First, deepfakes swapped our faces (https://medium.com/huia/live-deep-fakes-you-can-now-change-your-face-to-someone-elses-in-real-time-video-applications-a4727e06612f), now a US company is developing the technology to recreate voices. The therapeutic uses are clear – there are dozens of situations which can lead to a person losing their voice (https://www.entnet.org/content/common-problems-can-affect-your-voice) – and clearly having a computer sound like me as well as speak my words will help…

TNW has a brief summary of the ways that machine learning is being used to improve authentication and authorization, with a rundown of a number of approaches used by different companies. https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/07/13/authentication-cybersecurity/ To some, the future of authentication might look a little creepy. But the explosion of data and connectivity will provide plenty of ways…

The search for "generalisation" in AI is somewhat hindered by an inability to test for it, so a recent paper by Google's Deep Mind team provides an interesting insight in to the thought process of teams pursuing this goal. The team generated a number of tests which contain patterns with abstract relationships between elements in…

while an interesting use case for sure, i'm not sure that I would pay $1,000 for a dustbin unless it automatically managed the inventory in my kitchen cupboards for me… https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/oscar-ai-trash-can-sorts-recyclables-garbage/ Autonomous, an ergonomic office furniture company, announced a Kickstarter campaign for Oscar, a smart home appliance. The AI-based device sorts recyclables and garbage. Environmentally-conscious…

In a very interesting and wide ranging talk on the history (including a very early mechanical perceptron) of AI, Carlos Guestrin outlined 4 trends he sees in the future: 1. shift from parallelism (e.g. spark) to HPC (e.g. deep learning on massive GPU clusters) workloads driving insights from huge (rather than "massive") data 2. a…

In a couple of short but interesting videos, researchers at Honda show us how they're designing robots to be tolerant of physical risks, such as knocks, which may cause the robot to topple over and sustain damage to itself or others, by hopping or "running" (several fast steps), depending on the direction of the push.…

I still believe that we have to change the way we're consuming the earth's resources if we want to leave to our children anything like the planet we inherited from our parents. But the products like this need to work on the marketing. Who wants to eat algae 🙂 https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/green-tech/conservation/we-grew-algae-and-asked-spectrum-editors-to-taste-it Algae could be the environmentally-friendly…

It's interesting to see how Apple and Facebook are approaching the problem of "fake news" differently. Facebook is sticking to it's "algorithmic" approach, which i guess would be far more scalable if (and it's a big if) it can be demonstrated to work. Apple's employing more people to review the news that's presented through the…

I'm skeptical about the true market for bike sharing. I can see the perceived benefits, and when i lived closer in to central London I used to use Boris Bikes more often, i've recently tried to rent "dockless" bikes from several of the companies around London and although they never seem to be available nearby…

A new alloy promises sensors in temperatures of up to around 980°C – high enough to instrument engine blocks in cars, or drill heads in industrial machinery. As it's also conductive, it could be used to make solid state high current switching gear too. https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/manufacturing-design/superalloy-rescues-mems-sensors null