Category: Neural

Chinese city’s health-tracking surveillance tech set to outlast the pandemic


A Chinese city plans to turn its contact-tracing app into a permanent health tracker, deepening fears that surveillance tech introduced to fight COVID-19 will outlast the pandemic. Authorities in the eastern city of Hangzhou have proposed combining medical records, physical exam results, and data on lifestyle choices to create a healthcare score for citizens. Officials said the system would be a “firewall to enhance people’s health and immunity,” the Guardian reports. They aim to launch the app by the end of next month. Each of the city’s 10 million residents would be given a colored health badge based on a collation of this data, and a…

This story continues at The Next Web

Algorithms associating appearance with criminality have a dark past


‘Phrenology’ has an old-fashioned ring to it. It sounds like it belongs in a history book, filed somewhere between bloodletting and velocipedes. We’d like to think that judging people’s worth based on the size and shape of their skull is a practice that’s well behind us. However, phrenology is once again rearing its lumpy head. In recent years, machine-learning algorithms have promised governments and private companies the power to glean all sorts of information from people’s appearance. Several startups now claim to be able to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help employers detect the personality traits of job candidates based…

This story continues at The Next Web

Everything you need to know about neuromorphic computing


In July, a group of artificial intelligence researchers showcased a self-driving bicycle that could navigate around obstacles, follow a person, and respond to voice commands. While the self-driving bike itself was of little use, the AI technology behind it was remarkable. Powering the bicycle was a neuromorphic chip, a special kind of AI computer. Neuromorphic computing is not new. In fact, it was first proposed in the 1980s. But recent developments in the artificial intelligence industry have renewed interest in neuromorphic computers. The growing popularity of deep learning and neural networks has spurred a race to develop AI hardware specialized for neural…

This story continues at The Next Web

How to use pre-trained models in your next business project


Most of the new deep learning models being released, especially in NLP, are very, very large: They have parameters ranging from hundreds of millions to tens of billions. Given good enough architecture, the larger the model, the more learning capacity it has. Thus, these new models have huge learning capacity and are trained on very, very large datasets. Because of that, they learn the entire distribution of the datasets they are trained on. One can say that they encode compressed knowledge of these datasets. This allows these models to be used for very interesting applications—the most common one being transfer learning. Transfer learning is fine-tuning pre-trained models on…

This story continues at The Next Web

This free AI chatbot helps businesses fight COVID-19 misinformation


Avaamo, a company that specializes in conversational AI, recently built a virtual assistant to translate natural language queries about the COVID-19 pandemic into reliable insights. In other words, it’s an AI-powered chatbot that can answer just about any question you have about the pandemic. Avaamo’s Project COVID uses a deep learning system called natural language processing to turn our questions about the pandemic into website and database queries. It works a lot like Google or Bing, you input text and the AI tries to find the most relevant information possible. The big difference is that Avaamo carefully guards the gates…

This story continues at The Next Web

Nvidia teaches AI to create new version of Pac-Man just by watching gameplay


Forty years after Pac-Man had his first taste of ghosts, an AI has given the ravenous puck a new maze to chew his way through — without studying the game code. That means it recreated the game without first being taught the rules. Instead, the AI mimics a computer game engine to create a new version of the arcade classic. Researchers at GPU giant Nvidia recreated the game by feeding a model they call GameGAN 50,000 Pac–Man episodes. After digesting the sample, it spat out a fully-functioning new version of the game. The system uses generative adversarial networks (GANs), which Facebook Chief AI…

This story continues at The Next Web

Stanford uses AI scans of satellite images to track poverty levels over time


A new AI tool can track poverty levels in African villages over time by scanning satellite images for signs of economic well-being. The tool searches the images for indicators of development, such as roads, agriculture, housing, and lights turned on at night. Deep learning algorithms find patterns in this data to measure the villages’ wealth. Researchers from Stanford University tested the tool on about 20,000 villages across 23 countries in Africa that had existing wealth data. They say that it successfully estimated the poverty levels of the villages over time. [Read: AI detects plastics in the oceans by analyzing satellite images] Identifying these patterns of growth can show why…

This story continues at The Next Web

Google says it won’t build new AI solutions for the fossil fuel industry


File this under: minimal possible effort. Google today confirmed it will “no longer develop artificial intelligence (AI) software and tools for oil and gas drilling operations.” Will Grannis, Managing Director of the Office of the CTO at Google Cloud, spoke with CUBE’s John Furrier earlier this month in an interview where he revealed the end of Google‘s future involvement with fossil fuel extraction.   As The Hill’s Alexandra Kelly reports, this move comes hot on the heels of a Greenpeace expose showing Google as one of the top three developers of AI and machine learning solutions for the fossil fuel…

This story continues at The Next Web

Or just read more coverage about: Google

Facebook’s using AI to find scammers and imposters on Messenger


Facebook is using AI to spot scammers and imposters on Messenger — without reading your chats. The feature uses machine learning to detect suspicious activity, such as adults sending out loads of friend or message requests to children. When it spots suspect behavior, it sends an in-app warning to the top of the conversation. This prompts users to block or ignore shady accounts, and provides tips on how to avoid potential scams. Facebook says the feature doesn’t need to look at the messages themselves. Instead, it searches for behavioral signals such as sending out numerous requests in a short period of time. [Read: This AI needs…

This story continues at The Next Web

Or just read more coverage about: Facebook

China’s latest AI news anchor mimics human voices and gestures in 3D


Chinese state news agency Xinhua has added an AI 3D news anchor to its lineup of virtual presenters. Named Xin Xiaowei, the publicity stunt avatar was jointly developed by Xinhua and search engine Sogou. The 3D anchor is modeled on Zhao Wanwei, a real-life reporter for the news agency. Her digital counterpart is brought to life by “multi-modal recognition and synthesis, facial recognition and animation and transfer learning,” according to Sogou. The company claims that this allows it to imitate human voices, facial expressions, lip movements, and mannerisms using only text inputs. [Read: New Zealand’s first AI police officer reports for duty] Check it out in…

This story continues at The Next Web