How Apple made affordable lidar with no moving parts for the iPhone.
At Tuesday’s unveiling of the iPhone 12, Apple touted the capabilities of its new lidar sensor. Apple says lidar will enhance the iPhone’s camera by allowing more rapid focus, especially in low-light situations. And it may enable the creation of a new generation of sophisticated augmented reality apps. Read More
Tag Archives: Big7
How AI is powering a more helpful Google
Search On… At the heart of Google Search is our ability to understand your query and rank relevant results for that query. We’ve invested deeply in language understanding research, and last year we introduced how BERT language understanding systems are helping to deliver more relevant results in Google Search. Today we’re excited to share that BERT is now used in almost every query in English, helping you get higher quality results for your questions. We’re also sharing several new advancements to search ranking, made possible through our latest research in AI. Read More
VIVO: Surpassing Human Performance in Novel Object Captioning with Visual Vocabulary Pre-Training
It is highly desirable yet challenging to generate image captions that can describe novel objects which are unseen in caption-labeled training data, a capability that is evaluated in the novel object captioning challenge (nocaps). In this challenge, no additional image-caption training data, other than COCO Captions, is allowed for model training. Thus, conventional Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) methods cannot be applied. This paper presents VIsual VOcabulary pretraining (VIVO) that performs pre-training in the absence of caption annotations. By breaking the dependency of pairedimage-caption training data in VLP, VIVO can leverage large amounts of paired image-tag data to learn a visual vocabulary. This is done by pre-training a multi-layer Transformer model that learns to align image-level tags with their corresponding image region features. To address the unordered nature of image tags, VIVO uses a Hungarian matching loss with masked tag prediction to conduct pre-training.
We validate the effectiveness of VIVO by fine-tuning the pre-trained model for image captioning. In addition, we perform an analysis of the visual-text alignment inferred by our model. The results show that our model can not only generate fluent image captions that describe novel objects, but also identify the locations of these objects. Our single model has achieved new state-of-the-art results on nocaps and surpassed the human CIDEr score. Read More
The Grey Hoodie Project: Big Tobacco, Big Tech, and the threat on academic integrity
As governmental bodies rely on academics’ expert advice to shape policy regarding Artificial Intelligence, it is important that these academics not have conflicts of interests that may cloud or bias their judgement. Our work explores how Big Tech is actively distorting the academic landscape to suit its needs. By comparing the well-studied actions of another industry, that of Big Tobacco, to the current actions of Big Tech we see similar strategies employed by both industries to sway and influence academic and public discourse. We examine the funding of academic research as a tool used by Big Tech to put forward a socially responsible public image, influence events hosted by and decisions made by funded universities, influence the research questions and plans of individual scientists,< and discover receptive academics who can be leveraged. We demonstrate, in a rigorous manner, how Big Tech can affect academia from the institutional level down to individual researchers. Thus, we believe that it is vital, particularly for universities and other institutions of higher learning, to discuss the appropriateness and the tradeoffs of accepting funding from Big Tech, and what limitations or conditions should be put in place. Read More
#big7Microsoft teams up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3 language model
…You’ve probably already seen OpenAI’s announcement of their groundbreaking GPT-3 model – an autoregressive language model that outputs remarkably human-like text. GPT-3 is the largest and most advanced language model in the world, clocking in at 175 billion parameters, and is trained on Azure’s AI supercomputer.
Today, Microsoft announced it is teaming up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3, allowing it to leverage its technical innovations to develop and deliver advanced AI solutions for its customers, as well as create new solutions that harness the amazing power of advanced natural language generation. Read More
Google’s BigBird Model Improves Natural Language and Genomics Processing
Researchers at Google have developed a new deep-learning model called BigBird that allows Transformer neural networks to process sequences up to 8x longer than previously possible. Networks based on this model achieved new state-of-the-art performance levels on natural-language processing (NLP) and genomics tasks.
The team described the model and a set of experiments in a paper published on arXiv. BigBird is a new self-attention model that reduces the neural-network complexity of Transformers, allowing for training and inference using longer input sequences. By increasing sequence length up to 8x, the team was able to achieve new state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, including question-answering and document summarization. The team also used BigBird to develop a new application for Transformer models in genomic sequence representations, improving accuracy over previous models by 5 percentage points. Read More
Google runs largest chemistry calculation on quantum computer
Google has successfully performed the largest chemical simulation on a quantum computer to date, a feat that can unlock new frontiers in chemistry, improving a wide variety of industries.
The Google AI Quantum team used a noise-robust variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to directly simulate a chemical mechanism via a quantum algorithm. Read More
Architectures Every Data Scientist And Big Data Engineer Should Know
Comprehensive and Comparative List of Feature Store Architectures for Data Scientists and Big Data Professionals.
Feature store has become an important unit of organizations developing predictive services across any industry domain.
… This blog post highlights the features supported by different Feature Store frameworks, that are primarily developed by different leading industry giants. Read More
3 Lessons from Chinese Firms on Effective Digital Collaboration
Collaboration between organizations has never been more important. In the face of the current pandemic, a collaborative approach can help address market failures resulting from information asymmetry, misaligned incentives, or a lack of market intermediaries. Yet many companies restrict their partnerships to formal mechanisms such as joint ventures, limiting the extent of their collaboration.
Useful inspiration can come from China, where Covid-19 is but one of many crises that businesses have faced, and where a variety of pressures and opportunities have shaped a set of distinctive partnering practices. Through its rapid transformation from an economy lacking in basic commercial infrastructure to an e-commerce pioneer, China has emerged as a laboratory for developing new collaboration strategies. Read More
Microsoft wants TikTok for the same reason the U.S. fears China
It’s been a month since U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Trump administration was considering banning TikTok. Plenty has happened since, but the situation really accelerated last weekend. In the span of a couple hours, we learned that President Trump was planning to sign an order directing China’s ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok and that Microsoft and ByteDance had offered the White House a deal to keep TikTok in the U.S.
Chaos ensued. Trump gave Microsoft 45 days to seal a TikTok deal. Microsoft confirmed it was interested in TikTok’s U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand operations. Trump issued a September 15 sell-by deadline for TikTok and declared he was fine with Microsoft buying TikTok, but that the U.S. government should get a “substantial amount of money” as part of the deal. Finally, yesterday we learned that Microsoft might be pursuing TikTok’s global operations, and Trump signed an executive order to block all U.S. transactions with ByteDance (and Tencent) starting September 20.
What is all this really about? It’s about AI, data, and power. Read More
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