What’s happened in AI: April 30th-May 6th

By | May 7, 2018
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This week featured a number of AI developments from Facebook, who had their annual F8 developer conference on May 1st and 2nd.

Meanwhile, across the pond in South Wales (U.K), the local police force is having issues with their facial recognition software. At an 8% accuracy rate for its recent use during the UEFA Champions League matches, “having issues” might be an understatement.

Company developments:

Waymo self-driving minivan involved in crash in Arizona – May. 4, 2018 (The Verge)

  • A self-driving vehicle operated by Waymo was involved in a crash in Chandler, Arizona, on Friday afternoon, according to local news stations. Images of the crash scene showed a Waymo minivan with its side caved in and another vehicle with a smashed front end. There were minor injuries reported at the scene
  • Chandler police said the Waymo van was in autonomous mode with an occupant behind the wheel at the time of the crash, but it was not the “violator vehicle,” according to ABC 15 News. A spokesperson for the Chandler Police Department and Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment

Facebook Adds A.I. Labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, Pressuring Local Universities – May. 4, 2018 (New York Times)

  • Facebook is opening new A.I. labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, after hiring three A.I. and robotics professors from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University. The company hopes these seasoned researchers will help recruit and train other A.I. experts in the two cities, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, said in an interview
  • As it builds these labs, Facebook is adding to pressure on universities and nonprofit A.I. research operations, which are already struggling to retain professors and other employees
  • “It is worrisome that they are eating the seed corn,” said Dan Weld, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. “If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers.”

JPMorgan names head of artificial intelligence research – May. 4, 2018 (Reuters)

  • JPMorgan Chase & Co named Manuela Veloso head of artificial intelligence research to help drive the bank’s efforts in applying machine learning technology across its businesses
  • Veloso currently heads the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University. In her new role, Veloso will establish an AI research capability at the bank. She will also work closely with the data analytics and the quantitative research teams
  • Veloso will report to Chief Administrative Officer Sanoke Viswanathan

Ticketmaster to trial facial recognition technology at live venues – May. 4, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Ticketmaster has quietly revealed plans to use facial recognition technology in venues to facilitate admission to live shows and more. The rollout constitutes part of a trial that follows the ticketing giant’s investment in Blink Identity, an Austin, Texas-based startup that participated in the TechStars music accelerator program earlier this year
  • Blink Identity’s platform basically allows a venue to identify people using their facial biometrics without requiring them to stop and stand in front of a lens. This is a potential game-changer that elevates it above many of the consumer-focused facial recognition technology that exists today. Blink Identity claims it can capture people walking past at full speed and can handle more than 60 people each minute. For a venue that may hold tens of thousands of people, such efficiency is key
  • More than that, Blink Identity cites various potential use cases for its technology once the gig-goer is inside the venue. They can buy merchandise and drinks, for example, assuming the user has a valid payment card attached to their Ticketmaster profile. Facial recognition could also be used to regulate access to VIP zones

Google Assistant now works with 5,000 smart home devices – May. 3, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • With I/O just a matter of days away, Google’s gone on the offensive with Assistant. In a blog post, the company is talking up its smart home play in a major way, noting an admitted pretty impressive bump in hardware compatibility. By its count, the number of compatible devices recently hit the 5,000 mark
  • That number is up from 1,500 in January — an admittedly impressive jump in a short time frame. That, in itself, was a pretty decent jump since Google Home launched in late 2016 with little to no third-party device compatibility

DeepBrain Chain to build AI ecosystem in Silicon Valley – May. 3, 2018 (Bankless Times)

  • DeepBrain Chain’s Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Research Center is DeepBrain Chain Foundation’s first AI research center solely devoted to the development of cutting-edge AI technology. It works toward finding breakthroughs in the following areas:
  1. Mining and training: Distributed AI clusters and workstations for DBC, Neural network large-scale parallel training
  2. Structure: AI + Blockchain integration
  3. Deep-learning algorithm: Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data
  4. Efficiency: Reinforcement learning to reduce energy consumption across the DBC network
  5. AI applications: Distributed killer AI apps with unique differentiation, broad market and large business value, which will drive the fast adoption of DeepBrain Chain platform and ecosystem

Toyota will test self-driving car ‘edge cases’ at new proving ground in Michigan – May. 3, 2018 (The Verge)

  • Toyota announced today that it will build a gigantic, 60-acre facility in Michigan to test “edge case” driving scenarios with its autonomous vehicles that are too dangerous to perform on public roads. The news comes more than a month after the Japanese auto giant halted its self-driving tests on public roads in the US in the wake of a deadly crash involving a self-driving Uber in Arizona
  • Construction permits were filed this week to transform an approximately 60-acre site at Michigan Technical Resource Park in Ottawa Lake into a closed-course facility for the Toyota Research Institute, the car company’s Silicon Valley arm, to test its vehicles. The site will include congested urban environments, slick surfaces, and a four-lane divided highway with high-speed entrance and exit ramps. When it becomes operational this October, the company will use the site to specifically test scenarios deemed too risky for public roads, most likely involving vehicles without a human driver
  • “Our pause in testing on public roads in California and Michigan has allowed us to further refine and upgrade our Platform 2.0/2.1 test-vehicle fleet, in-line with the ongoing build-out of the Platform 3.0 fleet, introduced at this year’s CES in Las Vegas,” the spokesperson said. “We will resume testing on public roads in a few weeks, once these three systems have been more closely aligned. It’s important to note that our closed-course testing did not stop during this time.”

Facebook’s open-source Go bot can now beat professional players – May. 2, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • “We salute our friends at DeepMind for doing awesome work,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said in a keynote at F8. “But we wondered: Are there some unanswered questions? What else can you apply these tools to.” As Facebook notes in a blog post today, the DeepMind model itself also remains under wraps. In contrast, Facebook has open-sourced its bot
  • It’s not just Go that the team is interested in, though. Facebook’s AI Research group has also developed a StarCraft bot that can handle the often chaotic environment of that game. The company plans to open-source this bot, too. So while Facebook isn’t quite at the point where it can launch a bot that can learn any game (with the right amount of training), the team is clearly making quite a bit of progress here

Facebook is using your Instagram photos to train its image recognition AI – May. 2, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • In research the company presented at F8, Facebook details how it took what amounted to billions of public Instagram photos that had been annotated by users with hashtags and used that data to train their own image recognition models. They relied on hundreds of GPUs running around the clock to parse the data, but were ultimately left with deep learning models that beat industry benchmarks, the best of which achieved 85.4 percent accuracy on ImageNet
  • When you’re operating at this scale — the largest of the tests used 3.5 billion Instagram images spanning 17,000 hashtags — even Facebook doesn’t have the resources to closely supervise the data. While other image recognition benchmarks may rely on millions of photos that human beings have pored through and annotated personally, Facebook had to find methods to clean up what users had submitted that they could do at scale
  • The “pre-training” research focused on developing systems for finding relevant hashtags; that meant discovering which hashtags were synonymous while also learning to prioritize more specific hashtags over the more general ones. This ultimately led to what the research group called the “large-scale hashtag prediction model.”

Facebook to release PyTorch 1.0 and open source AI tools for translation and gameplay – May 2, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Facebook today announced it plans to open-source some of its AI tools, including Translate, which translates 48 languages, and ELF, which teaches machines reasoning through gameplay. Facebook’s AI now conducts more than 6 billion translations a day. An ELF bot has competed with some of the top Go players around the world in recent weeks and currently has a record of 14-0, said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer
  • “Developers can also take advantage of tools like Glow, a machine learning compiler that accelerates framework performance on different hardware platforms, and Tensor Comprehensions, a tool that automatically generates efficient GPU code from high-level mathematical operations,” the company said in a blog post. “We have also open-sourced other libraries, such as Detectron, which supports object-detection research, covering both bounding box and object instance segmentation outputs.”
  • The open source deep learning framework, first released to the public in January 2017, has been downloaded more than 1.1 million times and was the second-most cited deep learning framework on popular research portal Arxiv over the past month

AI researcher Daphne Koller heading new machine learning drug discovery venture – May. 2, 2018 (Mobi Health News)

  • In a recent medium.com blog post, Daphne Koller — an artificial intelligence researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and, until just a few months ago, chief computing officer at Alphabet’s Calico Labs — announced her up-and-coming foray into machine learning-powered drug discovery
  • Called insitro (a portmanteau of “in silico” and “in vitro”), the new endeavor looks to stem the increasing costs of developing new drugs and, according to Koller, has already found financial backing from ARCH Venture Partners, Foresite Capital, a16z, and Third Rock Ventures
  • “Our hope at insitro is that big data and machine learning, applied to the critical need in drug discovery, can help make the process faster, cheaper, and (most importantly) more successful,” Koller wrote in the post. “To do so, we plan to leverage both cutting-edge [machine learning (ML)] techniques, as well as the profound innovations that have occurred in life sciences, which enable the creation of the large, high-quality data sets that may transform the capabilities of ML in this space.”

The chatbot will see you now: 98point6 launches virtual clinic app, aims to solve ‘primary care crisis’ with AI (and real doctors) – May. 1, 2018 (GeekWire)

  • CEO Robbie Cape, a Seattle-based entrepreneur, is the architect of 98point6’s ‘virtual clinic,’ an app that lets users have routine primary care visits with a certified doctor through a smartphone, all thanks to its artificial intelligence technology
  • The company publicly launched its service Tuesday, a culmination of nearly two years in stealth mode, a year-long beta test and more than $35 million in venture funding
  • The app is now available to download in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. For now, the service is available in California, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington, and the company said it plans to expand service to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., by the end of the year

Parallel Domain wants to train self-driving cars in virtual worlds – May. 1, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Kevin McNamara, a former Apple and Pixar employee, is bringing his virtual world creation expertise to the domain of self-driving cars. And he has $2.5 million from Costanoa Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and others to do so
  • At Apple, McNamara says he worked on an autonomous systems project, where he explored automatic content generation of simulated virtual environments. The idea was to figure out how to use that type of technology to train, test, validate and develop artificial intelligence in autonomous systems, he told me
  • Using real-world map data, procedural growth algorithms and generative models, the platform can teach cars how to drive and make sure the car’s software is learning how to drive properly, he said. All elements of the world are adjustable and programmable — be that the number of lanes, type of terrain, location of mountains, road curvature and so forth

Regulus Cyber launches with a technology to secure autonomous vehicles – May. 1, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • “We’re building a system that is looking at different sensors and the first system is GPS,” co-founder Yonatan Zur says. Using a proprietary array of off-the-shelf antennas and software developed internally, the system Regulus has designed can determine whether a GPS signal is legitimate or has been spoofed by a hacker (think of it as a way to defend against the kind of hack used by the bad guys in “Die Hard 2“)
  • Zur first had the idea to launch the company three years ago while he was working with drones at the Israeli technology firm, Elbit. At the time, militaries were beginning to develop technologies to combat drone operations and Zur figured it was only a matter of time before those technologies made their way into the commercial drone market as well
  • Backing the company are a clutch of well-known Israeli and American investors, including Sierra Ventures, Canaan Partners Israel, Technion and F2 Capital. Regulus, which raised $6.3 million in financing before emerging from stealth, said the money will be used to expand its sales and marketing efforts and to continue to develop its technology

Facebook facial recognition could unlock clues in search for missing persons – Apr. 30, 2018 (ABC News)

  • Launched by the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN), the Invisible Friends campaign calls for Facebook users around the world to befriend the profiles of missing persons
  • The initiative will use Facebook’s auto-tagging technology to scan the background of each photo and video posted by friends of the profile. Facebook’s algorithm will then automatically tag the profile and send a notification to the MPAN if the missing person is identified in an image
  • “By searching through billions of posts per week, we’re not only raising awareness for the devastated families of these missing people, but also hope to put an end to their ambiguous loss, the most stressful type of grief.”

Starship Technologies launches autonomous robot delivery services for campuses – Apr. 30, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Starship Technologies, a robotics startup created by Skype’s cofounders, has launched a large-scale commercial autonomous delivery service aimed at corporate and academic campuses in Europe and the U.S
  • Founded out of Estonia, Starship Technologies has initiated myriad autonomous delivery trials over the past few years, covering food and other small packages, in more than 100 cities. Though the robots are autonomous, they can also be monitored and controlled remotely by humans if the situation requires it. The company was created by Skype’s Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis in 2014, and it has raised around $17 million in venture capital funding
  • The latest program could become one of the largest autonomous delivery services globally, with little armies of robots deployed across campus in a range of situations, including delivering food or transferring goods. The company said it plans to launch around 1,000 robots by the end of this year on a number of as-yet-undisclosed campuses

Partnerships:

Aptiv launches fleet of autonomous vehicles on the Lyft Network – May. 2, 2018 (Automotive World)

  • Aptiv PLC, a global technology leader in mobility, announced the launch of a fleet of 30 autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas on the Lyft network. A product of Aptiv’s Mobility and Services group, these vehicles will operate on Aptiv’s fully-integrated autonomous driving platform and be made available to the public in partnership with Lyft. On an opt-in basis, passengers will have the ability to hail a self-driving vehicle equipped with Aptiv technology to and from high-demand locations
  • This partnership is a multiyear agreement between the two companies and a clear step toward generating revenue for Aptiv’s autonomous driving business. Both companies will leverage Aptiv’s connected services capabilities and Lyft’s ride-hailing experience to provide valuable insights on self-driving fleet operations and management
  • The combination of Aptiv’s autonomous driving technology and Lyft’s ride-hailing app is the expansion of a successful partnership that launched in Las Vegas during CES 2018. That initial pilot provided more than 400 self-driving rides to the public and earned an average customer rating of 4.99 out of five stars. Like the CES program, vehicles will be operated by highly-trained safety drivers

Fundraising:

UBTECH Robotics Announces Largest Artificial Intelligence Funding in History – May. 4, 2018 (Robotics Tomorrow)

  • UBTECH Robotics, the world leader in intelligent humanoid robots, announced today the completion of its Series C investment totaling USD$820 million with a market valuation of USD$5 billion, the single largest funding round ever for an artificial intelligence company
  • The investment was led by Tencent, and also includes funding from ICBC, Haier, Minsheng Securities, Telstra, Easyhome Furnishings, Chia Tai Group, China Minsheng Bank, China Film and TV Capital, CGN, Sichuan Railway Investment Group, Green Pine Capital Partners, Whale Capital, and Shenzhen JinFuZi Network Technology. The lead investor of UBTECH’s Series B funding, CDH Investments, also participated
  • As part of its investment, Tencent will work closely with UBTECH on future product development. Tencent has already worked with UBTECH, launching the humanoid robot Qrobot Alpha last December – the first robot to feature the Tencent Cloud Xiaowei service; and the personalized educational robot Alpha Ebot in February which integrates the high-quality, comprehensive, and open AI services and interactivity of the Tencent Dingdang assistant.

M&A:

ServiceNow acquires AI startup Parlo for its NLP tech – May. 3, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • ServiceNow today announced plans to acquire AI startup Parlo in a cash deal scheduled to close later this month. Financial details of the deal are not being disclosed at this time, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat
  • ServiceNow will integrate Parlo’s natural language understanding technology named Broca into its Now platform for business process automation. Broca will make the Now platform better able to understand the nuances of conversational language, according to a statement about the acquisition shared with VentureBeat
  • Parlo is the latest AI startup to be acquired by a larger software company. On Wednesday, Cisco acquired Accompany, and in the past two weeks Adobe has acquired both Uru, an AI startup that embeds ads in videos, and voice app platform Sayspring

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Accompany – May. 1, 2018 (Global Newswire)

  • Accompany provides an AI-driven relationship intelligence platform for finding new prospects, navigating the selling process, and strengthening relationships. Accompany Founder and CEO Amy Chang will join Cisco as senior vice president in charge of the Collaboration Technology Group
  • The acquisition of Accompany will enable Cisco to take collaboration to the next level with even more intelligence. Accompany’s AI technology and talent will help Cisco accelerate priority areas across its collaboration portfolio, such as providing user and company profile data in Webex meetings. Together, Cisco and Accompany will continue to power the future of work in a smarter way to enhance customer experiences
  • Cisco will acquire Accompany for $270 million in cash and assumed equity awards. The Accompany team will join the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group under Chang’s leadership. The acquisition is expected to close in Cisco’s fourth quarter of fiscal year 2018, following customary closing conditions

Research:

Harvard forum examines safety of self-driving vehicles – May. 4, 2018 (Washington Post)

  • “It’s a little bit like the Wild West out there right now,” said Deborah Hersman, president and CEO of the National Safety Council. Hersman was part of a Friday panel discussion at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health that explored whether the field is advancing too quickly as dozens of companies have begun experimenting on public streets in several U.S. states
  • She joined other panelists in expressing optimism that eventually “machines will be better than us” at driving safely, while also worrying about the transition period before the technology is improved and society adapts to it.

AI researchers allege that machine learning is alchemy – May. 3, 2018 (ScienceMag)

  • Ali Rahimi, a researcher in artificial intelligence (AI) at Google in San Francisco, California, took a swipe at his field last December—and received a 40-second ovation for it. Speaking at an AI conference, Rahimi charged that machine learning algorithms, in which computers learn through trial and error, have become a form of “alchemy.”
  • Now, in a paper presented on 30 April at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Vancouver, Canada, Rahimi and his collaborators document examples of what they see as the alchemy problem and offer prescriptions for bolstering AI’s rigor
  • The issue is distinct from AI’s reproducibility problem, in which researchers can’t replicate each other’s results because of inconsistent experimental and publication practices. It also differs from the “black box” or “interpretability” problem in machine learning: the difficulty of explaining how a particular AI has come to its conclusions. As Rahimi puts it, “I’m trying to draw a distinction between a machine learning system that’s a black box and an entire field that’s become a black box.”

Joëlle Pineau awarded NSERC’s Steacie Memorial Fellowship – May. 1, 2018 (McGill Reporter)

  • Today at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) awarded Pineau one of six prestigious E.W.R Steacie Memorial Fellowships. Awarded $250,000 over two years, Steacie Fellows are relieved of teaching and administrative duties, so that they can devote time and energy to research. Pineau will continue her work as Director of FAIR Montreal
  • Pineau is one of the forces behind McGill’s growing specialization in reinforcement learning (RL), a sub-discipline of machine learning concerned with building programs, which learn how to predict and act, based on experience. Among Pineau’s objectives for the fellowship include applying RL techniques to the development and improvement of personalized medical treatment strategies
  • She is aiming to develop a signature mathematical construct to capture a suite of elements related to health, including an individual’s medical history, genetics, lab tests, imaging results, and history of interventions. In addition, Pineau will address questions about communicating methods and predictions discovered using RL with the medical teams operating in a clinical setting

Study finds AI algorithm can diagnose blindness-causing disease more accurately than doctors – May. 2, 2018 (GeekWire)

  • A new study on a specialized AI algorithm found that it was able to automatically diagnose a disease that causes childhood blindness more accurately than trained physicians can, a step towards automating medical tasks that are often bottle-necked by a shortage of doctors
  • The algorithm was developed and studied by scientists at Oregon Health and Science University and Massachusetts General Hospital. It was trained to diagnose a disease called retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) that, if untreated, will lead to total blindness. It’s the same disease that took the sight of musician Stevie Wonder and is the most common cause of childhood blindness
  • The algorithm was shown sample images of eye scans and correctly diagnosed patients with ROP 91 percent of the time. Physicians trained to diagnose the disease had an average accuracy of 82 percent using the same images

Artificial Intelligence Is Cracking Open the Vatican’s Secret Archives – Apr. 30, 2018 (The Atlantic)

  • A new project known as In Codice Ratio, uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour neglected Vatican texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time. If successful, the technology could also open up untold numbers of other documents at historical archives around the world
  • OCR has been used to scan books and other printed documents for years, but it’s not well suited for the material in the Secret Archives. Traditional OCR breaks words down into a series of letter-images by looking for the spaces between letters. It then compares each letter-image to the bank of letters in its memory. After deciding which letter best matches the image, the software translates the letter into computer code (ASCII) and thereby makes the text searchable
  • In Codice Ratio sidesteps some of the problems with analyzing the Secret Archives through a new approach to handwritten OCR. The four main scientists behind the project—Paolo Merialdo, Donatella Firmani, and Elena Nieddu at Roma Tre University, and Marco Maiorino at the VSA—skirt Sayre’s paradox with an innovation called jigsaw segmentation. This process, as the team recently outlined in a paper, breaks words down not into letters but something closer to individual pen strokes

Deep Learning Shows Promise in Screening CT Scans – Apr. 30, 2018 (Datanami)

  • AI startup Qure.ai said a clinical validation study involving 21,000 patients found that its algorithm could help accurately identify internal bleeding, fractures or other trauma in head CT scans. It also made its data set of 491 CT scans analyzed by its algorithms
  • The deep learning model was trained using more than 313,000 anonymized head CT scans. Of these, more than 21,000 were used to validate the AI algorithm. It was then clinically validated on 491 CT scans, with the results compared against a panel of three experienced radiologists that included a senior neuro-radiologist at the Mayo Clinic’s radiology department
  • Qure.ai also has worked with GPU vendor Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) on the CT scan effort, using its PyTorch deep learning framework along with Titan X and GeForce GTX platforms to train the model on the collection of labeled CT scans

Government / policy:

NYC Transit is building a fleet of chatbots – May. 4, 2018 (GCN)

  • The agency is currently working on five bots, and Suhas Uliyar, the vice president of AI bots and mobile product management at Oracle, one of the city’s technology partners for the chatbots, said at least three will leave the pilot phase and become operational this summer
  • The bots will address five use cases: 1. Scheduling 2. Citizen reporting 3. Collisions 4. Overtime and leave 5. Traffic

Facial recognition tech used by UK police is making a ton of mistakes – May. 4, 2018 (Wired)

  • South Wales Police has been testing an automated facial recognition system since June 2017 and has used it in the real-world at more than ten events. In the majority of cases, the system has made more incorrect matches than the times it has been able to correctly identify a potential suspect or offender
  • The automated facial recognition system has been used at sporting events, concerts and during coordinated police crackdowns on certain types of crime. Figures from South Wales Police, released following a Freedom of Information request, show the number of times its system made correct and incorrect matches. The police force has now also published the data on its website
  • During the UEFA Champions League Final week in Wales last June, when the facial recognition cameras were used for the first time, there were 2,470 alerts of possible matches from the automated system. Of these 2,297 turned out to be false positives and 173 were correctly identified – 92 per cent of matches were incorrect. A spokesperson for the force blamed the low quality of images in its database and the fact that it was the first time the system had been used

Singapore’s artificial intelligence capabilities to get S$150m boost – May. 3, 2018 (Channel News Asia)

  • The National Research Foundation (NRF) will be investing up to S$150 million into a new national programme aimed at boosting Singapore’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities over the next five years
  • Called AI.SG, the initiative will see Singapore-based research institutes partner AI start-ups and companies developing AI products to grow knowledge in the space, create tools and develop talent to power the country’s AI efforts. This was announced by Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim at the opening of InnovFest Unbound event on Wednesday (May 3)
  • “AI.SG will do three key things – first, address major challenges that affect both society and industry. Secondly, invest in deep capabilities to catch the next wave of scientific innovation. And finally, to grow AI innovation and adoption in companies – an initiative most pertinent to our business community,” said Dr Yaacob

China looks to school kids to win the global AI race – May. 3, 2018 (South China Morning Post)

  • China has published its first artificial intelligence (AI) textbook for high school students as the country looks to an even younger generation than its huge pool of college graduates to close the gap in the global AI talent war
  • The textbook, released in April and named “Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence”, comes around six months after China’s State Council called for the inclusion of AI-related courses in primary and secondary education
  • The lead author of the textbook is Tang Xiaoou, an information engineering professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and chairman of the world’s most valuable AI startup, SenseTime Group. The textbook details the history of AI and some of its major applications, such as facial recognition-enabled public security systems and autonomous driving

Victoria threatens to pull out of facial recognition scheme citing fears of Dutton power grab – May. 1, 2018 (The Guardian)

  • Victoria (Australia) has threatened to pull out of a state and federal government agreement for the home affairs department to run a facial recognition system because the bill expands Peter Dutton’s powers and allows access to information by the private sector and local governments
  • In October the Council of Australia Governments agreed to give federal and state police real-time access to passport, visa, citizenship and driver’s licence images for a wide range of criminal investigations. The identity matching services bill, introduced in February, enables the home affairs department to collect, use and disclose identification information including facial biometric matching
  • The Victorian government submission also complained that providing identity-matching services to local government authorities “goes beyond what was agreed to”. VicRoads “may not be authorised” to share information with the national driver’s licence facial recognition system because of this overreach

Singapore airport may use facial recognition systems to find late passengers – May. 1, 2018 (Reuters)

  • Steve Lee, Changi Airport Group’s chief information officer, told Reuters that the airport’s experiments are not from a “big brother” perspective but solve real problems. “We have lots of reports of lost passengers…so one possible use case we can think of is, we need to detect and find people who are on the flight. Of course, with permission from the airlines,” said Lee
  • While he declined to provide names of the firms involved, France’s Idemia, previously known as OT-Morpho, has previously provided some facial recognition technology to Changi. Chinese firm Yitu, which recently opened its first international office in Singapore, told Reuters it was in discussions with Changi Airport Group. Yitu says its facial recognition platform is capable of identifying more than 1.8 billion faces in less than 3 seconds

Events:

Microsoft’s global Innovate.AI competition unearths AI trends – May. 1, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Innovate.AI, a Microsoft-led global competition for artificial intelligence (AI) startups, has officially come to a close — with three regional winners emerging from around the world. A fourth company has claimed the “AI for Good” prize
  • Microsoft Ventures, in partnership with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group, London-based Notion Capital, and Vertex Ventures Israel, announced the $3.5 million contest last October. The plan was simple: Commission applications from AI startups in North America, Europe, and Israel; find the most promising ones in each region; and invite 10 of them to a “pitch-off” in front of judges to establish a winner. See the winners from each region below
  • North America: New York-based Envisagenics is driving new drug discovery by integrating AI with RNA therapeutics
  • Europe: London-based Hazy automates the process of anonymizing data for companies that hold vast swathes of customer information
  • Israel: Tel Aviv’s ZenCity analyses online conversations through social media and similar channels, using AI to identify trends and sentiments, and reports back to city officials

Socure CEO to Talk AI and Machine Learning at Connect:ID – Apr. 30, 2018 (Findbiometrics)

  • Socure CEO Sunil Madhu discussed the powerful impact that artificial intelligence and machine learning are having on the world of financial services and online businesses at this week’s Connect:ID exhibition. Entitled “Leapfrogging: The Impact of Machine Learning on ID Verification”, the session was scheduled for May 1st at 10:50 a.m.
  • In a statement announcing the talk, Socure asserted that AI and machine learning “far exceed human intelligence and intuition, and can verify the identity of the person on the other end of an online transaction and detect fraud.” Indeed, particularly when applied to biometrics, AI and machine learning technologies are proving to be highly effective across a range of identification applications, from remote customer onboarding to mobile payments. But, as Madhu explained in his session, “there are limitations, shortcomings and misapplications of data science which can impact results.”