Boston Dynamics has finally started to pivot from research towards manufacture of commercial products, with the following uses as priority: – entertainment – the first and easiest scenario – emergency response – eg search and rescue, surveillance – Security – think about automating property line walks etc. Longer term, they see their devices: – warehouse…

In a clear message to publishers (“We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic…That is the old world and there is no going back”), Facebook has reminded them both of the power it wields, and of their responsibilities – it’s not Facebook’s job to revive the business model of old school publishing,…

At $10,000 for the top end card, NVIDA is clearly aiming these at professional video editing suites, but the addition of built in Tensor Core units aims to speed up end to end editing of film and game graphics – perhaps automating the removal of guide wires from shots, or removing artefacts or entire actual…

AI models are complex and take time and compute power to generate – meaning they're expensive and valuable. IBM has been developing a way to "watermark" deep learning models by embedding specific information in to the model during training such that it's impossible (or very hard) to remove later, allowing definitive identification of model theft.…

HBR's list of steps to making your AI projects more likely to be successful: – ensure your purpose is clear. AI only adds value in the context of your business model and processes. – chose carefully what you automate – the value is in expanding human effectiveness, not replacing humans entirely – pick the right…

Indian researchers have created a solution capable of detecting motorcycle drivers riding without a helmet. When linked to existing surveillance systems and the police, the technology could identify riders and then alert police teams further up the road to intercept them. Hopefully, it'll be used to improve road safety. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/iit-hyderabad-develops-artificial-intelligence-to-catch-bikers-without-helmets/articleshow/65109382.cms IIT researchers have developed a…

In a scary development, China expects to deploy AI powered submarines capable of executing weapon strikes on targets within the next 2-3 years. https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2018/07/23/china-sea-power-unmanned-ai-submarines/ China is planning to upgrade its naval power with unmanned AI submarines that aim to provide an edge over the fleets of their global counterparts.

Although some are pitching it as "replacing" human call centre workers, a more likely scenario is that mundane or routine interactions can be completely automated, allowing human workers to spend more time on more meaningful, complex or sensitive activities. Yes, this will probably lead to individual call centres hiring fewer people, it could well pan…

Planning how to deploy people and resources (like water and fertiliser) to make the best use of yield is critical to optimising costs in highly volatile industries like wine making. Using drones to survey vineyards (which takes just 15 minutes), and analysing the results using AI, produces faster and more accurate results – the system…

Although (in theory) any randomly scrambled Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20-26 moves, current solutions are basically based on brute force searches. Given the massive number of combinations (4.3 × 10^19), one major challenge to training a system is the sparse reward mechanism – DeepMind's paper outlines the use of a new algorithm –…