Tag: Artificial Intelligence

Categories
GeekWire

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.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

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.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

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.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

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.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Biologists use AI to flesh out cell’s inner workings

3-D cell model
A 3-D view of human cells is color-coded to highlight substructures. (Allen Institute for Cell Science)

What happens when you cross cell biology with artificial intelligence? At the Allen Institute for Cell Science, the answer isn’t super-brainy microbes, but new computer models that can turn simple black-and-white pictures of live human cells into color-coded, 3-D visualizations filled with detail.

The online database, known as the Allen Integrated Cell, is now being made publicly available — and its creators say it could open up new windows into the workings of our cells.

“From a single, simple microscopy image, you could get this very high-contrast, integrated 3-D image where it’s very easy to see where all the separate structures are,” Molly Maleckar, director of modeling at the Seattle-based Allen Institute, told GeekWire.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

XNOR.ai raises $12M and unveils new AI tool

XNOR.ai object recognition
XNOR.ai’s computer vision tool can recognize objects using software that resides on a smartphone rather than in the cloud. (XNOR.ai Illustration)

“AI for Everyone, Everywhere” may sound like a science-fiction slogan, but it’s actually the name given to software from XNOR.ai that’s already making devices smarter in the real world.

The self-service software development platform is a new product for the Seattle startup, which is also announcing a $12 million Series A funding round led by Madrona Venture Group.

XNOR CEO Ali Farhadi says the new investment will help his company, which was spun out from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence last year, develop a high-end version of the “AI for Everyone, Everywhere” platform for enterprise-level applications.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Facebook opens AI labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh

Facebook Seattle
Facebook is upgrading the status of its Seattle AI research operation. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

After months of work to beef up its artificial intelligence research teams in Seattle and Pittsburgh, Facebook is acknowledging that those two cities are getting official status as AI labs in their own right.

“Facebook AI Research is opening two new labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, which will join the existing sites in Menlo Park, New York, Paris, Montreal and Tel Aviv,” Yann LeCun, Facebook’s chief AI scientist, said in a posting on May 4.

LeCun’s statement confirms what sources told GeekWire in March about Facebook’s growing Seattle presence in AI research, as well as rumors we heard back then about the social-media giant’s plans for Pittsburgh.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Policy experts seek intelligent ways to regulate AI

AI panel
The World Economic Forum’s Kay Firth-Butterfield, Carnegie Mellon University’s Lorrie Faith Cranor and Wired’s Tom Simonite discuss AI governance during a conference at Carnegie Mellon. (CMU via YouTube)

Regulations for the proper use of artificial intelligence are almost as inevitable as the rise of AI itself — but the way it’ll be done is far from clear.

“This isn’t as simple as just ‘trust,’ ” said Kay Firth-Butterfield, project head for AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “This is more complex, because the technology itself is very fast, changing all the time, and is complex as well.”

Firth-Butterfield and other policy experts weighed in on the challenges of regulating AI, and dropped some hints about the road ahead, today at the Carnegie Mellon University – K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and AI in Pittsburgh.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Microsoft is turning down some sales over AI ethics

Eric Horvitz
Microsoft Research Lab’s Eric Horvitz speaks at Carnegie Mellon University. (CMU via YouTube)

Concerns over the potential abuse of artificial intelligence technology have led Microsoft to cut off significant sales, says Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and director at Microsoft Research Labs.

Horvitz laid out Microsoft’s commitment to AI ethics today during the Carnegie Mellon University – K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and AI, presented in Pittsburgh.

One of the key groups focusing on the issue at Microsoft is the Aether Committee, where “Aether” stands for AI and Ethics in Engineering and Research.

“It’s been an intensive effort … and I’m happy to say that this committee has teeth,” Horvitz said during his lecture.

He said the committee reviews how Microsoft’s AI technology could be used by its customers, and makes recommendations that go all the way up to senior leadership.

“Significant sales have been cut off,” Horvitz said. “And in other sales, various specific limitations were written down in terms of usage, including ‘may not use data-driven pattern recognition for use in face recognition or predictions of this type.’ ”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk touts scary movie about AI

Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks about AI in “Do You Trust This Computer?” (Cinetic / Papercut Films via YouTube)

If you want to get really scared about the future, you could see “A Quiet Place” this weekend at your local theater — or you could stream “Do You Trust This Computer?”

The latter movie, about the potential threat posed by artificial intelligence, comes with a thumbs-up from Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla who has long voiced serious concerns about AI.

Musk is one of the prominent interviewees in “Do You Trust This Computer?” — which was made by Chris Paine, the filmmaker behind “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Paine’s new 78-minute documentary had its premiere on April 5.

Get the full story on GeekWire.