In a paper accepted by the 2020 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), researchers at Facebook describe a method for isolating up to five voices speaking simultaneously on a single microphone. The team claims their method surpasses previous state-of-the-art performance on several speech-source separation benchmarks, including with challenging noise and reverberations.Separating speech from conversations is a crucial step toward improving communication across a range of applications, like voice messaging and video tools. Beyond this, speech separation techniques like those proposed by researchers can be applied to the problem of background noise suppression, for example in recordings of musical instruments.

VentureBeat readers likely noticed this week that our site looks different. On Thursday, we rolled out a significant design change that includes not just a new look but also a new brand structure that better reflects how we think about our audiences and our editorial mission.VentureBeat remains the flagship brand — devoted to covering transformative technology that matters to business decision makers — and now, our longtime GamesBeat sub-brand has its own homepage of sorts, and definitely its own look. And we’ve launched a new sub-brand. This one is for all of our AI content, and it’s called The Machine.By creating two distinct brands under the main VentureBeat brand, we’re leaning hard into what we’ve acknowledged internally for a long time: We’re serving more than one community of readers, and those communities don’t always overlap. There are readers who care about our AI and transformative tech coverage, and there are others who ardently follow GamesBeat. We want to continue to cultivate those communities through our written content and events. So when we reorganized our site, we created dedicated space for games and AI coverage, respectively, while leaving the homepage as the main feed.

Aryballe, a startup developing biochemical sensors, optics, and AI to collect and analyze odor data, today announced it has raised €7 million ($7.9 million). The funds will bolster product and machine learning R&D as Aryballe seeks to expand its customer base, a spokesperson said.Digital olfaction could very well be the next wave in smart sensors. Automotive manufacturers, food and beverage producers, and personal care and cosmetics companies are increasingly piloting aroma sensors to improve their customer experience. Google researchers recently trained an AI model to identify molecules and predict smells. Intel similarly demonstrated a chip that could detect 10 different odors, following IBM’s work on an “artificial tongue” designed to fingerprint various liquids.

Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink says it will share progress next month on the company’s mission to link human brains with AI. Musk made the announcement of the announcement on Twitter: When Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in September 2018, the CEO told Rogan that Neuralink’s long-term goal is to enable human brains to be... Read more » The post Neuralink will share progress on linking human brains with AI next month appeared first on AI News.

Nonprofit think tank The Future Society, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), UNESCO, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation today announced the launch of the Collective and Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19 (CAIAC), an alliance with the goal of building an AI-powered pandemic decisioning tool for policymakers, health care leaders, and scientists. CAIAC, which will be advised by United Nations-affiliated organizations including UN Global Pulse, will attempt to structure the fast-expanding collection of health, social, and economic data on the pandemic through collaborations with companies like Stability.ai, C3.ai, Element AI, Axis, GLG, and Planet.Research institutions, companies, and non-governmental organizations have rushed to apply analyses and models to data on the pandemic from countries around the world. Indeed, the number of studies about COVID-19 has risen steeply from the start of the crisis, from around 20,000 in early March to over 30,000 as of late June. Some false information has been promoted on social media and in publication venues like journals. And almost as bad, many results about the virus from different labs and sources are redundant, complementary, or even conflicting.

Simple fact: You can’t stay competitive in business today without AI playing a significant role. Whether you’re in manufacturing, retail, wealth management or health care, or whether you’re in product development, marketing, or growth — and especially if you’re the leader of it all — staying abreast of the fast-changing AI landscape is not an option.At Transform 2020, July 14-17, many of the most notable thought leaders in AI today will share their insights, experience and case studies that demonstrate real-world results — all of which you’ll take away to apply to your own business.Each day focuses on a different area of AI, with the very first day devoted to day-long workshops.

Researchers are employing AI to track the spread of COVID-19, and to get accurate information to the public via chatbots.

Anomaly detection is used to find events out of the ordinary. A new model, MIDAS, is said to get more accurate results more quickly.

Dimensionality reduction is an unsupervised learning technique. Nevertheless, it can be used as a data transform pre-processing step for machine learning algorithms on classification and regression predictive modeling datasets with supervised learning algorithms. There are many dimensionality reduction algorithms to choose from and no single best algorithm for all cases. Instead, it is a good […]

The story of quantum computing hardware companies iswellknown. But as tech giants Amazon and Microsoft push the quantum computing conversation to the cloud, we’re also seeing quantum computing software companies emerge. One such company, Zapata, is building an enterprise software platform for quantum computing.Businesses with deep pockets are increasingly exploring quantum computing, which depends on qubits to perform computations that would be much more difficult, or simply not feasible, on classical computers. Quantum advantage, the inflection point when quantum computers begin to solve useful problems, is a long way off (if it can even be achieved) but its potential is massive. Applications include everything from cryptography and optimization to machine learning and materials science.

The UK and Australia have launched a joint probe into the controversial “data scraping” practices of Clearview AI. Clearview AI has repeatedly made headlines, and rarely for good reason. The company’s facial recognition technology is impressive but relies on scraping billions of people’s data from across the web. “Common law has never recognised a right... Read more » The post UK and Australia launch joint probe into Clearview AI’s mass data scraping appeared first on AI News.

To say that the speed of technological change in AI is fast-firing is an understatement. As engineers and data scientists unlock more of the potential of AI and machine learning, ever-more innovative solutions continue to advance the goals of business leaders.At Transform 2020 next week, you’ll have a chance to see those solutions for yourself. Transform 2020 Expo (July 15-17) will showcase some of the most cutting edge AI companies, from large tech giants like Intel and Dell to some of the most innovative growth companies and startups like Dataiku, Cloudera, and Modzy.This means you’ll be able to get an up-close look at some of the most advanced solutions spanning AI security, automation, conversational AI, explainable AI, training data, as well as solutions for specialized areas, such as customer experience, and specific industries, such as wealth management.

AI researchers have created a language-model testing tool that has discovered major bugs in commercially available cloud AI offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Yesterday, a paper detailing the CheckList tool received the Best Paper award from organizers of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference. The ACL conference, which took place online this week, is one of the largest annual gatherings for researchers creating language models.NLP models today are often evaluated based on how they perform on a series of individual tasks, such as answering questions using benchmark data sets with leaderboards like GLUE. CheckList instead takes a task-agnostic approach, allowing people to create tests that fill in cells in a spreadsheet-like matrix with capabilities (in rows) and test types (in columns), along with visualizations and other resources.

Researchers from Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford recommend that AI practitioners draw on decolonial theory to reform the industry, put ethical principles into practice, and avoid further algorithmic exploitation or oppression.The researchers detailed how to build AI systems while critically examining colonialism and colonial forms of AI already in use in a preprint paper released Thursday. The paper was coauthored by DeepMind research scientists William Isaac and Shakir Mohammed and Marie-Therese Png, an Oxford doctoral student and DeepMind Ethics and Society intern who previously provided tech advice to the United Nations.The researchers posit that power is at the heart of ethics debates and that conversations about power are incomplete if they do not include historical context and recognize the structural legacy of colonialism that continues to inform power dynamics today. They further argue that inequities like racial capitalism, class inequality, and heteronormative patriarchy have roots in colonialism and that we need to recognize these power dynamics when designing AI systems to avoid perpetuating such harms.

New jobs are emerging to help organizations execute on AI strategy, with teams including multiple disciplines and executive support.

AI is being employed to improve the accuracy and precision of weather forecasting, helping farmers and the renewable energy industry.

As our writers here at VentureBeat have emphasized, diversity is a long game. We recognize there’s no instant fix to the long-standing barriers people of color as well as women face, which include important challenges to those working in tech. At the same time, change will only happen with a committed focus on these issues, which is why at VentureBeat we continue to ensure they’re a prominent pillar of our events.At Transform 2020, we’re building on the gains we made last year, and are thrilled again to offer several opportunities to dive into these issues, give ample opportunity for provocative discussion, as well as celebrate some outstanding successes.Here’s a snapshot of our diversity program:

The past year has seen remarkable change. As innovation in the field of AI and real-world applications of its constituent technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision continue to grow, so has an understanding of their social impacts.At our AI-focused Transform 2020 event, taking place July 15-17 entirely online, VentureBeat will recognize and award emergent, compelling, and influential work in AI through our second annual VB AI Innovation Awards.Drawn both from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise, knowledge, and experience of our nominating committee members, these awards give us a chance to shine a light on the people and companies making an impact in AI.

Presented by Capital OneThe ways in which we interface with machines has evolved a lot since the Industrial Revolution. Early on, professionals relied on manual interfaces (think knobs, buttons, and levers) before the development of the programming interface. We dramatically expanded the accessibility and possibilities for consumers through the keyboard and mouse, and fueled the ubiquitous adoption of mobile devices through touchscreen technology. With the more recent advent of the conversational interface, we have miraculously reduced the human-machine interaction to a simple verbal cue.What all of these human-machine interface advancements have in common is the central tenet that the human will predominantly serve as the initiator of the interaction. The cognitive load of thinking about what to do, when to do it, and how to do it lies with us. But, what if the machine took on this cognitive load and was there for you before you even knew you needed it?

Amazon today announced AWS IoT SiteWise, its managed monitoring service for industrial customers, is now generally available two years after its unveiling at AWS re:Invent 2018. SiteWise is live for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers as of this week in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland) regions, with additional server regions to follow in the coming months.Manufacturers, energy utilities, and food processors often struggle to collect, process, and analyze data from their hundreds to thousands of internet of things (IoT) sensors. Extracting data across different locations is time-consuming and expensive, because this data is typically stored in local, specialized servers that lack a common data format. Even with a data-collection pipeline in place, information like equipment type, facility location, and relationships with other equipment must be annotated manually; customers have to write custom apps to calculate and compare performance metrics across facilities to derive insights.

Google is investigating ways AI might be used to ground natural language instructions to smartphone app actions. In a study accepted to the 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference, researchers at the company propose corpora to train models that would alleviate the need to maneuver through apps, which could be useful for people with visual impairments.When coordinating efforts and accomplishing tasks involving sequences of actions — for example, following a recipe to bake a birthday cake — people provide each other with instructions. With this in mind, the researchers set out to establish a baseline for AI agents that can help with similar interactions. Given a set of instructions, these agents would ideally predict a sequence of app actions as well as the screens and interactive elements produced as the app transitions from one screen to another.

Earlier this week, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report outlining what it believes must happen for the U.S. to advance “industries of the future.” Several of the committee’s suggestions touched on the field of AI as it relates to federal, state, and private-sector partnerships, as well as departmental budgetary considerations. In particular, the report recommends that the U.S. grow nondefense federal investments in AI by 10 times over the next 10 years and for the federal government to create national AI “testbeds,” expanding the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) AI Institutes with at least one AI Institute in each state and creating a “National AI Consortia” to share capabilities, data, and resources.

(Reuters) – Amazon plans to create at least $100 million in stock awards to retain the 900-plus employees of Zoox, the self-driving car startup it offered to buy last month, and can walk away from the deal if large numbers of them turn down job offers from the technology giant.Amazon, which is aggressively expanding into self-driving technology, announced June 26 it had agreed to acquire the Silicon Valley company, which was founded on an ambitious effort to design a fully autonomous vehicle from scratch rather than retrofitting existing cars for self-driving.Amazon will pay $1.3 billion in cash for the takeover, which the parties hope to close by September, according to deal documents seen by Reuters.

The world would be better off if there was such a thing as provably beneficial AI, to prevent a self-driving car for example from veering into evil-doing.