Items tagged with AI
It is well established that facial recognition based on machine learning is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination; therefore, using it for security purposes is likely a bad idea. This has now been proven through research from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, which showed that digital and real makeup could trick facial recognition systems with a success rate of up to 98%. The researchers at Ben-Gurion University explained that facial recognition is widely used in subways, airports, and workplaces to automatically identify individuals. In this experiment, the ArcFace face recognition model was used with 20 blacklisted participants who would be flagged in a real-world facial...
Read more...
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is adding another honor to his portfolio this week, as he was named one of the world's most influential people by TIME Magazine. Of course, we in the computing industry know all about Huang and his company's contributions to AI, PC gaming, and autonomous vehicles (among other sectors), and TIME is now recognizing those achievements. Andrew Ng, the founder of DeepLearning.AI and Landing AI, penned TIME's piece on Huang, writing that "he has helped enable a revolution that allows phones to answer questions out loud, farms to spray weeds but not crops, doctors to predict the properties of new drugs—with more wonders to come. "With still emerging AI technologies creating...
Read more...
Most people would be happy just to get their mitts on a single GPU, in the current landscape. The US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory is much more fortunate, having procured a whopping 2,240 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs (based on Ampere) for its Polaris supercomputer to "supercharge researcher and discovery." As such, Polaris qualifies as the largest GPU-based supercomputer on the planet, with thousands of A100s working in tandem with hundreds of second-generation and, sometime later, third-generation AMD EPYC server processors. More precisely, there are 560 nodes spread out over 40 racks, each with four A100 GPUs. As currently constructed, each node features a 32-core/64-thread...
Read more...
Do you think maybe the tech industry is hyper-focused on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies? It certainly is, and to some extent AI is practically everywhere these days, from servers and high-performance computing, to autonomous vehicles and everyday consumer devices, and everything in, around, and between. So it's not really shocking that Samsung is touting its latest advancements in processing-in-memory (PIM) technology at the Hot Chips 33 conference. Some of what Samsung is discussing has to do with past announcements. For example, back in February Samsung introduced the industry's first high bandwidth memory PIM, Aqualbolt-XL, with AI processing built into its HBM2 Aquabolt to bolster...
Read more...
Artificial Intelligence is a tricky business, as with anything in life, with great power comes great responsibility. On the one hand, AI can power autonomous vehicles or help usher in more secure computing platforms. On the other hand, for example, now it appears it's possible to end up being jailed due to questionable AI-based evidence. This is precisely what happened to 65-year-old Michael Williams when he was arrested last August, after being accused of killing a young man in his neighborhood who asked for a ride during a night of community unrest, due to a reported police brutality incident. In 2018, the city of Chicago entered a $33 million contract with ShotSpotter, a network of surveillance...
Read more...
The human brain is enormously complex, and cracking the code of its intricacies in its entirety might never be accomplished. However, there have been loads of interesting research related to brain activity. Most recently, a team of researchers say they developed a deep learning framework that is able to decode sensory and behavioral variables from wide-band neural data. Or put another way, they came up with an AI scheme that can interpret brain signals and predict behaviors. Whoa. Interpreting brain data is no easy task, and often depends on manual operations, the researchers say. The landscape is rife with incomplete datasets. The task is further compounded by the fact that activity in any particular...
Read more...
Following call center company Teleperformance allegedly forcing employees to undergo AI camera surveillance, Amazon wants to monitor its own customer service employees. Soon, Amazon could use a system that captures all workers' keystrokes to run behavioral analysis and prevent malicious hackers or imposters from stealing data. In a confidential document acquired by Motherboard, Amazon reports that there have been several cases of customer data being accessed around the world. India ranks at the top of the list, with 120 security incidents, followed by the Philippines with just under 70, and the U.S. with approximately 40 security incidents. While each of these incidents are not explained,...
Read more...
If you thought Amazon wanting drivers to submit to biometric surveillance was bad, these recent revelations take the cake. Colombia-based call center workers, who perform outsourced customer services for some of the largest companies in the US, are now reportedly being pressured into signing a contract allowing their employer to install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance. Teleperformance is one of the world’s largest call center companies with nearly 400,000 employees and clientele, including Apple, Amazon, and Uber, among others. Now, in a new ground-breaking report from NBC, six workers for the Colombian company, even working on contracts for these companies, have come...
Read more...
Though it has been more than a few weeks, and we have long since passed the end of 2020, the U.K’s most powerful supercomputer is now operational. Powered by NVIDIA hardware, the Cambridge-1 is a $100 million, 400 petaflop beast of a computer that ranks “among the world’s top 50 fastest computers and is powered by 100 percent renewable energy.” Under the hood, the Cambridge-1 supercomputer is powered by 80 DGX A100 systems tied together, each featuring NVIDIA A100 GPUs, BlueField-2 DPUs, and NVIDIA HDR InfiniBand networking. The whole system is an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD that delivers the aforementioned 400 petaflops of AI performance and eight petaflops of Linpack performance...
Read more...
I have only dabbled in programming, and from my limited experience, I can appreciate that really good coding is an art form that not everyone possesses. Whether I have it or not, I can't say—I've never dived too deeply into programming to find out. If I ever do, Microsoft's new GitHub Copilot might prove to be a boon. What exactly is Copilot? It is an AI pair programmer that helps coders hammer out lines and functions faster and with less work, especially with the more mundane stuff. Developed in collaboration with OpenAI, an AI researcher company co-founded by Elon Musk and backed by Microsoft (by way of a $1 billion investment in 2019), Copilot taps into the power of artificial intelligence...
Read more...
NVIDIA DLSS is an AI rendering technology used to increase performance while allowing players to still enjoy high-fidelity and quality in games. As of late, this technology has been added to a myriad of games, such as Rainbow Six: Siege earlier this year. Now, the tech is slated to come to five new game titles in the coming weeks. Announced today, NVIDIA DLSS will make its way to Facepunch Studio's multiplayer survival game Rust and becomes available on July 1st. Rust's Project Lead, Helk, explained that this is important because, "in Rust split-second reactions can be the difference between life and death, with NVIDIA DLSS offering our players a performance boost, without sacrificing visual...
Read more...
While there may be funny and impressive deepfakes out there, the technology poses a risk to trustworthy media and public figures. However, companies are working to prevent this sort of thing by developing robust deep fake detection tools. Facebook is the latest to join the group through reverse engineering generative models from a single deepfake. As time goes on, figuring out whether an image is real or fake has become increasingly difficult as new deepfake generative models are created. For example, things could end poorly if the U.S. President were deepfaked into a video where he says something defamatory about another country, which could spark hostilities or even war if not identified. To...
Read more...
Battlefield 2042 has been announced and shown off through game engine and gameplay footage during the past week. More recently, EA performed its first Battlefield Briefing, which gave a closer look at the upcoming game. In that briefing, which was recently updated, we found out that Battlefield 2042 will be introducing artificial intelligence soldiers to the series. One of the most frustrating things about playing games is when you want to play, but the player base is not what it once was. Sometimes all you can find are empty servers, which can also prove to be very disappointing. However, Battlefield 2042 is bringing AI soldiers to the battlefield to fill up those empty slots to combat this...
Read more...
For years, we have known that AI can beat humans at games like Go, Starcraft, and up to 57 different Atari 2600 games. However, it is commonly believed that AI cannot beat humans at designing things, but that is not necessarily the case. Google has decided to use AI to design microchips for its next generation of Google Tensor Processing Unit, and it can be done in 6 hours, whereas humans can take several months or longer. When it comes to designing computer chips, one of the more laborious yet highly important tasks is laying out the components in what is called a chip floorplan. Where all the physical parts go can have a massive impact, affecting power consumption, performance, and chip area....
Read more...
Games are one of the best testbeds for AI as they require problem-solving, forward-thinking, and other skills that normally only humans possess. So far, AI has gotten a handle on games like Go and up to 57 different Atari 2600 titles, but those are not terribly difficult. What if AI was pitted against one of the most notoriously hard games of all time? As it turns out, that is exactly what Facebook wants to do to bring down NetHack. NetHack is an 80s text-based single-player dungeon exploration game with a focus on “discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight,” as the NetHack website explains. If you decide to kill everything in sight, or at least...
Read more...
During yesterday’s Google I/O event, we heard about several updates to Google software products, including Android 12 and Wear OS. Google also managed to bring in actor Michael Peña to tour the new Google quantum computing and AI campus. Today, we get to take a closer look at it so let us dive right in… Google’s Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California, is a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility. It features the company’s first quantum data center, quantum hardware research laboratories, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities that will all be used to facilitating the building of the first “error-corrected quantum computer for the...
Read more...
Do you remember discussing (or arguing) with your schoolteacher about how you would never use some of the lessons that they they taught? There were probably some things that you never used and simply forgot about, but what if you could never forget such extraneous information? As it turns out, AI and machine learning have this exact problem, but Facebook AI researchers are looking to tackle it by teaching AI to forget things. Typically, AI is rather good at various tasks, but when it comes to searching long-term memories, performance drops, and the cost of storage grows exponentially. This can be quite the problem as time goes on since we constantly take in new information that would need to...
Read more...
AI is spreading, and not in the creepy sci-fi dystopian kind of way, but by way of programs to help manage large tasks in critical business sectors, such as healthcare, finance, and defense. Now, Microsoft is releasing a tool called Counterfit, an “automation tool for security testing AI systems as an open-source project.” This way, companies will be able to “ensure that the algorithms used in their businesses are robust, reliable, and trustworthy.” As mentioned, AI systems are becoming more prevalent in business, powering many different services. Thus, these systems must be secure from adversaries so that important or confidential information is not lost. However, performing...
Read more...
Autonomous vehicles will likely become the future for getting around, but the technology is not quite there yet. We still hear about accidents that occur due to a driver not being behind the car's wheel or simple dumb mistakes. To help quell these issues in the future, NVIDIA has created the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim through its Omniverse, a collection of the company's core technologies. During the GTC keynote, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the "next generation of autonomous vehicle simulation," called the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim. Purportedly, the sim provides a "high-fidelity simulation by tapping into NVIDIA's core technologies to deliver a powerful, cloud-based computing platform," which can...
Read more...
Nuance Communications is a company everyone has heard from but not many have heard of. The company’s technology powers Apple’s Siri voice assistant alongside various communications for healthcare and enterprise organizations. In 2014, it was rumored that Samsung might be interested in purchasing Nuance, but that deal never came to fruition. Now, tech-giant Microsoft has announced a plan to purchase Nuance for a hefty $19.7 billion, including debts, to focus on the healthcare industry. For quite some time, Microsoft has been working on improving global healthcare with technology and artificial intelligence (AI). In 2020, the company announced the AI for Health initiative to accelerate...
Read more...
Years ago, the method of navigating was either printing out directions from MapQuest or pulling out the absurdly large Rand-McNally map for the state and figuring it out the quickest way to your destination. You would not have access to live data like accidents, police activity, and road conditions as you do now with mobile devices. Since the “dark times,” Google has been “pushing the boundaries of what a map can do, propelled by the latest machine learning” and is “on track to bring over 100 AI-powered improvements to Google Maps.” Indoor Navigation Have you ever gotten lost or turned around in an airport, mall, train station, or other large, yet crowded location?...
Read more...
Amazon delivery drivers will have a tough choice ahead if they want to continue working for the retail giant. Starting this week, Amazon is requiring delivery drivers to agree to a "biometric consent" form giving the company permission to use surveillance equipment installed onboard all its delivery vans to track activities (inside and outside the vehicle) and even their behavior while driving. This move comes after a February report confirmed that the surveillance system manufactured by Netradyne, called Driveri, is designed to "[improve] driver behavior" and monitor behavior such as speeding, making illegal U-turns, braking too hard, and failing to acknowledge stop signs. The system can...
Read more...
