Another exciting week in AI. In particular, lots of news on the autonomous vehicle front. Pony.ai just raised another massive fundraising round, numerous U.S. states are driving forward autonomous vehicle investment and research, SpotHero is prepping Chi-town for the revolution with customized parking spots designed for autonomous vehicles, a former Apple employee was charged attempting to transfer Apple’s trade secrets to his new employer XMotors (a Chinese autonomous vehicle startup), Williams Formula One Team is adopting AI, Purdue is launching an autonomous vehicle center, Uber terminated its self-driving vehicle operators in Pittsburgh, and much more.
Company developments:
Facebook reportedly hires AI chip head from Google – July 13, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Facebook is continuing to devote more resources to the development of AI-focused chips, bringing aboard a senior director of engineering from Google who worked on chips for Google’s products to lead its efforts, Bloomberg reports. Shahriar Rabii spent nearly seven years at Google before joining Facebook this month as its VP and Head of Silicon according to his LinkedIn profile
- Facebook’s work on AI-focused custom silicon has been the topic of rumors and reports over the past several months. It’s undoubtedly a bold direction for the company, though it’s unclear how interested Facebook is in creating custom silicon for consumer devices or if they’re more focused on building for their server business as they also look to accelerate their own research efforts
- Rabii’s work at Google seemed to encompass a good deal of work on chips for consumer devices, specifically work on the Pixel 2’s Visual Core chip, which brought machine learning intelligence to the device’s camera
Guru announces new AI and Sync features for knowledge sharing platform – July 13, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Guru launched in 2015 as a Chrome extension to help revenue and customer service teams have easy access to all of their company’s information the moment they needed it by congregating relevant “cards” of information written by different internal teams. Since its launch, Guru has extended its company to include a web app, and Slack bot. Today, Guru unveiled a new AI, and syncing and impact analytics features aimed to improve the overall experience of the platform
- “Customer facing teams want to be responsive to their customers and feel confident in knowing what they want to communicate to them,” Guru CEO and co-founder Rick Nucci told TechCrunch. “They want to respond quickly and they want to respond accurately. These features further reduce the time it takes for them to dig up information and by reducing that time they’re solving issues faster and helping the customer have a better experience with them.”
- With the introduction of AI Suggest to its Chrome extension, users will be able to access relevant company information without needing to search for it first. And because the extension can work wherever they work, there’s no time wasted returning to a single site. In its announcement, Guru says that this AI will learn a user’s search patterns overtime and grow to better understand their needs and improve efficiency
Hinge’s newest feature claims to use machine learning to find your best match – July 11, 2018 (The Verge)
- Hinge’s newest feature — Most Compatible — attempts to use all your cumulative data to find the perfect match for you. The company’s been testing this feature, which occasionally recommends a possible match to users, for at least month now. Those recommendations were only offered once a week during testing but will now come every day. Justin McLeod, Hinge’s CEO, tells me the company spent the testing time honing its backend algorithm and getting Most Compatible to a point where the company feels confident putting it fully out there
- Most Compatible, he says, uses machine learning to figure out each user’s taste. It primarily relies on the Gale-Shapley algorithm to determine every user’s perfect match. The idea is that, essentially, there is a user out there who is most likely to like you and you’re most likely to also like. That would make you a good match in Hinge’s world. The company’s technology breaks people down based on who has liked them. It then tries to find patterns in those likes. If people like one person, then they might like another based on who other users also liked once they liked this specific person. Both users will receive the same recommendation on the same day, and it’ll expire after 24 hours
Facebook sets a new task for AI: guide a virtual tourist around New York – July 11, 2018 (The Verge)
- How do you teach computers to understand language — not just transcribe human speech, but actually comprehend what someone is saying? It’s one of the grand challenges of AI, and we still don’t really know the best way to tackle the problem. Facebook’s AI research lab, FAIR, has one idea: teach AIs to understand language by getting them to guide virtual tourists around New York City
- FAIR is releasing what it calls Talk the Walk, a dataset designed to be used by other researchers. It’s comprised of three elements: small maps of New York City neighborhoods (each a couple of blocks wide), 360-degree photos of the same locations, and sample dialogues of humans guiding one another around these neighborhoods. Basically, it’s everything you might need to teach an AI to tackle this task itself
- This may all sound a little odd as a method of training AI, but FAIR is tapping into an established field of research known as “grounded language learning” or “embodied learning.” This theory says that the only way we can teach AI to understand language like humans is to get them to learn like we do — in the real world
China’s Tinder embraces AI as it eyes growth from the country’s singles – July 11, 2018 (South China Morning Post)
- The technology will be used to help the company accurately identify new users, boost the accuracy of advertising, as well as contributing to growth in terms of user numbers and revenues, he said
- “[By using] artificial intelligence and algorithms, there is huge room for improvement to a point where as our users swipe more, they see pictures more suitable to their tastes. They can then quickly match and start an engaging conversation,” Wang said
Uber has terminated its self-driving car operators in Pittsburgh – July 11, 2018 (Quartz)
- The company held a meeting earlier today (July 11) to inform about 100 autonomous vehicle operators—people who monitor its self-driving cars—that their jobs were being terminated, a source close to the situation told Quartz. Uber said it was eliminating the position of autonomous vehicle operator, and that operators were free to apply to other roles at the company, the source said
- Uber confirmed it laid off about 100 autonomous vehicle operators in Pittsburgh and eliminated the position. The company plans to replace these jobs with about 55 “mission specialists”—specialists who are trained in both on-road and more advanced test-track operations, and who are expected to provide more technical feedback to self-driving car developers. Uber said affected operators could apply for these positions
- Pittsburgh was the earliest site of Uber’s self-driving car ambitions. The company hired its first robotics talent from Carnegie Mellon University in early 2015 and started its Advanced Technologies Center there. In September 2016, Uber puts its first passengers into self-driving cars in downtown Pittsburgh
SpotHero introduces 500 autonomous car-ready garages in Chicago – July 10, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Conventional cars drive the bulk of Chicago-based SpotHero‘s business, but the parking inventory and booking startup is setting its sights on a driverless future. Today, it announced that more than 500 of its connected parking garages in Chicago have been adapted to accommodate autonomous cars, trucks, and SUVs
- “Significant strides in both vehicle and parking technologies are creating major opportunities for parking facilities like ours to enhance drivers’ parking experiences,” Jeff Eckerling — senior vice president at SP+, a parking facility management service provider that’s collaborating with SpotHero — said in a statement. “Drivers want to have a seamless parking experience — from reservation to payment to entering and exiting the facility. Whether drivers are parking their cars today or autonomous vehicles take the wheel tomorrow, our collaboration with SpotHero contributes to driving real business and preparing for change.”
- SpotHero’s upgraded garages are outfitted with sensors that will allow self-driving car operators to book and pay for parking spaces, including license plate scanners and connected parking meters. On the software side, the HeroConnect software development kit and API will facilitate payments and let vehicles, carmakers, ridesharing services, and cities exchange parking data
Williams Formula One team in race to adopt AI system – July 10, 2018 (South China Morning Post)
- “We’re looking for technology and if we can get access to the latest technology before our competitors, that gives us the edge,” Williams chief information officer Graeme Hackland said in an interview at the RISE technology conference in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “We handle a lot of data and as of now most of it is analysed manually.”
- Williams generates about 800 gigabytes of on-track data in each round of the 21-race Formula One season, from information about the engine and tyres to weather and video footage. All of that data is currently processed by specialists, who might then narrow down a segment of the race and send it to the engineers for a closer look
- By employing AI technologies, such as machine learning, and big data, Williams hopes to be able to identify correlations between the multitude of variables that were previously not possible using just human experts, according to Hackland. The British racing team now uses cloud software from technology company Acronis to back up and protect its telemetry data and other crucial information
Former Apple Engineer Reportedly Charged With Stealing Autonomous Car Secrets – July 10, 2018 (Gizmodo)
- Imagine being an engineer at Apple, one of the most coveted positions in tech. On top of it, you work in the ultra-secret autonomous car division. And you blow it all by leaving for a startup in China and stealing Apple’s trade secrets on the way out the door. That’s what authorities believe one man did this past weekend, and now he’s been slapped with federal charges
- According to the Mercury News, Xiaolang Zhang was charged on Monday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California. He’s accused of attempting to transfer Apple’s trade secrets to his new employer, XMotors, a Chinese startup that’s working on electric and driverless vehicles. Zhang was arrested on Saturday as he was attempting to board a plane to Beijing
- The criminal complaint doesn’t appear to be online yet, but Mercury News reports that it alleges Zhang started at Apple in 2015 as a hardware engineer and was “granted broad access to confidential internal databases.” He went on paternity leave in April and when he returned he reportedly informed higher-ups that he was going back to China to care for his sick mother. But he told his supervisor that he would be joining XMotors. After turning in his company-issued phones and laptop, Apple reportedly reviewed his download activity and found that he’d been collecting confidential data at a suspicious rate
Nvidia uses AI to clean up messy photos – July 9, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Researchers from Nvidia, MIT, and Aalto University are using artificial intelligence to reduce noise in photos. The team used 50,000 images from the ImageNet dataset to train its AI system for reconstructing photos, and the system is able to remove noise from an image even though it has never seen the image without noise
- Named Noise2Noise, the AI system was created using deep learning and draws its intelligence from 50,000 images from the ImageNet database. Each came as a clean, high-quality image without noise but was manipulated to add randomized noise. Computer-generated images and MRI scans were also used to train Noise2Noise
- Noise can appear as grainy snow in a photo taken in low light or be found in other forms of photos, like medical imagery, computer-generated images, and pictures of space. Digital camera images taken in low light or using a digital zoom often contain noise
M&A:
Limerick startup bought by Miami-based firm – July 15, 2018 (Independent)
- Limerick startup EmotionReader has been acquired by facial recognition technology business Kairos. Emotion Reader uses algorithms to analyse facial expressions in video content. Kairos is based in Miami and said it was a multimillion dollar deal. The Limerick company was set up only last year by Dr Stephen Moore and Dr Padraig O’Leary
- “With EmotionReader’s research team on board, Kairos will be working hard to push the limits of current face recognition systems to be more accurate in real world conditions. Specifically, in optimizing the algorithms to work without bias on all races, ethnicities, genders, and ages of faces.”
- Kairos said that “as face-recognition systems are adopted for new use cases, potential IP opportunities will be a focus to cement Kairos as a leader in this space”. Dr Moore, Kairos’s new chief scientific officer, said that “with recent advances in AI and deep learning we’re at a tipping point where AI will change the lives of millions of people for the better.”
Box acquires Butter.ai to fuel better search results – July 10, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Cloud storage provider Box today announced it has acquired Butter.ai, a contextual search service powered by machine learning. Specific terms of the deal were not immediately made available, but the Butter.ai team will join Box. “The team from Butter.ai will help Box to bring more intelligence to our search capabilities, enabling Box’s 85,000 customers to more easily navigate through their unstructured information — making searching for files in Box more contextualized, predictive, and personalized,” Box chief product officer Jeetu Patel said in a blog post announcing the acquisition today
- “All the cloud apps you have are supposed to make your work life easier, but they actually make finding your work harder. And every work app your team uses creates another information silo where valuable information goes to die,” Butter.ai CEO Jack Hirsch told VentureBeat in a phone interview last fall. Last fall, Butter.ai came out of private beta with a Slack bot designed to help businesses search across multiple enterprise services such as Google Drive, Trello, Evernote, Confluence, and Dropbox
- Butter.ai is one of nearly 40 companies that have received financial backing from the Slack Fund and one of the original startups chosen to be part of All Turtles, an AI startup studio created in part by former Evernote CEO and early conversational AI investor Phil Libin that first opened its doors last year. Butter.ai is the first company associated with All Turtles to be acquired, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. Since launch in May 2017, All Turtles has opened offices in San Francisco and Paris
Fundraising:
China attracts 60% of global AI investment: report – July 13, 2018 (Global Times)
- Experts said the trade conflict with the US will have no effect to China’s development in AI technology, after an annual report released on Friday said China has become the most attractive country for investment and financing in AI technology, which accounts for 60 percent in the world. The report on China AI Development 2018 was released by Tsinghua University on Friday, which said from 2013 to the first quarter of 2018, the amount of investment and financing in AI technology in China accounts for 60 percent in the world, valued at $27 billion in 2017, Chinese news portal thepaper.com reported on Friday
- “Many emerging industries will enjoy an investment boom at the beginning, but when the boom subsides, investors will be more rational, and survivors will be very qualified. The quality of China’s AI will not suffer and will continue to attract more talent to return to China from the US,” Wan said
Next Insurance, an insurtech targeting small businesses, scores $83M Series B led by Redpoint – July 11, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Next Insurance, the Israeli digital insurance startup that helps small businesses get coverage, has raised a significant new funding round, adding another $83 million to its balance sheet
- The Series B round is led by Silicon Valley’s Redpoint Ventures, and will be used by the company to continue expanding across the U.S., where it now operates as a full service insurance carrier. It will also increase headcount in both its Israel and U.S. offices
- Founded in 2016 with the aim of becoming a one-stop insurance shop for micro and small business insurance needs, Next Insurance designs insurance plans for business sectors that are often overlooked by more general insurers
China’s Pony.ai nabs $102M at nearly $1B valuation to take its self driving platform up another gear – July 11, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Autonomous cars are fast-approaching, and so are those building the platforms that will help operate them. Today, Pony.ai — the startup whose autonomous driving platform powers the first fully self-driving fleet in China — has raised $102 million in funding — a follow-on round that comes about seven months after its previous $112 million Series A
- The funding — co-led by China’s ClearVue Partners and Eight Roads (which is part of Fidelity International) — is catapulting Pony.ai into unicorn territory: the company said that it takes it to “close to” a $1 billion post-money valuation. Other new investors include Green Pine Capital Partners, China Merchants Capital, Redpoint Ventures China, Adrian Cheng (Founder of K11), and Delong Capital, and previous investors Sequoia Capital China, Morningside Ventures, DCM Ventures, and Hongtai Capital also participated
- Autonomous — along with transportation in general — remains an extremely capital-intensive space (partly because it is very complex, so engineers and designers not only need to tackle computing problems but hardware problems as well). As one investor said to me earlier this week, the new wave of startups tackling problems new to tech is somewhat unchartered territory for traditional tech VCs, and are often require much larger investments than more traditional tech startups, but it is still one that they are jumping into with both feet (and are raising giant funds accordingly), lest they miss out on eventual returns
Partnerships:
Check-in with a smile: Marriott, Alibaba trial facial recognition at China hotels – July 11, 2018 (Reuters)
- The hotel chain will work in a joint venture with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group to test facial recognition check-ins at two China hotels this month, the firms said on Wednesday, with ambitions for a global rollout later
- The joint venture said the new technology would help guests jump queues and cut the check-in process to less than a minute, compared to at least three minutes at a normal counter. Chinese guests will need to scan their IDs, take a photo and input contact details on an automated machine, the firms said. The device will then dispense room key cards after verifying identities and booking information
- The pilot will roll out at two Marriott hotels in Hangzhou and Sanya on the tropical island province of Hainan. Marriott got in hot water in China earlier this year when local authorities closed down its Chinese website for a week as punishment for listing Chinese-claimed regions such as Tibet and Taiwan as separate countries in a customer questionnaire
Audi signs MOU with Huawei to develop connected car technology – July 10, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- After announcing plans to ship cars running Android and work with Nvidia to build automotive AI systems, Audi today put in place the latest piece of its self-driving car puzzle. The German carmaker has signed a memorandum of understanding with Huawei — the world’s third-largest smartphone maker after Samsung and Apple — to develop intelligent car technology, specifically in the areas of autonomous driving and services that use a new cellular standard, LTE-V, designed specifically for vehicles
- Audi and Huawei also are not providing a lot of specifics about what they would be developing together, except to note that the deal will cover the two building and testing data connectivity, and working on “intelligent driving and the digitalization of services in the vehicle environment.” Vehicles developed in the collaboration will initially be sold in China
- Huawei is one of the world’s big handset makers, but it originally started in networking equipment and this deal appears to be about building on that latter business, specifically in developing services for a new variation on LTE called LTE-V
Research / studies:
Purdue to Launch Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Center – July 13, 2018 (U.S. News)
- The Innovation Hub for Connected and Autonomous Transportation Technologies will be part of the university’s Discovery Park, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported. The 40-acre (16.2-hectare) complex is used by the school’s STEM undergraduate students, graduate-level researchers and faculty. Students and faculty studying science, technology, engineering and math will research topics such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and public policy related to autonomous transportation
- A significant portion of the research will be done in partnership with private-sector companies and government agencies, including the Indiana Department of Transportation. The research will focus on commercial uses for autonomous vehicles, but will consider some issues related to passenger vehicles. Convincing the public of the benefits of autonomous technology will take many small steps to see significant results, said Darcy Bullock, a civil engineering professor at Purdue
University of WA develops ‘more accurate’ 3D facial recognition model – July 9, 2018 (ZD Net)
- University of Western Australia researchers have designed a new system for large-scale 3D facial recognition that addresses the shortcomings of 2D facial recognition. The team from the university’s UWA Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering created the “FR3DNet” model, which has analysed 3.1 million 3D scans of more than 100,000 people
- According to findings published in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the team trained FR3DNet, which is currently available for research purposes, to learn the identities of a dataset of “known” persons and match a face to one of those identities
- “Our research shows that recognition performance on 3D scans is better and more robust,” said the model’s creator, Dr Syed Zulqarnain Gilani. “Your 3D scan could be in any pose, wearing glasses or a face mask, and laughing or just smiling and the deep model can recognise you in an instant.”
Longquan Temple is using artificial intelligence to organize and spread Buddhist scriptures – July 9, 2018 (Tech Node)
- The information and technology center at Longquan Temple is working on AI to improve their robot monk Xian’er and organize Chinese Buddhist Canon (大藏经), the total body of Buddhist canon in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, said Xinxian Master of the temple at TechCrunch Hangzhou
- The center optimized optical character recognition via machine learning, making the technology more suited for ancient characters. Now, the AI technology can even add punctuation to the ancient texts, notoriously difficult to parse much less understand
- Xian’er, meaning virtuous but stupid in Chinese, is a robot monk. It’s about half a meter tall and holds a tablet in front of his belly. You can either talk to the robot or select questions on the screen. The robot monk also exists in a WeChat mini program. Unlike Siri which answers more down-to-earth questions like “how’s the weather”, Xian’er is designed to tackle metaphysical problems like the meaning of life
Government / policy:
‘Ghana is the future of Africa’: Why Google built an AI lab in Accra – July 15, 2018 (CNN)
- Interesting take on the reasons behind Google’s AI lab in Ghana. Worth a read for anyone interested in AI’s impact on the African continent
U.S. regulator: Drunk driving is a bigger worry that driverless cars – July 13, 2018 (Salon)
- The head of the U.S. government’s top highway cops doesn’t think we should fence in self-driving cars — at least not right now. Heidi King, deputy administrator of the National Highway Transportation Safety Association (NHTSA) believes the technology is still “nascent,” and needs time to develop, she told Bloomberg in an interview
- NHTSA is the U.S. government’s top investigator — and the final word — on transportation accidents, which includes self-driving cars. Whether it’s Uber’s fatal accident involving its driverless car in Phoenix in March, or the Autopilot-engaged Tesla X that crashed into a highway barrier in California, killing its driver, — NHTSA was there
- Yet despite their involvement in auto accidents that involve driverless cars, NHTSA apparently doesn’t see them as a major problem today. Instead, King points to what she called the “old enemies” of the road, namely drunk drivers and people who refuse to wear seatbelts. (Seatbelts saved the lives of approximately 14,668 people in 2016, according to NHTSA.)
Microsoft urges government to regulate facial recognition systems – July 13, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Facial recognition technology is a controversial topic. Scores of investors and consumer advocacy groups rallied against Amazon for providing its face-detecting artificial intelligence (AI) to local law enforcement. In committee hearings, representatives in the House of Representatives took the FBI to task for using a facial ID system with an error rate of nearly 15 percent. And Facebook has come under fire for applying facial recognition to photos without users’ permission
- Regulatory ambiguity concerning the deployment of facial recognition tech has companies like Microsoft inviting the government to weigh in. In a blog post today, Microsoft president Brad Smith called on lawmakers to investigate face-detecting algorithms and craft policies guiding their usage
- Smith and Harry Shum, Microsoft’s AI chief, published a treatise earlier this year predicting that advances in AI would require new laws. But Smith’s post today marks the first time the Redmond company has explicitly advocated for the regulation of facial recognition systems and strikes a different tone than that of competitors like Amazon, which said in June that it was incumbent on the private sector to “act responsibly” in employing AI technologies
Autonomous vehicles: U.S. Department of Transportation chief urges public education – July 11, 2018 (Vision Systems Design)
- In this week’s roundup from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), which highlights some of the latest news and headlines in unmanned vehicles and robotics, learn about a keynote address from the Automated Vehicles Symposium, in which U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao urged the autonomous vehicle community to educate the public. Additionally, learn about an initial operational test and evaluation of the U.S. Navy’s newest unmanned aerial system (UAS)
- The “quite brilliant” engineers and technologists who are developing automated vehicles need to “step up and educate the public about this new technology” to boost confidence, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said Tuesday
- The DOT held a “listening session” in March to get input on the autonomous revolution, covering topics including accessibility, public safety, insurance and liability, jobs, cybersecurity and public outreach
Orlando Does an About-Face on Facial Recognition Technology – July 10, 2018 (Nextgov)
- Orlando’s police department resumed testing Monday of facial recognition software to “identify specific individuals” on designated cameras, after halting the program as its pilot expired two weeks ago. Citing Amazon Rekognition’s “potential value” in furthering public safety efforts, the Florida city will continue internal testing by using video streams from city-owned cameras and the photos of seven police volunteers
- “We have made good strides in testing this technology and believe it is important to continue this evaluation period to determine if it’s a concept that could add immeasurable value in enhancing the City’s public safety mission in a manner that balances reasonable privacy concerns,” Police Chief John Mina said in a statement
- Though the number may be expanded, eight video streams are currently designated for the pilot: four are at Orlando Police Headquarters; three Innovative Response to Improve Safety, or IRIS, cameras; and one at another, unidentified city facility
Driverless, electric vehicles still focus of Utah lawmaker – July 10, 2018 (Good4Utah)
- Utah’s population is expected to double by the year 2050, with 7 million expected to live in the Beehive State by 2060. This creates a demand for more efficient transportation, says Rep. Robert Spendlove (R- Sandy). Spendlove’s currently-on-hold legislation (H.B. 371) would allow driverless vehicles to be operating on Utah’s roadways in the very near future
- In a panel discussion at Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy, Spendlove along with panelists representing Utah Department of Transportation, Utah Transit Authority and others discussed the need for Utah to adapt to growing demand for driverless and electric vehicles
- The challenge, Spendlove says, is how to adapt. Changes, he suggested, would have to happen with how insurance works, how the term “motor vehicle operator” is defined and infrastructure to accommodate future technology
World’s largest driverless vehicle testing center coming to Ohio – July 9, 2018 (WKBN)
- According to Brett Roubinek, president and CEO of the Transportation Research Center (TRC) in East Liberty, Ohio, some Kasich administration policies have helped accelerate a plan five years in the making. About five years ago, according to Roubinek, an employee with the TRC wrote a white paper, in conjunction with the federal government, on what the future of autonomous vehicle testing would look like and require
- Phase one of the SMART Center will consist of a six-lane intersection, an urban setting with roundabouts and a control center office building. The control center will be linked to the US-33 Smart Mobility Corridor and with Smart Columbus
- At the groundbreaking ceremony, Kasich talked about how the new SMART Center is like Rhodes 2.0, a reference to former Governor Jim Rhodes and his plans to bring Ohio to the forefront of transportation innovation and boost the state’s economy
Events:
Samsung Electronics Wins at Two Top Global AI Machine Reading Comprehension Challenges – July 9, 2018 (Samsung)
- Samsung Research, the advanced R&D hub of Samsung Electronics’ SET (end-products) business, has ranked first in two of the world’s top global artificial intelligence (AI) machine reading comprehension competitions. Samsung Research recently placed first in the MAchine Reading COmprehension (MS MARCO) Competition held by Microsoft (MS), as well as showing the best performance in TriviaQA* hosted by the University of Washington, proving the excellence of its AI algorithm
- With intense competition in developing AI technologies globally, machine reading comprehension competitions such as MS MARCO are booming around the world. MS MARCO and TriviaQA are among the actively researched and used machine reading comprehension competitions along with SQuAD of Stanford University and NarrativeQA of DeepMind. Distinguished universities around the world and global AI firms including Samsung are competing in these challenges
- Machine reading comprehension is where an AI algorithm is tasked with analyzing data and finding an optimum answer to a query on its own accord. For MS MARCO and TriviaQA, AI algorithms are tested in their capabilities of processing natural language in human Q&As and also providing written text in various types of documents such as news articles and blog posts