Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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What’s cooking inside Nvidia’s robotics research lab

Nvidia robot open house
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Susan Gaither tickle a robotic hand at Nvidia’s robotics research lab in Seattle. (Nvidia Photo)

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang interacted with a sensitive robotic hand at today’s open house for his company’s robotics research lab in Seattle, it was love at first touch.

“It almost feels like a pet!” Huang said as he tickled the hand’s fingers, causing them to retreat gently.

“It’s surprisingly therapeutic,” he told the crowd around him. “Can I have one?”

The robotic hand, which is programmed to avoid poking humans when they come too close, was just one of the machines on display at the 13,000-square-foot lab in Seattle’s University District.

Nvidia is based in California’s Silicon Valley and has nearly 200 employees working at an engineering center in Redmond, Wash.

But when the chipmaker laid plans to open a lab focusing on research in robotics and artificial intelligence, it set up shop in the same building that houses the University of Washington’s CoMotion Lab. It also put Dieter Fox, a longtime computer science professor at UW, in charge of the operation as senior director of robotics research.

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Scientists enlist AI to decipher what rodents say

Mouse cartoon
University of Washington researchers have developed an AI program that uses machine learning in an effort to decipher the ultrasonic vocalizations made by mice. (UW Medicine Illustration / Alice Gray)

Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine have developed a software program that enlists artificial intelligence to decipher the ultrasonic vocalizations made by mice and rats.

The “DeepSqueak” program, described today in a study published by the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, focuses on squeaks and whistles that are well above the range of human hearing.

Software converts the audio signals into visual graphs, or sonograms, and then puts those images through the kinds of machine-vision algorithms that are used for autonomous vehicles.

“DeepSqueak uses biomimetic algorithms that learn to isolate vocalizations by being given labeled examples of vocalizations and noise,” Russell Marx, one of the study’s authors, explained in a news release.

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AI2 and Microsoft join forces on academic search

Microsoft Academic Graph
A chart generated by Microsoft Academic Graph shows the interconnections between a group of research authors associated with Microsoft, with Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates at the center and Satya Nadella, the company’s current CEO, highlighted on the periphery. (Microsoft via YouTube)

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI2, is partnering with Microsoft Research to widen the sphere of scientific search tools by connecting AI2’s Semantic Scholar academic search engine with the Microsoft Academic Graph.

Semantic Scholar is a free online tool makes use of artificial intelligence to maximize the relevance of search results for studies focusing on computer science and biomedicine. Its database takes in more than 40 million academic papers, plus associated blog items, news reports, videos and other resources.

Since its inception in 2015, Semantic Scholar’s user base has grown to more than 2 million monthly users.

Microsoft Academic Graph, meanwhile, charts the networks that knit together more than 200 million academic documents and citations on a wide variety of scientific subjects.

Doug Raymond, Semantic Scholar’s general manager, said the new collaboration is in line with his project’s goal of combating information overload in the scientific community. “This partnership with Microsoft Research relates to our shared interest in this problem,” Raymond told GeekWire.

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Google kicks off $25M contest for AI social impact

AI-enabled wildfire project
California high-school students Sanjana Shah and Aditya Shah built a device that uses AI to identify areas in a forest that are susceptible to wildfires. (Google Photo)

Google today unveiled a $25 million initiative called the Google AI Impact Challenge, aimed at soliciting and supporting projects that make use of artificial intelligence to solve some of the world’s greatest social, humanitarian and environmental problems.

The global challenge is open to nonprofit organizations and public charities — and to for-profit businesses as well, as long as their projects have a charitable purpose.

Google’s call to humanitarian action is part of its broader “AI for Social Good” campaign, and comes just weeks after Google Cloud decided not to bid on the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing project due to ethical concerns.

Microsoft, which is bidding on the contract, announced its own $40 million “AI for Humanitarian Action” initiative last month. And in the weeks before his death, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen set up a new organization called the Vulcan Machine Learning Center for Impact to support the use of machine learning for philanthropic projects.

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Paul Allen enlists machine learning as force for good

Elephant identification with AI
Machine-learning technology can contribute to image recognition programs that could identify elephants in aerial imagery on their own. (Vulcan Photo)

Paul Allen has made a name for himself as a co-founder of Microsoft, a supporter of artificial intelligence research and a contributor to causes such as wildlife conservation — so it only makes sense that the Seattle-area billionaire wants to use machine learning to further his philanthropic goals.

His latest contribution comes through the Seattle-based Vulcan Machine Learning Center for Impact, or VMLCI. “Its mission will be to apply the tools of machine learning and AI for good,” Bill Hilf, CEO of Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., said today in a tweet.

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Wash. Gov. Inslee voices concern over automation

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says the coming age of wider automation and smarter artificial intelligence will require upgrades in educational and training systems — as well as improvements in the social safety net for those who would otherwise be left behind.

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SpaceX rocket sends robot pal to space station

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off today from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, sending an AI-enabled, sphere-shaped robot companion to keep the International Space Station’s crew company.

The European CIMON robot, complete with a video-screen smiley face, is packed aboard an uncrewed Dragon capsule along with nearly three tons of additional experiments and supplies for the space station.

Launch came at 5:41 a.m. ET (2:41 a.m. PT) after a trouble-free countdown. The rocket ascended to eastward just before sunrise, producing spectacular views of the illuminated exhaust plume in the sky.

“I’m glad I got the opportunity to see the Dragon’s Tail in person,” one of the spectators, Taylor Harris, said in a tweet.

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AI experts turn soccer videos into ‘holograms’

Computer scientists have trained a neural network to transform the action from pre-recorded videos of soccer games into immersive augmented-reality “holograms” you can shrink down onto a tabletop.

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Worried about fake news? Get set for fake humans

Chatbot discussion
Speakers at a Seattle University event organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest discuss human-machine interaction with a word cloud displayed on the screen behind them. The words were provided by the audience to answer a question: “What scares you the most about technology?” (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

We have heard the voice of our future AI overlord — and it’s making hair appointments for us.

Last week, Google wowed the world by demonstrating a voice assistant called Duplex that sounds eerily human on the telephone, right down the um’s and mm-hmm’s that it uses during its chat with a scheduler at a hair salon.

Some are now questioning how true-to-life the demo actually was. But even if some liberties were taken, Google Duplex was an eye-opener for experts who gathered at Seattle University on Wednesday night for an AI-centric event presented by MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest.

“Seeing that happen so quickly, I think, was a real shock for some people,” said Kat Holmes, a Microsoft veteran who’s the founder of the design company Kata and the author of “Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design.”

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White House convenes AI summit

AI summit
Michael Kratsios, who’s currently in charge of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, addresses scores of executives, experts and officials at a White House summit focusing on artificial intelligence. (OSTP via Twitter)

The White House brought together scores of industry representatives for a summit focusing on artificial intelligence and its policy implications today — including representatives from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook — and set up an advisory panel of government officials to assess AI’s impact.

The Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence will advise the White House on AI research and development priorities, and will help forge partnerships involving government agencies, researchers and the private sector, according to Nextgov.

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