Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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Semantic Scholar takes in the full sweep of science

Semantic Scholar screengrab
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s academic search engine, Semantic Scholar, keeps track of more than 175 million research papers from all fields of science. (Semantic Scholar Graphic)

Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence says its academic search engine, Semantic Scholar, is now in high gear — thanks to a power boost from Microsoft that helped expand its reach to every field of science.

Over the course of just a few months, Semantic Scholar’s database has gone from indexing 40 million research papers in computer science and biomedicine to taking in more than 175 million papers. The database not only covers the time-honored physical sciences, but also political science and sociology, art and philosophy.

“That’s enabled us to take the research that we’ve done in making AI a tool for overcoming information overload in science [and turn it into] a tool that is now usable by, essentially all scholars around the world,” Doug Raymond, general manager of Semantic Scholar, told GeekWire.

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PNNL plays role in new AI research center

Roberto Gioiosa
Roberto Gioiosa, a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, will lead a new research center focusing on challenges in artificial intelligence. (PNNL Photo)

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is joining forces with two other research powerhouses to pioneer a new $5.5 million research center created by the U.S. Department of Energy to focus on the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence.

The Center for Artificial Intelligence-Focused Architectures and Algorithms, or ARIAA, will promote collaborative projects for scientists at PNNL in Richland, Wash., at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, and at Georgia Tech. PNNL and Sandia are part of the Energy Department’s network of research labs.

ARIAA will be headed by Roberto Gioiosa, a senior research scientist at PNNL. As center director, he’ll be in charge of ARIAA’s overall vision, strategy and research direction. He’ll be assisted by two deputy directors, Sandia’s Rajamanickam and Georgia Tech Professor Tushar Krishna.

The creation of the new center is in line with the White House’s efforts to encourage partnerships in AI research. Last month, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced the establishment of the DOE Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office to serve as a coordinating hub for all the work that’s being done in his department.

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Supp.AI tracks how drugs and supplements interact

Dietary supplements
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s Supp.AI search engine combs through research focusing on interactions involving nutritional supplements as well as drugs. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle

Physicians and regulators keep close tabs on how different drugs interact. But what about interactions involving dietary supplements?

“There’s just no way for anybody to keep up with the combinations of supplements and drugs,” said Deborah Rappaport, vice president of product at InHealth Medical Services. “It’s a huge number.”

Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, is harnessing the power of its Semantic Scholar academic search engine to make the job easier. Today it unveiled Supp.AI, a searchable database that indexes 4,650 supplements and drugs from Abbokinase to Zytiga, and serves up research findings on more than 56,000 interactions involving those products.

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Kurvv closes $1M seed round for AI service

Ryan Lee
Veteran Microsoft data scientist Ryan Lee is the CEO of Kurvv. (Photo Courtesy of Ryan Lee)

Artificial intelligence is a big deal for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google — but what about a small business that can’t afford to have a data scientist on staff?

That’s the niche that Bellevue, Wash.-based Kurvv plans to fill, with a service that takes a company’s data and fits it into a pre-trained AI model that may not be perfect, but is good enough to address the problem that needs solving.

“We’re targeting companies that have data, but don’t have the knowledge or the resources to hire data scientists and can’t bring in a consultant,” Kurvv’s CEO, Ryan Lee, told GeekWire.

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SonoSite and AI2 add AI to ultrasound imaging

Ultrasound imaging
Air Force Staff Sgt. Christine Blanco performs an ultrasound examination on a patient in Afghanistan. (Air Force Photo / Justyn M. Freeman)

A new collaboration between Fujifilm SonoSite and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence aims to use AI to generate better interpretations of ultrasound images, opening the way for new applications and enhanced accuracy.

The collaboration demonstrates how Pacific Northwest connections can pay off: Fujifilm SonoSite, a subsidiary of Japan’s Fujifilm that’s headquartered in Bothell, Wash., reached out to the startup incubator at the Seattle-based institute, known as AI2, for advice on improving their compact ultrasound imaging systems.

“The AI2 Incubator was a perfect place to look for help in creating breakthrough technology,” Rich Fabian, SonoSite’s president and chief operating officer, said in a news release. “They have the type of talent that is hard to recruit, combined with the hunger of a startup. We look forward to collaborating more.”

Ultrasound imaging is significantly more affordable and portable than X-ray imaging, CT scans or PET scans, with none of the downside associated with radiation exposure. “Ultrasound’s comparative disadvantage is its lower image quality, which we aim to address with the use of deep learning,” Vu Ha, technical director at the AI2 Incubator, told GeekWire in an email.

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Xnor teases AI gizmo that’ll keep groceries in stock

Shelf-monitoring system
Xnor.ai’s shelf-monitoring system can provide alerts about out-of-stock items. (Xnor.ai Photo via Twitter)

Artificial intelligence is coming to a grocery store shelf near you.

Xnor.ai, a spin-out from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has been working with partners on low-cost, low-power AI monitoring devices, including a camera with the ability to detect when a person steps in front of a webcam.

Now the startup is unveiling a wireless device that’s designed to be clipped onto a retail shelf and send out an alert when the store is running low on a particular item.

The beta demonstration is due to take place this weekend in Las Vegas at Groceryshop, a trade show for the grocery industry.

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How Microsoft helped make the first AI whisky

Intelligens whisky
Mackmyra’s Intelligens is billed as the first whisky created using AI. (Microsoft / Mackmyra Photo)

Computer scientists have tried using artificial intelligence to write poetry and compose music, with mixed results. But have they tried using it to make whisky?

We now know that they have, although drinkers in the U.S. will have to wait to judge how the AI experiment turned out.

Mackmyra, a Swedish whisky distillery, turned to Microsoft and a Finnish technology consulting firm called Fourkind to create novel whisky recipes for master blender Angela D’Orazio.

Jarno Kartela, principal machine learning partner at Fourkind, said in a Microsoft feature about the project that his company went with the cloud-based Azure platform and Machine Learning Studio “for its massive infrastructure … and its ease of deployment.”

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AI system finally passes 8th-grade science test

Aristo AI program
The Aristo AI software has matched an eighth-grader’s ability to pass a science test. (AI2 Illustration)

Five years after the late Seattle billionaire Paul Allen challenged researchers to come up with an artificial intelligence program smart enough to pass an eighth-grade science test, that feat has been declared accomplished — by the hometown team.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, announced today that its Aristo software scored better than 90% on a multiple-choice test geared for eighth graders, and better than 80% on a test for high school seniors.

There are caveats, of course: The exam, which was based on New York Regents aptitude tests, excluded questions that depended on interpreting pictures or diagrams. Those questions would have required visual interpretation skills that aren’t yet programmed into Aristo. Questions requiring a direct answer (that is, essay questions) were also left out. And for what it’s worth, Aristo would have been useless outside the areas of science in which it was trained.

Nevertheless, the exercise illustrated how far AI has come just since 2016, when all of the programs competing in the $80,000 Allen AI Science Challenge flunked.

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Billionaires Jack Ma and Elon Musk debate AI

Jack Ma and Elon Musk
Jack Ma and Elon Musk discuss the peril and promise of artificial intelligence at a Shanghai AI conference. (Xinhua via YouTube)

n the debate over artificial intelligence, whose side is Elon Musk on?

Musk, who’s in charge of SpaceX, Tesla and the Neuralink brain interface venture, sized up the odds with AliBaba founder Jack Ma today during a widely watched one-on-one session at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

The way Musk sees it, the prospects aren’t great for humans if future AI agents decide to go rogue. That’s despite pronouncements from AI researchers who say machines won’t match humans anytime soon when it comes to general intelligence, as opposed to specialized AI applications such as playing chess or Go.

“The biggest mistake I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent,” Musk said. “Yeah, they’re not, compared to AI. And so a lot of them cannot imagine something smarter than themselves.”

Musk said future AI agents will be “vastly smarter” than humans. “So what do you do with a situation like that?” he asked. “I’m not sure. I hope they’re nice.”

For his part, Ma saw more promise than peril in AI.

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Tech titans face scrutiny over killer-robot tech

SpotMini and Marc Raibert
Boston Dynamics’ four-legged SpotMini robot may look scary as it shares the stage with company founder and CEO Marc Raibert at Amazon’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas in June. But a report published this month praises Boston Dynamics’ owner, SoftBank, for confirming that it won’t develop technologies that could be used for military purposes. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Dutch activists are voicing concerns about technologies that could open the way for lethal autonomous weapons – such as AI software, facial recognition and swarming aerial systems – and are wondering where several tech titans including Amazon and Microsoft stand.

So are some AI researchers in the United States.

A report issued by Pax, a Dutch group that’s part of an international initiative known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, calls out Amazon, Microsoft and other companies for not responding to the group’s inquiries about their activities and policies in the context of lethal autonomous weapons.

“Why are companies like Microsoft and Amazon not denying that they’re currently developing these highly controversial weapons, which could decide to kill people without direct human involvement?” the report’s lead author, Frank Slijper, said this week in a news release. “Many experts warn that they would violate fundamental legal and ethical principles and would be a destabilizing threat to international peace and security.”

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