Items tagged with AI
Many tech companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI). These kinds of programs and products can be rather expensive, but there are a few that are more accessible to the public and small companies. Google’s Coral AI board has just come out of beta and has been released on a wider scale. Coral is a complete AI toolkit that helps researchers to “bring new models out of the data center and onto devices, running TensorFlow models efficiently at the edge.” The toolkit has allowed a variety of institutions to incorporate AI into new solutions. For example, Virgo Surgical Video Solutions has used Coral to improve the accuracy of endoscopies. This type of technology...
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We've entered an age with technology and software where you can't always believe what you hear, and with deepfakes, we can't always believe what we see. The video below shows what happens when you combine a voice actor who can do exceptional celebrity impersonations with AI-powered deepfake tech, to map the celebrity's face on the head of the impressionist. The result is a video that looks extremely convincing and just plain awesome. The impressionist in this video is Jim Meskimen, and the video is titled "Pity the Poor Impressionist." In the video, he voices 20 different celebrities, some more convincingly than others. He does an excellent Tommy Lee Jones and Robert De Niro as well. The visuals...
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Console gaming fans are looking forward to the next year or so as the PS5 game console is set to land in the holiday season of 2020. The Google Stadia game streaming platform is set to launch next month, and in a recent interview, the head engineer for the Google streaming platform talked about performance. VP of engineering Madj Bakar believes that Stadia will be faster and more responsive than local gaming hardware. The catch to that statement made by Bakar is that he says Stadia will be faster than local gaming systems in "a year or two." Bakar says that Google is on the verge of being better than local hardware due to advancements in modeling and machine learning. He says that the Stadia...
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Intel and Brown University announced today that they are working on a DARPA-funded project that is called Intelligent Spine Interface. The project is aiming to use AI tech to restore movement and bladder control in patients who have severe spinal cord injuries. During the two year-program, researchers will record motor and sensory signals for the spinal cord. The team will use AI networks to learn how to stimulate the post-injury site to send motor commands. During the study, surgeons at Rhode Island hospital near Brown University will implant electrode arrays on both ends of a patient's injury site. The electrodes will create an intelligent bypass to allow the severed nerves to communicate in...
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Many companies are working hard to improve their artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. AI could impact everything from medicine to silly Instagram overlays and everything in between. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are all toiling to gain an edge in the AI field by leveraging their massive treasure troves of data, but what are their existing privacy policies and user data security track records? Which of these companies cares the most about protecting your privacy? Should you even trust Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google with your data? We examined the kind of data that is collected by the above companies and how it is shared, their virtual assistants, and privacy controls. We also reviewed...
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Today at TwitchCon, NVIDIA announced some interesting new tech that can be quite beneficial to the livestreaming community. The company has been leveraging the RT and Tensor cores in its current generation of Turing-based GeForce RTX graphics cards to enable features like real-time ray tracing, but that same hardware will be used to power the company’s new RTX Broadcast Engine. The RTX Broadcast Engine will leverage the onboard Tensor cores to enable a wide variety of effects in real-time including style filters, augmented reality, and greenscreens. In the case of RTX Greenscreen, NVIDIA is using artificial intelligence to scrub the background in the livestream, leaving just your face and...
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How do you defeat “deepfakes”? According to Google, you develop more of them. Google just released a large, free database of deepfake videos to help research develop detection tools. Google collaborated with “Jigsaw”, a tech “incubator” founded by Google, and the FaceForesenics Benchmark Program at the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples. They worked with several paid actors to create hundreds of real videos and then used popular deepfake technologies to generate thousands of fake videos. Researchers will be able to freely access both the fake and real videos to develop “synthetic video detection methods”....
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The latest craze making the rounds on social media is a facial recognition program called ImageNet Roulette. It allows users to upload a selfie after which artificial intelligence will classify the photo with the tag that it thinks is appropriate for the subject person in the image. Some think that the program is fun, and others think it is downright racist, sexist and offensive. For example, it tends to classify anyone of any skin tone, or who uploads an image in poor light, with tags like "Black, Black person, blackamoor, Negro, Negroid," according to numerous user reports. Some of the tags it gives to people include things like "psycholinguist," "scientist," while other male subjects were...
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Many of the nuclear deterrence strategies that the U.S. has today were developed during the Cold War era when military officials had significant time to detect an incoming nuclear attack and decide a course of action for a response. This mutually assured destruction worked, in that any enemy with nuclear weapons knew the U.S. would have time to fire its own nuclear response at them and neither would survive the outcome. However, technology marches on and times have changed, with potential enemy forces around the globe making significant upgrades to nuclear arsenals -- upgrades such as hypersonic cruise missiles and other types of missiles that are difficult to detect. One type of hypersonic cruise...
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Fraudsters are always looking for new ways to cheat someone out of money. A report claims that a company CEO was tricked by scammers who faked the voice of the parent company CEO to get the executive to transfer $243,000 to an external account. The story claims that in March, criminals used commercially available voice-generating AI software to impersonate the CEO of a German energy company with a division based in the UK. The thieves and their deepfake corporate CEO tricked the real CEO of the British energy company into transmitting funds into the claimed account of a Hungarian supplier. Guarantees were given that transfer would be reimbursed immediately. The unwitting company CEO says that...
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How long will human beings be the dominant species on the planet? One scientist argues that the reign of humans is coming to an end. Dr. James Lovelock recently contended that humans will be overcome and replaced by cyborgs. Dr. James Lovelock detailed the fall of humanity and the rise of cyborgs in his most recent publication Novacene. Lovelock is not the first person to argue that cyborgs will take over the earth. Elon Musk has contended that human beings will need to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) if they want to survive. He recently unveiled plans for his "Neuralink", which would literally attach wires to a person’s skull. Lovelock’s perspective is rather unique. He defines...
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The global smart speaker market is large and growing as more embrace the idea of interacting with a digital assistant by voice. As the global smart speaker market heats up, manufacturers are vying to be the top name in the segment. The two top companies had been Amazon and Google, but a major change has taken place near the top with one company coming up fast, and that company is Baidu. Baidu is a search engine that has been dominating the Chinese market for years. It has surpassed Google in the global smart speaker market taking 17.3% the market with 4.5 million smart speakers shipped during the second quarter of 2019. The growth rate for Baidu was massive, with a recent Canalys report pegging...
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Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be invading every aspect of our lives from enabling partial and full self-driving cars, to fueling the search engines we use, to more mundane tasks like running algorithms on our smartphone to optimize battery life. AI can be used to augment many of the tasks we perform on a daily basis, and NVIDIA is hoping to lend a hand with its Tesla GPU accelerators. One of the big fields that's ripe for advancement is with conversational AI. While today's digital assistants can "converse" with their human operators, their voice performance and comprehension abilities are often stilted and not exactly human-like. That's where NVIDIA comes in with breakthroughs that it...
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During his record breaking Jeopardy run, it was hard not to think that James Holzhauer's brain was, at times, like a computer. The dude is smart. Through his Neuralink company, Elon Musk is envisions turning brains into actual computers, in a sense, through tiny implants as part of a revolutionary brain control interface (BCI). This is wild stuff, though not all that surprising—Musk hinted at what his Neuralink venture was working on when he founded the company in 2017. It was always known that the end goal was to connect the human brain to artificial intelligence (AI), though the details were sparse. Why? In Musk's words, the "existential risk is too high not to." In other words, if we...
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