Items tagged with artificial-intelligence
In 2014, it was established that the U.S. Copyright Office would "not register works produced by nature, animals, plants, or through divine or supernatural spirits." This declaration stemmed from a monkey who took a selfie and a photographer who thought they had the rights to the image. We are now facing a similar problem with artificial intelligence and patents across the pond in the United Kingdom, where a court has ruled that patents must list humans as inventors, not AI. In 2015, Stephen Thaler filed a U.S. patent for something dubbed Dabus (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), an "Electro-optical device and method for identifying and inducing topological states...
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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...
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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...
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Artificial intelligence is likely going to be a cornerstone of technology in the future. Until then, it needs to be improved, trained, and implemented well. Video games are an excellent way to train an AI due to the various paths and steps that can be taken, but it required some work to do. Now, the team at DeepMind has created an AI called MuZero, which can model and conquer games without even knowing the rules. Back in April, DeepMind created an AI called Agent57, which was set out to tackle 57 Atari 2600 games from over forty years ago. The DeepMind team explains that the Atari games were chosen because “they provide a rich suite of tasks which players must develop sophisticated behavioural...
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For a little while now, Elon Musk’s side project, Neuralink, has made the news rounds. Now, we may finally get to see something tangible during a webcast coming up on Friday. Founded in 2017, the Neuralink Corporation is Elon Musk’s business for creating a brain-machine interface. Over time, bits of information have slowly started to trickle out. On August 1st of this year, information was released pertaining to the capabilities of the Neuralink project. When someone on Twitter asked Elon Musk about listening to music through Neuralink, he replied with a simple “yes.” When asked about other features, Musk confirmed things such as possibly controlling hormone levels,...
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The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently ruled that only flesh and blood humans can be granted patents, not artificial intelligence systems, thus ensuring that a Skynet scenario will play out (you didn't think I'd talk about AI without a Skynet reference, did you? Pshaw!). Now it faces a lawsuit over its decision. What set this in motion is the filing of two patent applications in July of last year by Stephen Thaler, a physicist and AI researcher, on behalf of an AI "creative engine" called DABUS. One of the patents relates to an adjustable food container and the other one has to do with an emergency flashlight. On both applications, Thaler listed DABUS as the inventor. While neither...
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Previously, we reported on artificial intelligence being pitted against human pilots in a head to head dogfight challenge. The event has now concluded, with the AI going undefeated in five rounds of air-to-air combat, handily beating the human opponent in the final round. At the open of this multi-day event, eight teams entered the virtual airspace for the opportunity to go up against a human fighter pilot in virtual reality at the end. They all competed against simulated opponents at first, then progressing to each other. The AI v. AI fights reduced the number of competitors in the ring to just four: Aurora Flight Sciences, Heron Systems, Lockheed Martin, and PhysicsAI. In a bracket type system,...
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Who needs earbuds when you can simply listen to your favorite songs in your head? Elon Musk recently provided more information about the mysterious Neuralink. Neuralink will reportedly be able to provide users with “enhanced abilities and reasoning” and allow them to stream music straight to their brains. The Neuralink Corporation was originally founded in 2017 by Elon Musk and other contributors. The corporation held their first press conference in 2019 and introduced the Neuralink brain-machine interface (BMI). According to a paper published in August 2019, Neuralink has built a machine that is capable of inserting arrays of very flexible electrode threads into the human brain....
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NVIDIA has partnered with the University of Florida (UF) to build an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer that will be the fastest in all of academia. Or more specifically, it will be capable of a whopping 700 petaflops of AI performance, made possible by enhancing the university's existing HiPerGator supercomputer with NVIDIA's DGX SuperPod architecture. This essentially represents an infusion of NVIDIA's DGX A100 systems, each of which wields eight Tensor Core GPUs based on the company's 7-nanometer Ampere architecture. And each of those GPUs touts 54 billion transistors capable of delivering 5 petaflops of performance in a single node, along with the ability to handle 1.5TB of data per...
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Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are hot topics in virtually all tech sectors at this moment in time. The technology is gaining traction in many industries, from massive social networks that are analyzing mountains of data, to the tiniest of IoT smart home and mobile devices. Even during our everyday workflow here at HotHardware, we currently utilize a few key AI-enabled applications to enhance our content. Further, if you’ve ever talked to a smartphone for speech-to-text messaging or for Google Assistant recommendations, AI has impacted your connected experiences as well. For those that may be unfamiliar with how machine learning and AI technologies work, we should probably...
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For the time being, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX graphics cards are the only viable options for playing supported games with real-time ray tracing (there are a few exceptions), with the combination of RT cores and Tensor cores giving them the muscle and smarts required for such a task. As it turns out, however, there is another benefit, and it is being realized by NVIDIA's RTX Voice application. Now you can ray-trace your audio! Just kidding—the RTX Voice app does not actually ray-trace anything, but it does leverage the AI capabilities of Turing to suppress background noise from your broadcasts. "NVIDIA RTX Voice is a new plugin that leverages NVIDIA RTX GPUs and their AI capabilities to remove...
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Deepfake photos and videos have fooled many people, but can text-generated articles be just as convincing? OpenAI recently published the full version of “GPT-2: 1.5B”, a text-generating artificial intelligence system. The research lab warns that the tool could potentially be dangerous if it is misused. OpenAI released a paired down version of its GPT-2 model this past winter. This model included 124 million parameters, while the latest release features more than 1.5 billion parameters. OpenAI originally believed that its GPT-2 model was too dangerous, but there has since been “no strong evidence of misuse.” The full version was released earlier this week. Researchers used...
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Will artificial intelligence be humanity’s savior or downfall? Many people have begun to evaluate the potential consequences of AI as it becomes more integrated into our everyday lives. Microsoft president Brad Smith recently warned that AI could be a “formidable weapon” with “unintended consequences” if human beings do not use caution. Smith spoke at the 2019 Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. He gave a very Jurassic Park-esque warning and stated, “We shouldn’t just ask what computers can do, we need to ask what they should do.” He noted that we are the first generation to allow machines to make decisions that are typically made by human beings. He...
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Artificial intelligence has frequently been used to better identify people and objects. But can AI also be used to mask someone’s identity? Facebook recently announced that it has created video de-identification technology that can hide people from facial recognition. Facebook has combined an “adversarial autoencoder” and a “trained-face classifier”. An autoencoder is an artificial neural network that learns a representation for a set of data unsupervised. Adversarial autoencoders were introduced in 2016 and are able to “match the aggregated posterior of the hidden code vector of the autoencoder with an arbitrary prior.” Classifiers typically use an algorithm...
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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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It seems as though we've been down this road before. Over the past few months, tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others have admitted to using human workers to listen in on your smart assistant voice recordings in order to improve functionality. Most did this without getting express consent from users, which in turn caused a huge privacy uproar. Now, we're learning that Amazon may have taken things a step further by not only using human to review audio recordings, but also video recordings from its Cloud Cam security device. Amazon's Cloud Cam Before we get into the controversy, we need to first tell you what the Cloud Cam is. The Cloud Cam is a first-party...
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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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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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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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Scientists and casual stargazers alike have been trying for thousands of years to identity the flashes of light that come from the moon. One scientist believes that they are close to pinning down the origins of the phenomenon. Dr. Hakan Kayal from the University of Würzburg in Bavaria will use telescopes and AI to explain the flashes of light on the moon. Dr. Kayal has spent several years studying this lunar mystery as well as other topics such as nano satellites. These light sources are referred to as transient lunar phenomenon or TLP. Dr. Kayal and his team have built a custom telescope in Spain that is over 62 miles (100 km) from the nearest sources of light pollution. Kayal’s system...
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Artificial intelligence has the potential to change lots of things (in good ways) for humanity. Some people, notably Elon Musk, fear an AI arms race could lead to another world war. AI has shown that it is capable of beating humans in games that humans have mastered over many years, such as Google's AlphaGo AI defeating Go world champion Lee Sedol. Now, AI has invented an entirely new sport using data from 400 existing sports. The new sport is called Speedgate, and it was created after design agency AKQA feed the AI neural network data on 400 existing sports. The AI came up with some wacky ideas for sports; one of them was exploding Frisbees making it a good thing that the AI can't force...
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