Items tagged with machine learning
With the proliferation of artificial intelligence in recent years, the term "neuromorphic" is being used much more often in the tech sector. If you're a native English speaker, you can probably surmise that neuromorphic means something along the lines of "brain-like." Indeed, the buzzword of the day is "neuromorphic processing," and it refers to computers—previously called "cognitive computers"—designed to mimic the function of the human brain. The reason that's the buzzword of the day is because Intel just announced its second-generation neuromorphic processor, Loihi 2. If you never heard of the original Loihi, you probably aren't involved in bleeding-edge artificial intelligence...
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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...
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While robots are cool, the jury is still out on whether they will want to kill us pesky humans if the robot uprising occurs. This is not helped by the fact that we are making more robust robots that can walk and move as well as if not better than humans. Enter Cassie: a bipedal legs-only robot devised at Oregon State University that just traversed five kilometers in under an hour. Since 2017, students at OSU have worked on Cassie under the direction of robotics professor Jonathan Hurst, using a 16-month $1 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. Hurst, who founded spin-off company Agility Robotics, explained that “The Dynamic Robotics...
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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...
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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...
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Some people are concerned about games like GTA 5 affecting peoples' behavior in real life, but what if those games actually looked like real life? Researchers at Intel Labs may have figured out how to do just that using machine learning to make rendered footage look photorealistic. This technology could just bring gaming into a new era if it is used in the wild. Since the dawn of video games, people have been trying to make them as realistic as possible to achieve the most immersive experience. PC and console hardware has grown over time as well, which nicely complements this goal. Take, for example, the Tomb Raider games, the original of which looks to us more like a Cubism art piece versus...
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Last year's Overwatch League was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that temporarily pumped the brakes on some interesting AI projects, as well. At the time, Blizzard and IBM were set to announce that Big Blue was about to become the cloud, AI, and machine learning analytics partner for the game's official e-sports platform. Blizzard and IBM hope that this partnership will lead to figuring out new ways to evaluate performance, fix balance issues, and much more. Now that Overwatch League is back on for 2021, the partnership is starting to bear fruit. IBM has developed an AI-powered ranking system that will not only separate the wheat from the chaff, but hopefully also bring the best of...
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Arm processor architecture helps make the world go-'round, as chips using the instruction set and core architecture reside in various devices from smartphones/tablets to automotive applications, smart TVs and appliances, and networking equipment. Most tech enthusiasts, however, are primarily familiar with Arm architecture in consumer devices like Android smartphones (typically powered by Qualcomm-designed Snapdragon Arm-based SoCs) and Apple devices (iPhones and the new M1 Macs), which typically utilize Arm core architecture of various derivatives. For the past decade, these devices have been employing variants of the Armv8 architecture, the first native 64-bit Arm instruction set (starting...
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Deepfakes have been around for a few years now, and with each passing day, it seems as though the technology keeps getting better and more lifelike. We saw this last year with a Back To The Future deepfake starring Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland, rather than real Doc and Marty. Now, deepfaker and visual effects artist Chris Ume has taken Tom Cruise’s face and put it on an actor to make a deepfake TikTok series, and it is wild. For those who do not know, deepfakes are AI-generated images or video which can be made to look like a specific person. The way they work, in essence, is by training AI with millions of images of the targeted person. The trained AI is then paired with an...
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Recently, Microsoft patented the creation of an AI chatbot for a specific person, whether they were alive or not. Now, a genealogy company called MyHeritage has partnered with deep learning and image processing company D-ID to create something called “Deep Nostalgia.” This technology can bring a person's ancestors back to life by running a process that upscales, sharpens, and animates any image uploaded. Announced at RootsTech Connect 2021, the world’s largest genealogy conference, “Deep Nostalgia” is a licensed technology that uses D-ID’s AI Face Platform in the backend. Essentially, MyHeritage filmed people for a basic set of motions which could then be paired...
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In 2017, Microsoft filed a patent entitled “Creating a Conversational Chat Bot Of A Specific Person,” which was recently finally approved by the USPTO on December 1st, 2020. Over 21 pages of material are provided in the patent, covering the software, hardware, and other minutiae that come up with this idea. However, the basic premise is that Microsoft will scan and scrape "social data" from the internet about you, another person or perhaps even a loved one that has passed away. Then, the company will use that data to create a chatbot with the personality of the person being targeted, for a sort of persona replication, using machine learning and AI. This chatbot can then be paired...
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Imagine a world where you could control a computer with your mind. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences have created a brain-computer interface (BCI) that is reliant on machine learning. Paralyzed individuals were able to control a computer cursor with their brain activity without the need for constant retraining. Past brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) “...used ‘pin-cushion’ style arrays of sharp electrodes” that would penetrate the brain. These arrays would allow for more “sensitive recordings”, but they were relatively short-lived. Researchers would need to reset and recalibrate their systems every...
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There are currently several AI tools whose purpose is to create more life-like images. The most recent addition is PULSE (Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration), an AI-infused application that can transform low-resolution pixelated images into high-resolution images. The creators of PULSE’s mainly focused on human faces, but others have already used the tool to create slightly terrifying images of video game characters that may just haunt your dreams. PULSE was developed by a team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. It varies from other tools because “instead of starting with the LR (low resolution) image and slowly adding detail, PULSE traverses the high-resolution...
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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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One of the first arcade games you may remember playing on an Atari 2600, what seems like a million years ago, was Pac-Man. However, this was not exactly a faithful recreation of the true classic co-op arcade version. Now, several decades later, NVIDIA trained an AI model called GameGAN to recreate a proper recreation, and what makes this so interesting is that there is no underlying game engine, whatsoever. These days, the original Pac-Man arcade game is easy enough to recreate on virtually any modern platform, though this approach with NVIDIA machine learning is unique and far more challenging. GameGAN did not have the benefit of being programmed with the game's fundamental rules or...
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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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Amazon has announced a new product called AWS DeepComposer, which is the world's first machine learning-enabled musical keyboard. Amazon says that machine learning requires math, computer science, code, and infrastructure expertise, and while those are important topics, many find them boring. To help people learn about practical machine learning tasks, Amazon has unveiled the AWS DeepComposer. DeepComposer is a 32-key, 2-octave keyboard designed for devs to get hands-on with Generative AI using pre-trained models or their own. Amazon is allowing users to enter their email address to be notified when the device is available. Until then, there is a virtual AWS console keyboard. Essentially the...
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In a new blog post, Microsoft extols the benefits of somewhat recently implementing machine learning into its Windows 10 update process. This is an evolving process, though from Microsoft's vantage point, it has been a success so far, allowing it to identify which Windows 10 PCs are the least likely to run into an issue when rolling out a new update. The first broad scale use of this process was when Microsoft pushed out its April 2018 Update for Windows 10 (build 1803). "We started with six core areas of PC health (e.g. overall PC reliability) to determine whether the feature update process went smoothly. With Windows 10, version 1903 (the May 2019 update), our third iteration of using ML in...
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If a new report is to be believed, deepfake technology is about to ramp up the realism factor while making it increasingly more accessible to the general public. While this is an interesting development for people that like to do this sort of digital trickery for fun; in the age of "fake news" it has the potential for creating more upheaval considering how quickly videos can go viral on social media. According Hao Li, a University of Southern California (USC) associate professor of computer science, deepfake videos have the potential to look "perfectly real" within six to 12 months from now. In many cases with current technology, you can often tell that videos have been altered. This...
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We all know that NVIDIA is doing some cool thing in graphics as it relates to gaming, namely real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), courtesy of its Turing GPU architecture and RTX technology. But it's not all fun and games, it's also fun and photo manipulation. By leveraging its work and research in machine learning, NVIDIA has developed a tool that can take rudimentary doodles or sketches and turn them into "photorealistic masterpieces." Appropriately enough, NVIDIA is calling this GauGAN, a clever play on words based on the famous impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh Paul Gauguin, and the technology utilizing generative adversarial networks, or GANs. "It’s much...
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The release of Tesla’s Autopilot Hardware 3.0 is just around the corner and the automotive firm has made a number of significant changes with this upgrade. A series of recent patents have confirmed that Tesla will utilize a new artificial intelligence chip, or “neural net accelerator”. This will replace the NVIDIA hardware that is currently used in the Autopilot 2.0 platform and should enable full self-driving capabilities in the future. Why is Tesla working on a new AI chip? According to the patent filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, “Processing for machine learning and artificial intelligence typically requires performing mathematical operations...
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Instagram wants to eliminate bullying on its platform and has announced new tools to do so. The service already has tools that allow people to report bullying, and when reported, the content is removed from the network; the new tool that Instagram is rolling out brings a way to detect bullying in photos. Instagram's new head, Adam Mosseri, says that most of the photos on the network are positive and meant to bring people joy, but on occasion, a photo is shared that is unkind or unwelcome. Instagram is using machine learning technology to detect bullying in photos and captions on photos proactively, and then send the content to the Community Operations team to review. Mosseri says that this change...
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