A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
Look ma, no hands
!By Emmett Smith
When we talk about autonomous vehicles, we almost always talk about cars. However, a number of ambitious pioneers are trying to teach AI systems the intricately human art of riding a bike. It turns out that mastering that craft can be an important step in achieving artificial general intelligence.
Retailers have turned to AI to replace photoshoots and predict what people will want to buy and wear in the future
Julie Bornstein spent two years quietly building AI shopping app THE YES to launch it in March 2020. Then the pandemic struck – and changed what people were wearing. “Right now, we’re in a heavy comfort zone,” Bornstein says. The pandemic has meant demand for tracksuit bottoms and work-from-home clothing is high. But as vaccines allow people more freedom, trends are expected to reverse.
THE YES is part of a new wave of companies using AI to personalise how people shop online. It pulls items of clothing from brands and retailers’ websites and shows them in a feed within the app. Think of it like a clothing version of Tinder: if users like the dress being shown, they tap “yes”. If they’re not interested, they tap “no”. But, unlike Tinder, it can improve the items it shows over time by using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Every like and dislike is fed back to the underlying machine learning models to inform each personalised feed of items users can then buy, and no two people’s recommendations are the same. “AI is simply the ability to understand consumer behaviour and act on it,” says Bornstein, the former chief operating officer of personal styling service Stitch Fix. “The problem with e-commerce is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist to do that today. You need to rebuild the tech stack.”
Continue reading… “The AI that fashion is using to reinvent itself”A swarm of drones could launch attacks on their own
By Ameya Paleja
The system is fed with data from satellites, other reconnaissance drones, aerial vehicles, and intel collected by the ground unit.
In July 2019, unidentified drones swarmed the US Navy destroyers, triggering an alert. In May of 2021, Israel allowed the use of drone swarms to locate, identify, and attack Hamas militants, in what is likely the first-ever use of drone swarms in combat.
Last month, we had reported that Israel deployed a semi-autonomous robot during the recent Gaza conflict. Carrying a machine gun, this robot named Jaguar, was capable of driving to a designated location, returning fire, and even self-destructing when compromised. However, the robot needed a human operator to initiate the firing from the machine gun.
A fully autonomous drone swarm is a different level of technology altogether. It is a networked entity that is not controlled by human operators at all. Operated by artificial intelligence (AI), it can continue its mission, even if loses some drones during its mission. The machine learning system is fed with data sourced from satellites, other reconnaissance drones, and aerial vehicles, as well as intel collected by ground units.
Continue reading… “Israel Just Used Fully AI Controlled Drone Swarms in a World First”Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been creating quite a stir across all industries, including the Connected TV (CTV) realm. In fact, it has already switched from being an attribute of siloed players to become something most actors dip their toes into.
While AI-driven data mining helps build predictions and foresee peoples’ attitudes to video content, machine learning algorithms segment viewers according to their habits. With such a slew of capabilities, no wonder AI has received a warm welcome in the CTV space.
Continue reading… “How AI Is Bringing Intelligence to TV Screens”If you imagine how a food and beverage company creates new offerings, your mind likely fills with images of white-coated researchers pipetting flavors and taste-testing like mad scientists. This isn’t wrong, but it’s only part of the picture today. More and more, companies in the space are tapping AI for product development and every subsequent step of the product journey.
At PepsiCo, for example, multiple teams tap AI and data analytics in their own ways to bring each product to life. It starts with using AI to collect intel on potential flavors and product categories, allowing the R&D team to glean the types of insights consumers don’t report in focus groups. It ends with using AI to analyze how those data-driven decisions played out.
“It’s that whole journey, from innovation to marketing campaign development to deciding where to put it on shelf,” Stephan Gans, chief consumer insights and analytics officer at PepsiCo, told VentureBeat. “And not just like, ‘Yeah, let’s launch this at the A&P.’ But what A&P. Where on the shelf in that particular neighborhood A&P.”
Continue reading… “How PepsiCo uses AI to create products consumers don’t know they want”Besides cooking, cleaning and driving, some robots are now also able to give people a beauty treatment. An auto-manicurist uses artificial intelligence to help people get their dream nails.
Sidekicks are a unique take on the trend for AI companion robots” offering a holographic artificial intelligent friend which is voice-enabled and equipped with emotions and more. Equipped with a holographic display the Sidekick artificial intelligent companion has been designed to interact with its owner offering a variety of different features. Launched via Kickstarter this month the project has already raised is required pledge goal thanks to over 160 backers with still 23 days remaining. The AI companion is available as a digital application or can be housed in its own special environment.
Specially priced early bird pledges are now available for the innovative project from roughly $69 or £50 (depending on current exchange rates). If the Sidekicks campaign successfully raises its required pledge goal and fullfilment progresses smoothly, worldwide shipping is expected to take place sometime around January 2022. To learn more about the Sidekicks holographic AI companions.
The new machine will be a close relative to Tesla’s upcoming Dojo supercomputer.
By Chris Young
Tesla’s Senior Director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, unveiled the electric vehicle automaker’s new supercomputer during a presentation at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
Last year, Elon Musk highlighted Tesla’s plans to build a “beast” of a neural network training supercomputer called “Dojo”.
For several years, the company has been teasing its Dojo supercomputer, which Musk has hinted will be the world’s fastest supercomputer, outperforming the current world leader, Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer which runs at 415 petaflops.
The new supercomputer seems to be a predecessor to the Dojo project, with Karpathy stating that it is the number five supercomputer in the world in terms of floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
This supercomputer is certainly not lacking in the processing department. As Karpathy highlights in his presentation, the supercomputer has 720 nodes of 8x A100 80GB (5760 GPUs total). It also has 1.8 EFLOPS (720 nodes * 312 TFLOPS-FP16-A100 * 8 gpu/nodes), 10 PB of “hot tier” NVME storage @ 1.6 TBps, and 640 Tbps of total switching capacity.
Continue reading… “Tesla Shows Off Its Brand New AI-Training Supercomputer”By Andy Meek
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un can angrily denounce K-pop as a “vicious cancer” all he wants. It’s not just that pop music has become one of the most beloved exports from his neighbor to the south, but the same holds true for pretty much the entirety of South Korean popular culture — everything from movies to music and TV shows, which have combined to form a staggeringly massive entertainment industry juggernaut, with few if any equals.
Netflix, for example, recognizes this and is currently pouring millions of dollars into funding new original Korean dramas and movies, like the newly released emotional masterpiece Move to Heaven, about a “trauma cleaner” and his uncle who pack up the belongings of people who’ve died and help their families to move on. All told, Netflix reportedly plans to spend half a billion dollars in 2021 on South Korean content, which also coincides with a moment that finds South Korean pop groups (like Blackpink and BTS) being among the biggest in the world. Those two groups, in particular, have millions of global fans and incomprehensibly massive audiences across social media — which might explain why the four members of Blackpink, in particular, got their own documentary treatment on Netflix, via their movie Light Up The Sky. Meanwhile, technology is also helping point toward a futuristic and potentially even more lucrative new chapter for Korean pop music. Case in point is the new K-pop group called Eternity, which recently made its debut via the song I’m Real, although this 11-member girl group is much different from anything else in the K-pop universe right now.
That’s because, with apologies to the message conveyed by Eternity’s debut song, the members are, in fact, not real. This new K-pop group, which is the product of AI graphics company Pulse 9, was created using deepfake technology to simulate hyper-realistic images of faux K-pop stars in the vein of some of the genre’s biggest female acts, a la Blackpink, Red Velvet, and Itzy.
“Unlike human singers,” Pulse 9 CEO Park Ji-eun told the South China Morning Post, “AI members can freely express themselves and weigh in on diverse social issues because they are less vulnerable to malicious comments and criticisms. As a creator, I can also add more fantastical and (impactful) elements to them, making them more distinguishable from existing K-pop acts.”
Continue reading… “Watch: This new K-pop group was created with AI and deepfake technology”When the Mayflower leaves its home port in Plymouth, England to attempt the world’s first fully autonomous transatlantic voyage, it will be guided by a highly trained, artificial intelligence-driven ‘captain’ and a ‘navigator’ versed in the rules of avoiding collisions at sea
Over its roughly three-week trip from England to the United States, the Mayflower will be guided by an artificial intelligence-powered ‘captain’ and make the journey without humans on board.
Another ship called the Mayflower is set to make its way across the Atlantic Ocean this week, but it won’t be carrying English pilgrims — or any people — at all.
When the Mayflower Autonomous Ship leaves its home port in Plymouth, England to attempt the world’s first fully autonomous transatlantic voyage, it will have a highly trained “captain” and a “navigator” versed in the rules of avoiding collisions at sea on board, both controlled by artificial intelligence (AI).
The ship’s AI captain was developed by Marine AI and is guided by an expert system based on IBM technologies, including automation software widely used by the financial sector. The technology could someday help crewed vessels navigate difficult situations and facilitate low-cost exploration of the oceans that cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface.
Over its roughly three-week trip, the Mayflower sea drone will sail through the Isles of Scilly and over the site of the lost Titanic to land in Plymouth, Massachusetts, as the colonists on the first Mayflower did more than 400 years ago.
Continue reading… “Mayflower AI sea drone readies maiden transatlantic voyage”A new breakthrough study develops artificial intelligence algorithm that will serve to help doctors and researchers around the world to learn more about sleep disorders in the future and help treat difficulty in sleeping, sleep apnea and narcolepsy
In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Computer Science have collaborated with the Danish Center for Sleep Medicine at the Danish hospital Rigshospitalet to develop an artificial intelligence algorithm that can improve diagnoses, treatments, and our overall understanding of sleep disorders.
Difficulty sleeping, sleep apnea and narcolepsy are among a range of sleep disorders that thousands of Danes suffer from. Furthermore, it is estimated that sleep apnea is undiagnosed in as many as 200,000 Danes.
“The algorithm is extraordinarily precise. We completed various tests in which its performance rivalled that of the best doctors in the field, worldwide,” states Mathias Perslev, a PhD at the Department of Computer Science and lead author of the study, recently published in the journal npj Digital Medicine (link).
Today’s sleep disorder examinations typically begin with admittance to a sleep clinic. Here, a person’s night sleep is monitored using various measuring instruments. A specialist in sleep disorders then reviews the 7-8 hours of measurements from the patient’s overnight sleep.
The doctor manually divides these 7-8 hours of sleep into 30-second intervals, all of which must be categorized into different sleep phases, such as REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, light sleep, deep sleep, etc. It is a time-consuming job that the algorithm can perform in seconds.
“This project has allowed us to prove that these measurements can be very safely made using machine learning– which has great significance. By saving many hours of work, many more patients can be assessed and diagnosed effectively,” explains Poul Jennum, professor of neurophysiology and Head of the Danish Center for Sleep Medicine.
Continue reading… “Here’s how new artificial intelligence algorithm can treat sleep disorder”Most of us take it for granted that we can read another person’s emotions through subtleties such as body language, yet this is a real struggle for many others. Enter emotion AI.
Researchers at Stanford University modified Google’s augmented reality glasses to read emotions in others and notify the wearer. The glasses detect someone’s mood through their eye contact, facial expressions and body language, and then tell the wearer what emotions it’s picking up.
“Emotion AI taps into the individual,” explains Zabeth Venter, CEO and co-founder of Averly. “If you think about facial recognition, which is a kind of emotion AI, I can pick up if you like what I’m saying by whether your smile is a smirk or a real genuine smile.”
Such nuances go deeper. Another example is polling: what is your favourite colour? Maybe it’s purple. But did you say that enthusiastically? Did you hesitate? Did you just say it to say something? Did you even understand the question?
We simply can’t get this level of context from the available surveys, sales data and the many other ways we try to understand humans through information. But through emotion AI, we can grasp incredible nuance.
Continue reading… “How Emotion AI Can Make the World a Better Place”
