In a major breakthrough, researchers from Deep Mind have improved the accuracy of AI lip reading, with half the error rate of previous methods, and over 50% accuracy. If embedded in to smart devices, it could make lip reading accessible to anyone with a smartphone – both helping the many people who struggle in noisy…

One obvious use case for autonomous cars is to ferry people on the "last mile" between their starting point (e.g. home, office etc.) and public transport, and Google's Waymo has started a pilot programme in Phoenix to help evaluate the model. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoenix-to-connect-people-to-public-transit/ Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business…

One of the questions we often ask in interviews is for a candidate to talk about a piece of data they've seen recently which surprised or interested them – an interest in data journalism is (for my team) an indicator of a person interested in numbers, a prerequisite for a successful career in data and…

Perhaps further evidence that "fitting to a curve" can produce syntactically and mathematically correct prose (e.g. which rhymes, has the correct pace and tone), without truly understanding the meaning of the content that's being generated, the emotion is missing. I'm sure simulation will continue to improve, but without true understanding of the causal link between…

Tesla claims its custom AI chips are capable of processing 10x frames per second compared to their current off the shelf NVIDA chips – opening up a wide range of future development opportunities. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/elon-musk-says-tesla-ai-chip-project-is-finally-coming-to-fruition.html Elon Musk said Tesla has been working on a self-driving chip for three years.

I've never considered before what's missed when faces are "blurred" to provide anonymity – of course, you lose facial expression and so emotions. A new technique allows faces to be anonymised without losing that expressive motion. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180801131551.htm Researchers have devised a way to replace the use of ‘blurring’ faces in news reports when anonymity is…

The Large Hadron Collider generates more data per second than Facebook collects in an entire year – even after compression, it's far too much to store. Through clever use of AI and machine learning, applied in real time, the data can be analysed almost as it's generated, and the system decides for itself what dat…

In an interesting piece reminding us that "it's not their fault, it's yours" if people can't follow your user interface to access features they want or could find useful, Fredric Paul argues that, without more and better thought on usability and proper reconsideration of user interfaces for functionality not just to make it "sexy", IoT…

We hear a lot about the biases and problems inherent in AI development and use – but this is an interesting approach to solving some societal problems using AI. A piece of software scans news articles and scientific citations to try and identify scientists who are notable but not represented in existing Wikipedia articles, creating…

The ACLU and nearly 70 other civil rights oranisations have pressed Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology to governments over fears of misuse. Microsoft has also asked the government to step in and regulate the technology, and others are calling it "the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented". https://medium.com/s/story/facial-recognition-is-the-perfect-tool-for-oppression-bc2a08f0fe66 It’s easy to accept…