Company developments: Siemens Unveils Simulation Tool for Testing of Autonomous Vehicles – May. 24th, 2019 (Design News) Known as PAVE360, the new tool allows developers to design and test an autonomous vehicle system-on-chip (SoC) and its surrounding electronic components in a completely virtual environment. “We don’t just model the analog or electromechanical systems,” noted David… Read More »
We’ve seen two sides of Microsoft over the past two weeks. Last week, we learned that Microsoft was working with a Chinese military university on AI. This week, we learned they declined to sell their facial recognition technology to California law enforcement. While encouraging to hear given the current privacy and civil rights violations associated with many facial recognition technologies, the fact that they’re operating in China on this topic should still leave us all concerned. More weekly news can be found below.
Big news this week for Apple, who poached one of Google’s top AI minds. Dr. Ian Goodfellow decided to leave his role as “Senior Staff Research Scientist” with Google to join Apple as a “Director of Machine Learning” in the company’s Special Projects Group. Dr. Goodfellow is best known as being the “father” of GANs. Given Apple’s AR focus this hire makes a lot of sense. As for Google, in addition to losing Dr. Goodfellow, they decided to shut down their AI ethics committee after only a week. That was quick… Other weekly news can be found below.
We’ve finished up our first week in 2019 with numerous AI developments to kick things off. In the autonomous vehicle arena we witnessed perhaps the most bizarre developments as Waymo’s vehicles continue to face attacks from pedestrians. It’s quite a situation and just another reminder of how weird humans can be (let’s hope the AI doesn’t fully resemble us!). It seems like although these are random incidents, they pose a threat to public perception of the safety of autonomous vehicles.
Highlights this week are dominated by new developments in the autonomous vehicle world. Baidu continues to add new partners with the separate additions of Ford and Volvo this week. Waymo also had a big win this week becoming the first company to receive a permit from the California DMV that allows for fully autonomous vehicle testing without a safety driver.
Heavy week on the fundraising side. In particular, lots of Chinese AI startups raised money this week including Moviebook, Suiyuan, and Tianrang. In addition to startup fundraising, nonprofits were big winners this week as well. AI4All, a nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence, received a $1mm grant from Google. It’s great to… Read More »
Interesting week in AI to say the least. To start, a school in China is now using AI to catch students who aren’t paying attention and/or napping. RIP to those students if they were anything like me in school. Meanwhile across the pond, the Metropolitan (U.K) police admitted their facial recognition technology has an abysmal… Read More »
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.