To improve the online shopping experience for its fashion customers, Uniqlo has developed a new AI empowered personal assistant using the same technology that has been used in Google Assistant by Inamoto & Co.
Bloomberg News today often relies on the combined efforts of humans and machines. Individual tasks are often automated but there are very few jobs without a human contribution.
“We produce automated news, but even more than that we do a lot of human-computer hybrid stories,” says Mann. “The computer will come up with a first story and then a journalist will take it and elaborate it, put it into context, and explain the whole narrative act.
But just how big? To put it in perspective, let’s look at living icon Beyoncé. Here are her (English-language) Wikipedia pageviews between March and May of 2016, in 48-hour intervals.
The Maryland Department of Commerce; Johns Hopkins University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore; the University of Maryland, College Park; Mount St. Mary’s University; and Hood College have endowed a total of $15.8 million in eight new research professorships. The endowments were made through the Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative (MEI), a state program created to spur basic and applied research in scientific and technical fields at the colleges and universities. The schools raised a combined $9 million in private funding for each chair and Maryland Commerce approved matching grants of $6.8 million to support the endowments.
“Maryland is often hailed as one of the most innovative states in the country, thanks in no small part to the groundbreaking research at our first-rate colleges and universities. These endowments will continue to support that important work,” said Maryland Commerce Secretary Mike Gill. “This program, now in its fourth year, has endowed more than $31 million to help academic institutions make advances a diverse range of fields including cybersecurity, tissue engineering, drug delivery and theoretical computer science.”
Johns Hopkins University received $800,000 for the Endowed Fund in Honor of Marcella E. Woll, which will fund age-related macular degeneration research in Dr. Laura Ensign’s lab. In particular, Dr. Ensign is focused on developing a topical gelling eye drop that can be administered by the patient, thereby removing barriers to administration of vision-preserving drugs that require a clinical visit with a specialist.
A University of California, Riverside, computer scientist has received reinforcements in his battle against fake news.
Snap Research, the research division of Snap, Inc., has made a $7,000 donation for Evangelos Papalexakis, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the Bourns College of Engineering, to continue improving an algorithm that can already detect fake news stories with 75 percent accuracy.
The gift formalizes an ongoing project between Papalexakis’ Multi-Aspect Data Lab and Snap Research scientist Neil Shah to create an automated algorithm that sorts news stories into categories based on clusters of words and contextual information and flags them as potentially fake news. The algorithm could be used by social media platforms to help users make more informed decisions about the news they click on and share.
“SHIELD is a fast and practical approach to defend deep neural networks from adversarial attacks. This work proposes a multifaceted framework which incorporates compression, randomization, model-retraining, and ensembling to make computer vision models robust to adversarial perturbations.”
Decades ago, synthetic polymers became popular because they were cheap and durable. Now, scientists are creating material that self-destructs or breaks down for reuse on command.
arXiv, Computer Science > Machine Learning; Krishnamurthy (Dj) Dvijotham, Robert Stanforth, Sven Gowal, Timothy Mann, Pushmeet Kohli
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This paper addresses the problem of formally verifying desirable properties of neural networks, i.e., obtaining provable guarantees that neural networks satisfy specifications relating their inputs and outputs (robustness to bounded norm adversarial perturbations, for example). Most previous work on this topic was limited in its applicability by the size of the network, network architecture and the complexity of properties to be verified. In contrast, our framework applies to a general class of activation functions and specifications on neural network inputs and outputs. We formulate verification as an optimization problem (seeking to find the largest violation of the specification) and solve a Lagrangian relaxation of the optimization problem to obtain an upper bound on the worst case violation of the specification being verified. Our approach is anytime i.e. it can be stopped at any time and a valid bound on the maximum violation can be obtained. We develop specialized verification algorithms with provable tightness guarantees under special assumptions and demonstrate the practical significance of our general verification approach on a variety of verification tasks.
The technology will be integrated into the Accenture Touchless Testing Platform to strengthen its analytics and cognitive capabilities.
Accenture has acquired an AI technology from Real Time Analytics Platform, Inc. The newly acquired technology will be integrated into Accenture’s Touchless testing platform to strengthen its analytics and cognitive capabilities.
Real Time Analytics platform utilizes AI as machine learning, natural language processing and neural networks to analyze each stage of software testing so that users can use the insights gleaned from the collected data to optimize test case execution, reduce defects and improve human decision making. These tools will complement Accenture’s Touchless Testing platform to help speed the adoption of extreme automation and AI-enabled services.
Some of today’s boldest artists are using emerging forms of media and technology to tell stories that reinvent the way we experience the world. Through virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and other immersive media, they’re using new and developing forms of technology to shape what the future looks like and how we understand and interpret it. In doing so, they’re also forging a strong connection between art, technology, and the public interest, showing how these areas reinforce and complement one another—and their profound potential to change the world.
During the month of August, we are sharing a series of stories from three artists whose creativity and innovation are leading the way.
As we integrate digital technologies into every aspect of our lives it can be hard to make informed choices about the privacy and security risks that come with them. For example, users probably know they should be concerned about security risks when choosing a payment app, but it can be difficult to understand what those risks might be.
For the first time, Consumer Reports has an answer. They have developed The Digital Standard, a new set of criteria and tests for digital technologies and applied it peer-to-peer payment (P2P) apps (like Apple Pay and Venmo) to evaluate, as CR puts it, “how well the services authenticate payments to prevent fraud and error, secure user data, and protect privacy.”
Advances in computer-generated imagery have brought vivid, realistic animations to life, but the sounds associated with what we see simulated on screen, such as two objects colliding, are often recordings. Now researchers at Stanford University have developed a system that automatically renders accurate sounds for a wide variety of animated phenomena.
“There’s been a Holy Grail in computing of being able to simulate reality for humans. We can animate scenes and render them visually with physics and computer graphics, but, as for sounds, they are usually made up,” said Doug James, professor of computer science at Stanford University. “Currently there exists no way to generate realistic synchronized sounds for complex animated content, such as splashing water or colliding objects, automatically. This fills that void.”
The researchers will present their work on this sound synthesis system as part of ACM SIGGRAPH 2018, the leading conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. In addition to enlivening movies and virtual reality worlds, this system could also help engineering companies prototype how products would sound before being physically produced, and hopefully encourage designs that are quieter and less irritating, the researchers said.
Army researchers have designed a computer model that more effectively calculates the behavior of atmospheric turbulence in complex environments, including cities, forests, deserts and mountainous regions.
This new technology could allow Soldiers to predict weather patterns sooner using the computers at hand and more effectively assess flight conditions for aerial vehicles on the battlefield.
Trillions of tiny microbes and bacteria live in your gut, each with their own set of genes. These gut microbes can have both beneficial and harmful effects on your health, from protecting you against inflammation to causing life-threatening infections. To keep out pathogens yet encourage the growth of beneficial microbes, scientists have been trying to find ways to target specific microbial genes.
Katherine Pollard, PhD, is one of these scientists. Her team at the Gladstone Institutes is interested in better understanding how microbes colonize the gut. They want to identify the genes that help microbes pass through the stomach’s harsh environment and survive in the lower gastrointestinal tract.
“Until now, this has not been an easy feat,” explains Pollard, senior investigator and director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology. “Most microbes in the gut have evolved from related species, so they share many common genes. It’s difficult to single out the genes that actually influence a microbe’s ability to survive in the gut environment.”
A new study published in the scientific journal PLOS Computational Biology led by Patrick Bradley, a postdoctoral scholar in the Pollard lab, found a new approach to identify the genes that may be important to help microbes live successfully in the human gut.
Online AI-powered healthcare chatbot Buoy has announced a new, deep partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital. Buoy will create a white-labeled version of its product for Boston Children’s website, use data from that version to improve its product’s pediatric expertise, and even get help from doctors at the Boston health center to evaluate its algorithms.
“Ten percent of our traffic every single day is a patient asking for help with their children,” Buoy CEO Andrew Le told MobiHealthNews. “And while we already cover pediatric diagnoses, we really saw that with the uptick in our users and how many parents we were seeing that it was time now to bring on someone who could help us think through pediatric diseases, everything from the bread and butter to the more complex.”
“The NSF 2026 Idea Machine is a competition to help set the U.S. agenda for fundamental research in science and engineering. Participants can earn prizes and receive public recognition by suggesting the pressing research questions that need to be answered in the coming decade, the next set of “Big Ideas” for future investment by the National Science Foundation (NSF).” Launches late-August 2018.
Liverpool’s attacking, fast paced and dynamic style of play may be catching up with them as manager Jurgen Klopp laments the fitness of his front three with their opening Premier League match against West Ham on Sunday drawing nearer.
Liverpool had eight players at the World Cup – six English sides had more players in Russia – and Klopp says he has been left with a squad that has varying levels of fitness.
“They boys who trained from the beginning could go 90 [minutes], Millie [James Milner], Gini [Georginio Wijnaldum],” said the manager, who was less hopeful of his front three’s fitness, especially Roberto Firmino. “But Sadio, Mo… Bobby was not allowed to go more than 45, that was already the edge. He needs training now.”
“The much anticipated 1.0 release of Julia is the culmination of nearly a decade of work to build a language for greedy programmers. JuliaCon2018 celebrated the event with a reception where the community officially set the version to 1.0.0 together.”