Big news out of China this week on yet another ambitious AI project. This time they’re looking to create an underwater AI colony in the South China sea. The base will be for scientific research and defense purposes, so will be interesting to see how much investment is put into this. Other weekly news can be found below:
Company developments:
China’s Infervision is helping 280 hospitals worldwide detect cancers from images – Nov. 30, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- The startup, which has to date raised $70 million from leading investors like Sequoia Capital China, began by picking out cancerous lung cells, a prevalent cause of death in China. At the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference in Chicago this week, the three-year-old company announced extending its computer vision prowess to other chest-related conditions like cardiac calcification
- “By adding more scenarios under which our AI works, we are able to offer more help to doctors,” Chen Kuan, founder and chief executive officer of Infervision, told TechCrunch. While a doctor can spot dozens of diseases from one single image scan, AI needs to be taught how to identify multiple target objects in one go
Adobe’s Smart Tags for video can classify objects, scenes, attributes, and actions – Nov. 29, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- “Over the past two years, we’ve … invested a lot of the really high-end computer vision models [Adobe’s] research teams have come forward [with] and are basically using that to automate the curation process,” Santiago Pombo, product manager of AEM, told VentureBeat in a phone interview
- Smart Tags for video — which Adobe Research and Adobe’s Search team architected jointly using Adobe’s Sensei machine learning platform — produces two sets of tags for each clip. One describes roughly 150,000 classes of objects, scenes, and attributes, and the second corresponds to actions such as drinking, running, and jogging
LG creates new robotics and autonomous vehicles divisions – Nov. 28, 2018 (ZDnet)
- LG Electronics announced during its year end restructuring that it will form two new divisions — in robotics and autonomous vehicles — which will be under the direct supervision of the CEO
- Previously, robotics was divided into various groups under the CTO: its home entertainment business, and material and production research groups, but the personnel for these two groups will now come under one roof
AWS announces new Inferentia machine learning chip – Nov. 28, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- “Inferentia will be a very high-throughput, low-latency, sustained-performance very cost-effective processor,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained during the announcement
- “The speed and cost of running machine learning operations — ideally in deep learning — are a competitive differentiator for enterprises. Speed advantages will make or break success of enterprises (and nations when you think of warfare). That speed can only be achieved with custom hardware, and Inferentia is AWS’s first step to get in to this game,” Mueller told TechCrunch. As he pointed out, Google has a 2-3 year head start with its TPU infrastructure
Google blocks gender-based pronouns from AI tool to prevent accusations of bias – Nov. 27, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her.”
- Smart Compose is an example of what AI developers call natural language generation (NLG), in which computers learn to write sentences by studying patterns and relationships between words in literature, emails and web pages. A system shown billions of human sentences becomes adept at completing common phrases but is limited by generalities. Men have long dominated fields such as finance and science, for example, so the technology would conclude from the data that an investor or engineer is “he” or “him.” The issue trips up nearly every major tech company
Oxbotica hopes its driverless cars will be on the streets of London by Christmas – Nov. 26, 2018 (Evening Standard)
- The DRIVEN consortium – which encompasses autonomous vehicle software provider Oxbotica, insurance provider AXA XL and security company Nominent – has announced it will begin trials in the London borough this month, following the success of similar trials in Oxford
- Oxbotica, one of the leading software providers in the driverless car space, has revamped Ford cars to fit them with its Selenium autonomous software, radar and lidar sensors, on-board computers and cameras
Huawei releases autonomous AI driving solution and demos cellular-connected cars – Nov. 26, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Though Huawei’s international business remains clouded by U.S. security allegations, the Chinese company is continuing to debut next-generation communications and AI solutions that will be of interest to companies around the world. Huawei’s latest such offering is the Mobile Automation Engine (MAE), a solution designed to accelerate autonomous driving using cellular networks
- The idea behind MAE is to help the automotive and mobile network industries use AI to deliver increased vehicle automation in specific scenarios, ramping up on a scenario-by-scenario basis as AI becomes more capable. Huawei expects that AI will grow in capability during the late 4G and early-to-mid 5G eras, with fully driverless cars becoming available in 10 years or so, likely in the 2030s
Fundraising / investment:
China AI chip designer Horizon Robotics to gain up to $1 billion in Series B round – Nov. 28, 2018 (Gasgoo)
- Beijing Horizon Robotics Technology Co.,Ltd (Horizon Robotics), a China’s leading technology company of embedded artificial intelligence, will reportedly raise up to $1 billion in the Series B round funding that is going to value the company at between $3 billion and $4 billion
- Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, revealed at the 2018 Security China last month that the startup will complete a new round of financing by the end of 2018, raising around $500 million to $1 billion
Qualcomm Ventures launches $100 million AI fund – Nov. 28, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Qualcomm Ventures today announced the creation of AI Fund, a program to invest up to $100 million in promising startups. The news was shared by global head of Qualcomm Ventures Quinn Li and CEO Steven Mollenkopf in a presentation in San Francisco
- The fund’s first investment was made in AnyVision, a computer vision and facial recognition software company. The size of investments made in specific companies will not be disclosed, but the fund will make investments ranging from $1 million to $10 million. Roughly one-third of investments will go to Series A companies and two-third to Series B companies, Li told VentureBeat in a phone interview
Partnerships:
NYU, Facebook Offer Dataset for MRI Artificial Intelligence Project – Nov. 30, 2018 (Health IT Analytics)
- NYU School of Medicine’s Department of Radiology, in collaboration with Facebook AI Research (FAIR), are releasing a large-scale, open source MRI dataset as part of fastMRI, a project that aims to accelerate MRI scans using artificial intelligence (AI)
- This initial dataset will include more than 1.5 million anonymous MRI images of the knee, drawn from 10,000 scans, in addition to raw measurement data from nearly 1600 scans. The data release is the newest phase in the fastMRI collaboration, which was announced by Facebook and NYU in August 2018
Research / studies:
Less accidents with driverless cars? Majority polled by AXA don’t believe so – Nov. 29, 2018 (Insurance Business)
- Much has been said about the future of transport, but new research by AXA reveals that the majority of UK residents don’t think improved road safety will be had from the use of driverless cars
- AXA found that only 27% of 2,000 participants believe driverless cars will bring about fewer road accidents. The poll was conducted by Opinium on behalf of the insurer, whose property & casualty and specialty risk division AXA XL is insuring autonomous vehicle trials as part of the DRIVEN consortium
Government / policy:
Lawmakers say Amazon’s facial recognition software may be racially biased and harm free expression – Nov. 30, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- The letter, signed by eight lawmakers — including Sen. Edward Markey and Reps. John Lewis and Judy Chu — called on Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos to explain how the company’s technology works — and where it will be used
- It comes after the ACLU found that the software failed to facially recognize 28 members of Congress, with a higher failure rate towards people of color
China citizens are proud the country can compete with the US on AI, venture fund manager says – Nov. 27, 2018 (CNBC)
- Speaking to CNBC’s Eunice Yoon, Yeung described how technology consumers were starting to want more protection for their data from large-scale platforms, namechecking the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — which came into force earlier this year. But in China, Yeung described a different view on data protection
- “I think there are a lot of Chinese citizens really proud of the fact that we’re actually big enough to even be able to compete with the U.S. in terms of AI. And I think it is just a really exciting time to be in China,” she said
Beijing plans an AI Atlantis for the South China Sea – without a human in sight – Nov. 26, 2018 (South China Morning Post)
- China is planning to build a deep sea base for unmanned submarine science and defense operations in the South China Sea, a centre that might become the first artificial intelligence colony on Earth, officials and scientists involved in the plan said
- The project – named in part after Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology – was launched at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing this month after a visit to a deep sea research institute at Sanya, Hainan province, by Chinese President Xi Jinping in April
Events:
Apple set to attend major machine learning conference, highlights over 100 open ML jobs – Nov. 29, 2018 (9to5 Mac)
- Apple has today shared that it will be attending the 32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). Apple will have members of its ML team at a booth and notes it has many open positions as it works to build “a team of exceptional researchers and engineers.”