and concerns over data privacy are pushing tech companies to explore new ways to advance machine learning models…

22/08/2019

Thanks to the creation of AutoML — which is essentially automated neural architecture search (NAS) — AI can now design better deep neural networks than human researchers for computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection. AutoML’s tremendous success has prompted AI researchers to explore its efficacy in additional areas, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs).

Researchers from Texas A&M University and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab recently presented a paper that applies NAS to GANs. Their “AutoGAN” is an architecture search scheme specifically tailored for GANs that outperforms current state-of-the-art hand-crafted GANs on the task of unconditional image generation. The associated paper has been accepted by ICCV 2019.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/automl-gan-autogan-ai-can-now-design-better-gan-models-than-humans-3d862f8300c0

Thanks to the creation of AutoML — which is essentially automated neural architecture search (NAS) — AI can now design better deep neural…

21/08/2019

AI Summit Offer: Last chance to save 25% off any 2019/2020 RE•WORK summit using discount code SUMMER25. With summits in Europe, America and Montreal covering the latest research and application methods spanning several industries, there is something for everyone! See the full list of summits and locations here - https://bit.ly/2MsDoZA

21/08/2019

A team of researchers from Imperial College London has now offered a solution. In the paper Emotionless: Privacy-Preserving Speech Analysis for Voice Assistants, researchers propose adding a privacy-preserving intermediate layer between users and cloud services. They say the method “serves as a wrapper of the emotional part of the voice input to prevent service providers from monitoring users’ emotions associated with their speech.”

https://medium.com/syncedreview/how-to-hide-your-feelings-from-ai-voice-assistants-2db516d9e2d7

No matter whether the conversations commence with “Ok, Google”, “Hello Alexa”, or “Hey Siri”, tech giants Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google…

20/08/2019

Let’s say you’ve just sketched a portrait but don’t have the inclination to hand-colour your creation. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply tell an artificial intelligence assistant what colours you want and have it do the rest? Well, now you can!

A research group from the Seoul National University recently introduced Tag2Pix, a generative adversarial network (GAN) approach for line art colourization. Given a text sentence that includes tag information such as “blue_hair” or “brown_eyes,” Tag2Pix can convert monotone line art into a colorful picture. The researchers’ associated paper as been accepted to ICCV 2019.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/seoul-national-university-ai-uses-text-tags-to-colourize-line-drawings-a0440079c3ba

Let’s say you’ve just sketched a portrait but don’t have the inclination to hand-colour your creation. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could…

20/08/2019

California artificial intelligence startup Cerebras Systems yesterday introduced its Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the world’s largest-ever chip built for neural network processing. Cerebras Co-Founder and Chief Hardware Architect Sean Lie introduced the gigantic chip at one of the semiconductor industry’s leading conferences, Hot Chips 31: A Symposium on High Performance Chips, hosted at Stanford University.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/hot-chips-a-california-startup-has-built-an-ai-chip-as-big-as-a-notebook-why-4d068429349

California artificial intelligence startup Cerebras Systems yesterday introduced its Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the world’s…

19/08/2019

Jerry the mouse repeatedly outsmarts hapless Tom the cat in the classic cartoon Tom & Jerry. Now, researchers from Two Six Labs and Stanford Schnitzer Lab have developed a deep learning system designed to explore the workings of the mouse mind and predict behavior by processing brain-based electrical activity with a neural network.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/of-mice-and-machines-can-ai-read-rodents-minds-a8ff3ef77623

Jerry the mouse repeatedly outsmarts hapless Tom the cat in the classic cartoon Tom & Jerry. Now, researchers from Two Six Labs and…

16/08/2019

If “data is the new oil,” then Kaggle is a virtual gusher of datasets, kernels and other essential content and information for anyone working in machine learning and data science. Synced would like to invite Toronto AI and data science students and researchers to join representatives of the world’s largest data science community for an evening of networking, discussions, and refreshments! RSVP: http://bit.ly/31J2UNM
https://syncedreview.com/2019/08/16/masters-will-share-insights-at-first-toronto-kaggle-days-meetup/

Synced would like to invite Toronto AI and data science students and researchers to join representatives of the world’s largest data science community for an evening of networking, discussions, and…

16/08/2019

“Choose whoever looks the coolest” — that suggestion might or might not help your Chun-Li character top a tournament in the popular video game Street Fighter. What you really need to factor in are attributes such as health, power, mobility, techniques, and range — and how these will affect your fighter when facing different challenges. Now AI researchers have created a similar evaluation system to assess the relative performance of reinforcement learning (RL) systems across different tasks.
https://medium.com/syncedreview/deepmind-bsuite-evaluates-reinforcement-learning-agents-e4a208ea0c6d

“Choose whoever looks the coolest” — that suggestion might or might not help your Chun-Li character top a tournament in the popular video…

16/08/2019

In a bid to teach algorithms to better understand the ambiguities of human language, Israeli research company AI21 Labs today published the paper SenseBERT: Driving Some Sense into BERT, which proposes a new model that significantly improves lexical disambiguation abilities and has obtained state-of-the-art results on the complex Word in Context (WiC) language task.

https://medium.com/syncedreview/israeli-ai-research-company-led-by-stanford-professor-and-mobileeye-ceo-introduces-model-to-solve-747acaad8357

Given a sentence which includes homonyms, such as “He is a great bass player who hates eating bass,” humans are considerably confident…