Items tagged with Artificial Intelligence
Sometimes I get a hankering for a juicy burger, and if I happen to pass by a Burger King, a Whopper (with extra pickles, don't @me) will suffice. It looks like I'm not the only one. Apparently the Autopilot feature in Tesla vehicles can confuse circular Burger King restaurant signs with stop signs, and will slow down accordingly. This is part of a new "Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control" feature that Tesla is beta testing, though to be clear, it's not supposed to slow down for restaurant signs, Burger King or otherwise. Burger King ran with the idea anyway, and for a brief period, was offering a free Whopper to Tesla owners who shared a picture of their smart car stopped at one of its locations....
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has many different uses, including facial recognition and the creation of photo-realistic human faces. However, these various AI applications have not always hit the mark. They often create very basic or unnerving images that fail to bridge the "uncanny valley" gap. A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and City University of Hong Kong have created one of the most advanced image generators to date. DeepFaceDrawing relies on artificial intelligence to transform sketches of human faces into high-quality images. Similar AI frameworks require detailed, well-drawn sketches. DeepFaceDrawing is intended to help those with very little drawing experience....
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John Henry was a steel driving railroad man who, according to legend, bested a steam-powered rock drilling machine in a competition many, many years ago. I'm reminded of this because it's one of my favorite songs performed by my late grandfather and great uncle, and now decades later, man versus machine is still a relevant topic as the United States Air Force gets read to pit a AI-powered autonomous fighter jet against a human pilot. Things have changed dramatically since the days of John Henry and steam-powered machines. Artificial intelligence has improved machines by leaps and bounds, and every so often, we are reminded of the potential AI holds. For example, when IBM's Watson beat the greatest...
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NVIDIA made some big promises when it first outed its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology. Through the wonders of artificial intelligence and machine learning, DLSS aimed to make games look better at higher resolutions, and boost framerates without overburdening the GPU. Results were mixed, though, and certain limitations held the technology back. Now with the introduction of DLSS 2.0, NVIDIA is promising even bigger and better things. DLSS 2.0 delivers a "big leap in AI rendering" and breaks free of several existing constraints. The biggest one is game support—DLSS 2.0 has the potential to be more broadly supported in games because, unlike before, it does not require training...
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Multiple facets of technology are trending towards artificial intelligence these days, in applications both big and small. As that's been happening, graphics processing units (GPUs) have taken on the heavy lifting, though researchers at Rice University have cooked up a new machine learning scheme they say is more efficient when run on central processing units (CPUs). It should come as no surprise that the computer scientists from Rice University are being supported by collaborators from Intel, which has a vested interest in anything that can tap into its CPUs. There's a lot of money to be made by leveraging AI—NVIDIA, for example, reported a 41 percent increase in its fourth quarter revenue,...
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The true measure of a chatbot is not simply its ability to offer responses to questions, or even to just to make sense when 'conversing' with a human. Instead, it is the ability to allow a flesh and blood person to suspend disbelief and feel as though they are chatting with an actual intelligent being (and do it without being offensive, which is challenging, as Microsoft discovered). Google claims its new Meena chatbot is better at this than another other "conversational agent." Calling Meena a chatbot is selling it short. It is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond with replies that make actual sense, given whatever context is at hand. Google says Meena consists of...
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Just a few days prior to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Samsung teased the creation of an artificial human, and it had our minds racing at the possibilities. Turns out the it is not quite what we thought. Samsung subsidiary STAR Labs lifted the curtain on Project NEON, which is essentially a set of digital avatars for glorified chatbots. To be fair, that is soft of an oversimplification. At least, I think it is. In no uncertain terms, STAR Labs says NEON is "not an assistant" like Siri or Alexa, and "not an interface to the internet." It is also "not a music player," in case anyone is confused about that. Simply put, STAR Labs refers to NEON as "a friend," albeit a virtual...
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River Networks is injecting a bit of artificial intelligence (AI) into is Killer Intelligence Engine to bolster wireless connections. The general idea behind this is to constantly monitor and "score" Wi-Fi access points in order to ensure a user is connected to the best available one, thereby resulting in a stronger, faster, and more reliable connection. According to Rivet Networks, simply moving to a better access point can have a dramatic impact on the wireless experience, reducing latency by up to 50 percent and increasing throughput by over 100 percent. I'm not sure where Rivet Networks plucked those specific figures from, though the company is correct in asserting a stronger access point...
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Intel is banking heavily on the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a growing revenue stream in the years to come. Intel booked $3.5 billion in AI-related revenue during 2019 -- which represented a significant 20 percent year-over-year increase -- so it stands to reason that the company is looking to keep that train steaming ahead. Its latest addition to drive its AI efforts comes with the acquisition of Habana Labs. Habana Labs is an Israeli company that the develops deep learning accelerators for the data center market. This plays right into Intel's hands, as it looks to increasingly become a player in a market that has strong entries from the likes of NVIDIA and AMD. Habana Labs...
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Is there anything that artificial intelligence does not do these days? Sure there is, but the list is growing smaller by the day. In case you were wondering, AI even has dance moves that it came with by itself. That's right, through the power of deep learning, researchers at NVIDIA collaborated with the University of California, Merced, to develop a deep learning-based model that can automatically compose new dance moves. "This is a challenging but interesting generative task with the potential to assist and expand content creations in arts and sports, such as a theatrical performance, rhythmic gymnastics, and figure skating," NVIDIA stated in a paper on the subject. The team collected dance...
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Researchers at NVIDIA have come up with a clever machine learning technique for taking 2D images and fleshing them out into 3D models. Normally this happens in reverse—these days, it's not all that difficult to take a 3D model and flatten it into a 2D image. But to create a 3D model without feeding a system 3D data is far more challenging. "In traditional computer graphics, a pipeline renders a 3D model to a 2D screen. But there’s information to be gained from doing the opposite—a model that could infer a 3D object from a 2D image would be able to perform better object tracking, for example.," NVIDIA explains. What the researchers came up with is a rendering framework called...
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A lot of expensive hardware and other swank prizes are up for grabs, courtesy of NVIDIA and Hackster.io partnering to launch the AI the Edge Challenge. It's a competition centered around NVIDIA's Jetson Nano Developer Kit, whereby developers are being asked to build "unique and creative projects" to chance to win from a pool of prizes valued at around $100,000. "In this contest, you’ll tap into the power of the new NVIDIA Jetson Nano—a powerful, easy-to-use, mini AI computer that lets you run multiple neural networks in parallel. It’s perfect for any project using image classification, object detection, segmentation, speech processing, and more," Hackster.io states in a blog...
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NVIDIA is flexing its muscle once again when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) inference workloads, and this time around, the company is claiming benchmark supremacy in MLPerf Inference 0.5. AI performance is becoming increasingly more important for usage scenarios like image recognition, voice recognition and autonomous vehicles (among other fields). To that end, NVIDIA says that the one-two punch of its Turing-based AI accelerators and the Xavier SoC allowed it to take top honors in all five of MLPerf's inference benchmarks. For its Turing offerings (with a focus on data centers), the Turing GPUs were able to top the charts in both server and offline scenarios on a "performance per processor"...
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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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Like just about every other major technology firm, Intel sees a lot of promise in artificial intelligence, and is making investments in the category. That is on display today at the Hot Chips conference, where Intel unveiled the first two processors comprising its Nervana Neural Network (NNP) line, including one for training (NNP-T) and one for inference (NNP-I). Dubbed "Spring Crest," Intel built its Nervana NNP-T from the ground up to train deep learning models at scale. It is designed to prioritize training networks as quickly as possible, and do it within a given power budget, Intel says. The chip is also designed with flexibility in mind, to offer a balance between compute, communication,...
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OpenAI has been given a big vote of confidence from Microsoft, which today announced a massive investment into the company. OpenAI is a research lab that counts Elon Musk as a co-founder and has a mission to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Microsoft has agreed to invest $1 billion into OpenAI in exchange for a multi-year partnership that will see a free-flowing exchange of ideas between the two companies. One takeaway from this new deal is that Microsoft will now become the exclusive cloud computing platform provider for AI, which is a big boost for Azure. Microsoft and OpenAI have also agreed to jointly develop new artificial intelligence technologies...
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The developer of the rather disturbing and depraved 'DeepNude' application, that is programmed to "undress" women using machine learning and AI technology, has shut down the operation following a backlash on social media. In a message posted to Twitter, the developer acknowledged that "the probability that people will misuse [the application] is too high." Ya think? How or why the developer may have ever thought otherwise is a mystery. In a lame attempt to justify the app's existence, the developer further stated that the software was created "for user's entertainment" and is "not that great, it only works with particular photos." Here is the full statement on why the app is no longer...
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Researchers at Adobe and UC Berkeley are collaborating on a method to detect facial manipulations made to digital photos in Photoshop. While development is in the early stages, it is part of a broader effort across Adobe to better detect image, video, audio, and document manipulations in today's landscape of fake news. Sometimes it is as easy as pie to detect a manipulated image. Take the photo at the top of this article, for instance—our knowledge of the world tell us that dogs do not normally dress up in suits and walk around like humans, and so that is obviously an altered image. But in other cases, the changes are not so blatant. That in and of itself is not a problem. It is when altered...
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We often joke about the possibility of a Skynet situation playing out, but even if that never happens, there is at least one way that machines can assert their dominance over the flesh and blood race—gaming. We have already seen this play out in numerous ways, such as on Jeopardy when IBM's Watson wiped the floor with its opponents. Google's DeepMind has been very much active in this space as well, and is now adding Quake III Arena to the list of games where it can play as good as an actual person. What's unique about Quake III Arena, as it relates to AI, is that the notion of capture the flag gameplay is a team-based sport that seemingly requires human traits to be effective at. Attacking...
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Close your eyes for a brief moment and imagine a world where it's near impossible to tell what is real from what is computer generated. The truth is, we are virtually already there to an extent, and it has enormous implications. We have already seen several examples of spoofed images and videos, known as deepfakes, but apparently artificial intelligence schemes can do a damn good job at replicating someone's voice as well. Researchers from Dessa, a startup based in Toronto that "helps the world's largest and most complex organizations build real-world value with advanced AI," demonstrated this with a believable audio clip of what sounds like Joe Rogan, former host of Fear Factor, stand up comedian,...
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Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm not a poet, which is why this line does not rhyme (oops!) or follow any sort of convention. But do you know who is a poet? Or rather, what is a poet? A new experiment by Google that taps into machine learning. It is called POEMPORTRAITS (all caps, for some reason), and it uses artificial intelligence to generate a poem based on your input. I'll just refer to it as Poem Portraits from here on out. it was created by Es Devlin, an artist and stage designer, in collaboration with the Google Arts & Culture Lab and Ross Goodwin. "Ross trained an algorithm to learn to write poems by reading over 25 million words written by 19th century poets. It works a bit like...
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Remember life before digital assistants? Even if you are not using one, it is a safe bet that you know someone who is, because they are all over the place. The market is flush with them—Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft), Google Assistant (Google), and Bixby (Samsung), those being the main ones. There may be another on the horizon as well, from Facebook. These AI controlled assistants are in all kinds of devices these days, which mostly consists of smartphones and smart speakers. You can use them to fire up playlists, look up the news, get a weather forecast, fetch movie times, and even to order a pizza. Citing "several people familiar with the matter," CNBC reports that...
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