Robots today have been programmed to vacuum the floor or perform a preset dance, but there is still much work to be done before they can achieve their full potential. This mainly has something to do with how robots are unable to recognize what is in their environment at a deep level and therefore cannot function properly without being told all of these details by humans. For instance, while it may seem like backup programming for when bumping into an object that would help prevent unwanted collisions from happening again, this idea isn’t actually based on understanding anything about chairs because the robot doesn’t know exactly what one is!
Facebook AI team just released Droidlet, a new platform that makes it easier for anyone to build their smart robot. It’s an open-source project explicitly designed with hobbyists and researchers in mind so you can quickly prototype your AI algorithms without having to spend countless hours coding everything from scratch. Read More
Tag Archives: Big7
New toolkit aims to help teams create responsible human-AI experiences
Microsoft has released the Human-AI eXperience (HAX) Toolkit, a set of practical tools to help teams strategically create and responsibly implement best practices when creating artificial intelligence technologies that interact with people.
The toolkit comes as AI-infused products and services, such as virtual assistants, route planners, autocomplete, recommendations and reminders, are becoming increasingly popular and useful for many people. But these applications have the potential to do things that aren’t helpful, like misunderstand a voice command or misinterpret an image. In some cases, AI systems can demonstrate disruptive behaviors or even cause harm. Read More
Google’s Supermodel: DeepMind Perceiver is a step on the road to an AI machine that could process anything and everything
The Perceiver is kind-of a way-station on the way to what Google AI lead Jeff Dean has described as one model that could handle any task, and “learn” faster, with less data.
Arguably one of the premiere events that has brought AI to popular attention in recent years was the invention of the Transformer by Ashish Vaswani and colleagues at Google in 2017. The Transformer led to lots of language programs such as Google’s BERT and OpenAI’s GPT-3 that have been able to produce surprisingly human-seeming sentences, giving the impression machines can write like a person.
Now, scientists at DeepMind in the U.K., which is owned by Google, want to take the benefits of the Transformer beyond text, to let it revolutionize other material including images, sounds and video, and spatial data of the kind a car records with LiDAR.
The Perceiver, unveiled this week by DeepMind in a paper posted on arXiv, adapts the Transformer with some tweaks to let it consume all those types of input, and to perform on the various tasks, such as image recognition, for which separate kinds of neural networks are usually developed. Read More
Facebook is ditching plans to make an interface that reads the brain
The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech’s campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk’s new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people’s brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that its secretive skunkworks, named Building 8, was attempting to build a headset or headband that would allow people to send text messages by thinking—tapping them out at 100 words per minute.
The company’s goal was a hands-free interface anyone could use in virtual reality. “What if you could type directly from your brain?” asked Regina Dugan, a former DARPA officer who was then head of the Building 8 hardware dvision. “It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you realize.”
Now the answer is in—and it’s not close at all. Four years after announcing a “crazy amazing” project to build a “silent speech” interface using optical technology to read thoughts, Facebook is shelving the project, saying consumer brain-reading still remains very far off. Read More
Inside Facebook’s Data Wars
Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users’ high engagement levels with right-wing media sources.
One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.
Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network’s integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Mr. Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day.
The announcement, which left CrowdTangle’s employees in stunned silence, was the result of a yearlong battle among Facebook executives over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings. Read More
Google Built A Trillion Parameter AI Model. 7 Things You Should Know
One of the exciting things about Artificial Intelligence is the steady stream of new accomplishments that we see in the news. Every week, some research institution or company accomplishes something amazing with AI, whether it is translating a long lost language, or building a massive model, the scale of which has never been done before.
But what does it all mean? If I am a business CEO, what impact if any does this have on my business? Is there any way I can leverage it? If I am a teacher, what should I tell my students? Being aware of recent events is always a good thing, but without context it is hard to make sense of them.
In this article, we dissect this specific announcement, and answer seven high level questions you may have about it. Read More
Google News Initiative launches AI Academy for Small Newsrooms
The first pilot edition of the AI Academy for Small Newsrooms program will commence in September 2021 and will welcome journalists and developers from small news organizations in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region.
The Google News Initiative has partnered with Polis, the journalism think-tank of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), to launch the “AI Academy for Small Newsrooms” , a six-week-long, free online program for 20 media professionals to learn how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to support their journalism.
The program combines a series of masterclasses given by experts working at the intersection of journalism and artificial intelligence with opportunities for discussion among participants. Read More
China’s Tencent Says It’ll Use Face Recognition to Keep Minors From Gaming at Night
henzhen, China-based gaming giant Tencent has announced it will use a face recognition system to prevent minors in its home country from playing video games late into the night.
Tencent is attempting to keep ahead of recent regulations designed to stamp out what the Chinese government defines as excessive and unhealthy gaming habits. In 2019, China passed a law ostensibly intended to prevent minors “from indulging in online games.” According to NPR, that includes a ban on minors playing video games from 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., as well as limiting their playtime to 90 minutes a day. The law also prohibited minors from spending more than $28 to $57 a month on micro-transactions. New rules requiring all individuals, regardless of age, to register for games using their real identities and prohibiting citizens from playing games that include “sexual explicitness, goriness, violence, and gambling” were also implemented. Read More
Amazon Fresh grocery store: Meet Just Walk Out shopping
For the first time, Just Walk Out technology is available in a new full-size Amazon Fresh grocery store.
Now customers can save time shopping for groceries by skipping the checkout line with the launch of our new Amazon Fresh grocery store with Just Walk Out shopping, now open in The Marketplace at Factoria in Bellevue, Washington.
Using a combination of overhead cameras equipped with computer vision to identify items customers put in their cart, weight-detecting sensors to log whenever they move items from or back to store shelves, and back-end systems to track the data and manage inventory, Amazon is proving out the scalability of the Amazon Fresh concept. Read More
AI Conference Recap: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Others at ICLR 2021
At the recent International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), research teams from several tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and Amazon, presented nearly 250 papers out of a total of 860 on a wide variety of AI topics related to deep learning.
The conference was held online in early May and featured a “round-the-clock” program of live talks and Q&A sessions, in addition to pre-recorded videos for all accepted papers. Each day of the four-day conference featured two Invited Talks from leading deep-learning researchers. Although most of the papers were from academia, many prominent tech companies were well represented by their AI researchers: Google contributed over 100 papers, including several winning Outstanding Paper awards, Microsoft 53, IBM 35, Facebook 23, Salesforce 7, and Amazon 4. Read More
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