When Jagadish Mahendran heard about his friend’s daily challenges navigating as a blind person, he immediately thought of his artificial intelligence work.
“For years I had been teaching robots to see things,” he said. Mahendran, a computer vision researcher at the University of Georgia’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, found it ironic that he had helped develop machines — including a shopping robot that could “see” stocked shelves and a kitchen robot — but nothing for people with low or no vision.
After exploring existing tech for blind and low vision people like camera-enabled canes or GPS-connected smartphone apps, he came up with a backpack-based AI design that uses cameras to provide instantaneous alerts. Read More
Daily Archives: March 24, 2021
Amazon Web Services partners with Hugging Face to simplify AI-based natural language processing
Amazon Web Services Inc. said today it’s partnering with an artificial intelligence startup called Hugging Face Inc. as part of an effort to simplify and accelerate the adoption of natural language processing models.
… For its part, Hugging Face has announced a couple of new services built using Amazon SageMaker, including AutoNLP, which provides an automatic way to train, evaluate and deploy state-of-the-art NLP models for different tasks, and the Accelerated Inference API, which is used to build, train and deploy machine learning models in the cloud and at the edge. The startup has also chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider. Read More
Text-Gen, a python library that allows you to build a custom text generation model
Defence review: British army to be cut to 72,500 troops by 2025
The size of the Army is to be reduced to 72,500 soldiers by 2025 as part of a move towards drones and cyber warfare.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said “increased deployability and technological advantage” meant greater effect could be delivered by fewer people.br>
He set out plans for new capabilities such as electronic warfare and drones in the Commons. Read More
Small, cheap spy satellites mean there’s no hiding place
IN THE MIDDLE of last year, Ecuadorians watched with concern as 340 foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around their country’s westernmost province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea requires such vessels to carry GPS-based automatic identification systems (AIS) that broadcast where they are, and to keep those systems switched on. Some boats, however, failed to comply. There were more than 550 instances of vessels not transmitting their locations for over a day. This regular radio silence stoked fears that the boats concerned were sneaking into Ecuador’s waters to plunder its fish.
Both local officials and China’s ambassador to Ecuador denied this, and said all the boats were sticking to the rules. In October, however, HawkEye 360, a satellite operator based in Virginia, announced it had detected vessels inside Ecuador’s EEZ on 14 occasions when the boats in question were not transmitting AIS (see map). HawkEye’s satellites could pinpoint these renegades by listening for faint signals emanating from their navigation radars and radio communications. Read More
GPT-3 tries pickup lines
AI blogger Janelle Shane, the author of “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You” , used four variants of GPT-3 to generate humorous pickup lines with varying degrees of success. Some lines they generated included “I’m losing my voice from all the screaming your hotness is causing me to do” and “I will briefly summarize the plot of Back to the Future II for you.” Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 