A.I. IN THE NEWS
Facial-recognition goes public. Megvii, a Chinese startup specializing in facial-recognition technology, plans to go public in Hong Kong, according to a CNBC report. The company, whose main rival is Chinese tech firm Sensetime, recently raised $750 million in funding at a valuation of over $4 billion, the report said.
Scanning faces in Uganda. Huawei is supplying facial-recognition and other data-crunching technologies to law enforcement in Uganda, The Financial Times reported. A Uganda police spokesperson told the newspaper, "The cameras are already transforming modern day policing in Uganda, with facial recognition and artificial intelligence as part of policing and security."
DeepMind co-founder is taking a "time out." DeepMind, the high-profile A.I. research lab that's part of Google, has placed co-founder Mustafa Suleyman on leave for unspecified reasons, Bloomberg News reported. A spokesperson told the news service that "Mustafa is taking time out right now after 10 hectic years," but did not say when he would return.
Even Xbox? Microsoft contractors listened to audio recordings of Xbox players in order to use the data to improve Microsoft's A.I.-powered voice technologies, tech publication Motherboard reported. Several other big tech companies like Amazon and Google have also faced criticism for using contract workers to listen to audio recordings.
AFRICA'S A.I. HOPES
Wim Delva, acting director of the school for data science and computational thinking at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa, writes in Quartz (per The Conversation) about universities debuting data science and A.I. research initiatives in Africa, and how they may differ from projects in other countries. Delva writes: "It is human nature to focus on immediate, locally perceived problems before venturing into fixing more remote ones. So people and organizations from elsewhere in the world may not always identify and try to tackle the African continent's problems. These issues include improving access and equity in health care; improving road safety and bolstering food security."
Lessons from "A.I." of the 1800s
It's no surprise A.I. will be a part of our future. But is there anything we can learn from past tech disruptions that will help us anticipate opportunities and prepare for innovations from the A.I. revolution ahead?
Find out
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Recursion Pharmaceuticals has hired Imran Haque as vice president of data science. Haque, who specializes in machine learning and drug discovery, was previously the chief scientific officer of genomics company Freenome.
Breather, a startup focusing on office rentals, picked Philippe Bouffaut to be chief technology officer. Bouffaut was previously the vice president of products and engineering at public relations software company Cision.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Electrochemical A.I. action. Researchers from New York University's school of engineering published a paper about using deep learning to improve the process of electrosynthesis, an environmentally-friendly chemical synthesis technique. Miguel Modestino, an NYU assistant professor and co-author of the paper, said in a statement that his team believes "this is the first time AI has been used to optimize an electrochemical process."
A.I. to predict ozone concentrations. Researchers from the University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, and University of Science and Technology of China published a paper about using deep learning to predict ozone concentrations during the summer in the U.S. Although the A.I. system was effective, the researchers said "other modern machine learning algorithms have the potential for even greater gains in performance."
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Huawei Launches New A.I. Chip As Company Enters 'Battle Mode' To Survive – By Eamon Barrett
No Humans Needed: Chinese Company Uses AI to Read the News, Books – By Alyssa Newcomb
How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon – By James Bandler, Anjali Tsui , and Doris Burke
BRAIN FOOD
I guess we'll find out how dangerous this really is. Two young graduate students have created A.I. software that can generate convincing prose that they said was based on similar technology created by the high-profile OpenAI research group, Wired reported . What's noteworthy about the research is that OpenAI originally said it wanted to keep the secret sauce behind its technology private, because it was worried it would be used by bad actors, like for creating realistic fake news. The graduate students created the language-generating tech to show that its possible for many people to create these kinds of complicated systems, not just well-funded research groups.
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