Items tagged with AI
This robot with the fake hand on it has one job; and that job isn't to learn to grasp objects or hold tools. This robot is meant only to find that stripe wearing, child frustrating, bespectacled Waldo from the kids books. Perhaps the scientists will next time devise a robot AI that reads the last chapter of the new novel from your favorite author and tells you what happens. This bot is called "There's Waldo" and it uses machine learning to find Waldo and point him out. The robot was built by Redpepper and uses a Raspberry Pi along with pyram Python Library. The bot automatically goes over the page of the book when booted up and snaps a picture with its attached camera. That photo is then scanned...
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The Galaxy Note 9 isn’t the only new device that Samsung launched today at its Galaxy Unpacked event; it also pulled the wraps off the new Galaxy Watch and the Galaxy Home. First out of the gate is the Galaxy Watch, which sheds the “Gear” branding and more closely aligns with the flagship Galaxy smartphones. As with previous Samsung smartwatches, it features a 1.3-inch circular AMOLED touch display (360x360) and is covered in Gorilla DX+ glass. The Galaxy Watch is available in two sizes: 42mm and 46mm, and both of them include 4G LTE connectivity. Both are powered by a Samsung Exynos 9110 dual-core processor rather than the more prevalent Snapdragon Wear SoC from Qualcomm. 1.5GB...
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Do you need any more proof that your ball handling skills suck? Well, look no further than Carnegie Mellon University and DeepMotion, which together trained AI how to dribble a basketball and pull off increasingly advanced moves as it learned. It can be hard to often rationalize in our minds that professional basketball players who make dribbling, crossovers, and pump fakes seem so effortless have honed those skills over many years of practice. However, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and DeepMotion were able to teach AI how to pull off similar feats in a matter of hours (via training). We're not talking about canned animations here that you might see in NBA 2K19, but actual...
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Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, as it's being used in everything from our smartphones to our digital assistants to even the vehicles we drive (or rather, are driven for us). However, as AI becomes even more powerful, there are those that say that the technology should have limits on where it can be applied. Most often, those limits are envisioned for robots that would be placed on the battlefield and would have the ability to target and potentially kill without human oversight. A group of researchers and companies that has expertise in the AI field have come together with a pledge to not develop or participate in the development of machines...
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Typos are something that we all have made at some point in our work. When it comes to publications, typos sometimes let loose the trolls, sometimes they are flat-out embarrassing, and sometimes they result in both. With that said, we feel for the programmer who wrote code in the critically-panned 2013 game Aliens: Colonial Marines. The programmer made a single typo which was largely responsible for how bad that game sucked. Anyone who was a fan of the movie franchise the game was based on wanted this game to be awesome. The problem was that the Aliens in the game were brain-dead because of this single-character typo. A modder dubbed jamesdickinson963 has been tinkering...
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It’s happened to us all at some point in time — you capture an image in less-than-ideal light conditions and the end result is a is grainy photo filled with digital noise. While you may still be able to make out many of the details in the photograph, wouldn’t it be nice if you could somehow magically restore it to near perfect condition the way it was meant to be seen? That’s exactly what researchers from NVIDIA, MIT and Aalto University have been able achieve using deep learning artificial intelligence called Noise2Noise. NVIDIA used a team of Tesla P100 GPUs along with the cuDNN-accelerated TensorFlow deep learning framework to train Noise2Noise using over 50,000 images...
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It's not quite the Skynet that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has warned us about, but researchers from the Musk-based OpenAI initiative have made a breakthrough in AI algorithms using Dota 2 as a testbed. OpenAI's achievement is remarkable due in part to its scope. Most AI versus human matches -- be it go or a computer game -- involves a single computer against a single human (as was the case with OpenAI’s victory last year). But OpenAI has managed to train its AI to master competing against humans on a five-player team. The team of five neural networks that was developed is collectively known as the OpenAI Five and is capable of playing [at an accelerated rate] 180 years with...
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Amazon's Alexa AI assistant is a neat device that can perform all sorts of tasks, from answering questions to controlling your smart home and controlling video playback, among many other useful talents. Alexa has also been known to be downright creepy on occasion. It wasn't too long ago that Alexa was laughing maniacally and freaking out users. Alexa has also recorded private conversations and sent them out to at least one owner's contacts. Amazon did, however, give a convoluted explanation of how that happened and vowed to change things so that situation wouldn’t arise again. However, Alexa's latest creep-show may be an ever tougher situation to explain away. Alexa has allegedly done...
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IBM took its most recent AI system, dubbed Project Debater, and entered it into a competition against human debating champions. The event was held at the IBM Watson West site in San Francisco, California. Project Debater started by preparing arguments for and against the following statement: “We should subsidize space exploration.” The IBM AI and its human opponent, Noa Ovadia, each delivered a four-minute opening statement, four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute summary. IBM notes that Project Debater made an opening argument that supported the statement with facts including the benefits of space exploration for mankind. Ovadia opposed the statement arguing that there are better applications...
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Google has been able to train its various DeepMind AIs to do some very cool things. The AlphaZero AI was able to destroy the highly acclaimed Stockfish chess program over a 100-game match, winning 28 of the matches outright and tying the other 72 matches for a no loss record. DeepMind certainly isn’t the only AI that has performed some cool and impressive feats, however. With respect to a pure gaming venue, EA has developed an AI that is able to successfully battle human players in Battlefield 1. And yet another AI, inspired by the human visual cortex, was recently demonstrated as having the ability to beat CAPTCHA prompts. Google's DeepMind AI has been at it again, and this time...
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After months of internal and public testing (via the Windows Insider program), Microsoft released the Windows 10 April 2018 Update on the very last day of April. Microsoft rolled the update out in phases to help minimize install failures and hardware incompatibilities (which did tend to pop up on occasion). Today, Microsoft announced that the April 2018 Update is now available for all Windows 10 PCs. The company says that it was able to achieve broad availability in a relatively short period of time thanks in part to machine learning. "Our AI approach intelligently selects devices that our feedback data indicate would have a great update experience and offers the April...
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MIT has created a new AI that we sincerely hope never escapes into the wild because this IS how you get Skynet. This AI is called Norman and it is a psychopath. How did Norman turn into a psycho? All the image data MIT fed Norman came from what it calls "an infamous subreddit" that the researchers refuse to name specifically due to its graphic content. However, the team does say that this subreddit is "dedicated to documenting and observing the disturbing reality of death." The goal with Norman was to prove that when people say that an AI can be biased and unfair, the fault isn't the algorithm but the biased data that the algorithm consumes. When an AI algorithm is trained as Norman was, it sees...
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Amazon and Google are massive tech giants, for vastly different reasons. Google is the leading search engine provider, a smartphone platform juggernaut, and huge advertising machine, while Amazon is the largest e-tailer in the world and a cloud services powerhouse, though Google is coming up strong. Though they are different animals, these two companies find themselves locked in heated battle with their respective Google Home and Amazon Echo devices; a battle for AI dominance that could determine who will ultimately control a good chunk of the Smart Home market. The Smart Home market has massive growth potential over the next decade and it's an area that Google wants to own. We all remember how...
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It appears that the naysayers have won out this time at Google with regards to its involvement in Project Maven, a Department of Defense program involving aerial drones used in military operations. Google has reportedly decided against renewing its contract with the Pentagon after facing immense backlash both inside and outside of the company. At a meeting with employees on Friday dubbed the "Weather Report", Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene broke the news saying that Google will not renew its contract once it expires in 2019. The meeting, which were first reported by Gizmodo, made it clear that Google had actively been trying to secure military contract, which can often be quite...
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Google caused a bit of a firestorm after details leaked that it was forging a relationship with the United States Department of Defense to develop AI software for aerial drones. However, it's important to note that Google wasn't going to be involved with developing AI that would power killer Skynet robots on the battlefield; instead its AI would be used to examine images and video footage captured by the drones. Google's involvement in the program, called Project Maven, prompted more than a dozen employees to resign. In addition, another 4,000 employees signed a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai urging him to abandon the program. Further complicating matters are comments that Google...
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iOS 11.4 is rolling out to iPhone and the iPad today, and it will bring with it support for Messages in the Cloud and AirPlay 2 (among other things). The first feature will allow all of your text messages and iMessages (which can often be quite large in size) via iCloud. The latter is a bigger deal for those with multi-room audio setups in their home. AirPlay 2 will allow you to, for example, sync the HomePod in your kitchen with the HomePod in your upstairs loft, allowing you to enjoy the same music as you move through different areas of your home. Not only can you use AirPlay 2 to sync between multiple HomePods, but you can also sync your HomePod with other AirPlay 2-enabled devices...
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Earlier this week we talked a bit about an issue with an Amazon Echo device that had recorded an audio clip of a woman's conversation and then set the clip to a random contact on her contacts list. The woman was rightfully fearful of the Alexa voice powered device after that incident, and had vowed to never use it again and wanted a refund. Amazon confirmed early on, according to reports, that it had gone through her logs and verified that the incident did, in fact, occur just as she claims. Amazon has now reached out to HotHardware and other tech publications with an update on the situation and a rather convoluted explanation for how the incident took place. Amazon said, "Echo woke up due...
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A woman from Portland, Oregon has claimed that her Amazon Echo recorded part of her conversation and sent it to a random person on her contact list. The woman claims that she learned about the issue when a person who worked for her husband contacted her at her home after receiving the message and told her that she was “hacked.” Amazon has confirmed that this issue happened and issued the statement, “Amazon takes privacy very seriously,” an Amazon representative told Fox. “We investigated what happened and determined this was an extremely rare occurrence. We are taking steps to avoid this from happening in the future.” According to the woman, an Amazon engineer...
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Microsoft wants to improve its AI tech and is acquiring smaller firms to do just that. The software giant says that we are only at the start of teaching computers to understand the full context of human communications. Today these intelligent AI bots and assistants, like Cortana, are only able to respond to simple commands and queries. This allows the AI to tell the user weather reports, play a song, or share a reminder. What Microsoft wants in the future is a "rich and effective" communication that allows the AI assistant to have a natural dialog with the user rather than just responding to commands. Microsoft calls this "conversational AI." To help it reach the goal of conversational AI, Microsoft...
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NVIDIA is talking up some new AI techniques that well help robots to more efficiently work alongside humans. The research was led by NVIDIA researchers Stan Birchfield and Jonathan Tremblay. The duo was able to develop a deep learning-based system that is said to be the first of its kind that can teach a robot to complete a task simply by observing the actions of a human. NVIDIA says that the research is meant to enhance communications between humans and robots while furthering research that allows people to work alongside robots seamlessly. "For robots to perform useful tasks in real-world settings, it must be easy to communicate the task to the robot; this includes both the desired result and...
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It's safe to say that the most impressive thing shown off at Google I/O this year was the awesome demo of Google Duplex and the Google Assistant interacting with humans to book hair appointments and dinner reservations. Despite the potential of such a mind-blowing demo, some complained that the AI hadn’t identified itself and that it was unethical to have humans in the dark about the computer on the other end of the phone. Google later said that it would identify when the AI was calling in the future. Now some are crying foul about Google's demo with allegations that the entire thing was faked. Some are unhappy that Google won’t provide the most basic sort of evidence to...
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In April we learned that a petition was circulating at Google signed by workers who wanted the search giant to sever ties with the Pentagon and stop working on a military AI project. That AI project is called Project Maven, which is a Pentagon effort to create an AI capable of sorting through footage taken from drones. When we first learned about the petition in April, it had been signed by over 3,100 Google employees. The petition read in part "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war." Reports are claiming that at least a dozen Google employees have now resigned in protest to the company's participation in the project. There is no indication that the petition nor the resignations...
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