The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates an automated future that’s already on its way. It serves as a wake-up call to all AI, robotics, and driverless car startups: stop building eye-dazzling demos and talking about the future possibility of general-use AI. Instead, focus on deploying real-world solutions that can run 24 hours a day with minimum human intervention and deliver true value to users.Thousands of Americans have started to work from home amidst the current pandemic. Retailers have struggled with supply while nervous consumers are hoarding everything from toilet paper to hand soap. Across the globe, Chinese e-commerce giant JD began testing a level 4 autonomous delivery robot in Wuhan and running its automated warehouses 24 hours a day to cope with a surge in demand.

Though the EV advocates will get angry at me, I’d claim there is as much if not more calls for an AI self-driving car than for an EV.

“We know there is a lack of women and diversity in tech; I see it starkly reflected in the data and AI teams that I've built.”

Huiying Medical, a medical devices company based in Huizhou, China, claims to have developed an AI imaging solution that uses CT chest scans to detect the presence of COVID-19. The company asserts that it might be useful in regions of the world without access to reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), the standard testing method for COVID-19.According to Intel, which highlighted Huiying’s work in a blog post today, Huiying — a member of Intel’s AI Builders program, a market enablement program for OEMs, system integrators, and software vendors — developed the solution’s underpinning algorithms based on CT data from over 4,000 coronavirus cases. It analyzes what’s known as ground-glass opacity (GGO) in the lungs, which indicates a partial filling of air spaces, as well as other indicators that inform a probability of suspected COVID-19 infection.

On Thursday afternoon, the United States became the country with the greatest number of known COVID-19 cases in the world. With millions out of work and the spread of the virus taking its toll, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and in anguish without ever getting off the couch.Inadequately supplied frontline healthcare workers are the heroes in the trenches of this war, but the world’s scientific community is also considering how it can respond and provide solutions. People with expertise in AI, data science, and tech tools are in demand right now as the world scrambles for ways to avert disaster. In last week’s newsletter, VentureBeat AI editor Seth Colaner characterized it as a kind of digital flotilla

Presented by DocuSignTaking business processes digital can help reduce errors, speed up agreements, reduce costs, and most importantly, turn the focus on growing an SMB. To learn more about modernizing business processes with technology, don’t miss this VB Live event!Register free here!For small businesses, growth directly translates to gaining more customers. But the trick is knowing when and where to allocate time and money – the lifeblood of an SMB. All money spent marketing, whether that’s going toward keeping existing customers or spent on actively wooing new customers, ultimately impacts cash flow, receivables, and inventory.Without striking the difficult balance between maintaining a solid customer base and growing a larger audience, small businesses rapidly run into cash flow issues, says Leo Rodriguez, small business ecosystem director, DocuSign Inc. And in today’s climate, he adds, cash flow is king.

Organizers of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) shared details about what will be one of the largest-ever all-digital AI research conferences. The weeklong, online-only affair will feature more than 650 machine learning works. ICLR will include live chat, live Zoom video calls for Q&As and research author meetings, and the ability to upvote questions or vote for speakers using Slido.ICLR was initially scheduled to take place next month in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but with a global pandemic underway and shelter in place orders asking one in five people worldwide to stay home, the conference will now take place entirely online. ICLR organizers told VentureBeat they’re treating the cancellation as an opportunity to develop a model for remote conferences. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICLR board members like Yoshua Bengio had championed remote paper presentations as a way to reduce the carbon footprint of AI conferences.

Multioutput regression are regression problems that involve predicting two or more numerical values given an input example. An example might be to predict a coordinate given an input, e.g. predicting x and y values. Another example would be multi-step time series forecasting that involves predicting multiple future time series of a given variable. Many machine …

Today, following the launch of a Facebook program that’s matching developers with organizations to build solutions that inform people about COVID-19, Facebook revealed the steps it’s taking to help Messenger users stay connected. Via a new hub — the Messenger Coronavirus Community Hub — the network is providing tips and resources to help users stay in touch with friends, family, colleagues, and community while preventing the spread of misinformation.“Messenger helps you feel together with the people you care about, even when you can’t be together,” wrote Stan Chudnovsky in a blog post. “Around the world, we’ve seen significant increases in people using Messenger for group calls to stay in touch with their loved ones. Globally, 70% more people are participating in group video calls and time spent on group video calls has doubled. Whether it’s a one-on-one conversation with a friend or a video call with your extended family, Messenger can help keep you connected to your support system and help get us through these challenging times.”

A proposed clinical data sharing framework from doctors at Stanford University promises to spark a lively debate about who owns the data.

The White House has issued a “call to action” for AI researchers to fight the coronavirus spread, and private industry races to discover effective drugs.

This month, under the strain millions of people self-quarantined by COVID-19 have placed on broadband infrastructure, Facebook, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Netflix, and YouTubeagreed to temporarily reduce download speeds and video streaming quality in countries around the world. Nearly 90 out of the top 200 U.S. cities saw internet speeds decline in the past week, according to BroadbandNow. And Akamai found that global traffic on March 18 was running 67% higher than the typical daily average.As a result of government and employer mandates to “shelter in place” and work remotely from home, internet subscribers are consuming more bandwidth than during the holidays and sporting events like the Super Bowl. At the same time, ISPs are under regulatory and consumer pressure to maintain a baseline quality of service. According to new research from Park Associates, 76% of households say it would be difficult to go without broadband. And in March, FCC chair Ajit Pai introduced the Keep Americans Connected Pledge, a telecom industry measure that asks companies to prioritize connectivity for essential services.

Seattle-based Textio is introducing new AI-powered tools this week that detect and help employers remove language from job applications that can make older people, women, or people of color feel excluded. With exclusionary language removed, and increasing accommodation language included, companies can hire job candidates faster by reaching the broadest array of people. For companies like Nvidia, for example, its use of Textio has led to a higher number of female job applicants.Textio uses natural language processing to color-highlight and interrupt bias communication in workplace text like job applications, LinkedIn job candidate outreach, or emails on Outlook or Gmail. Accommodation language and ageism-fighting AI will be made available through the Textio connected language platform and through integrations with job applicant tracking systems like Greenhouse and soon Workday.

A preprint paper coauthored by Uber AI scientists and Jeff Clune, a research team leader at San Francisco startup OpenAI, describes Fiber, an AI development and distributed training platform for methods including reinforcement learning (which spurs AI agents to complete goals via rewards) and population-based learning. The team says that Fiber expands the accessibility of large-scale parallel computation without the need for specialized hardware or equipment, enabling non-experts to reap the benefits of genetic algorithms in which populations of agents evolve rather than individual members.As the researchers point out, increasing computation underlies many recent advances in machine learning, with more and more algorithms relying on distributed training for processing an enormous amount of data. (OpenAI Five, OpenAI’s Dota 2-playing bot, was trained on 256 graphics cards and 1280,000 processor cores on Google Cloud.) But reinforcement and population-based methods pose challenges for reliability, efficiency, and flexibility that some frameworks fall short of satisfying.

Dremio, which offers tools that help to streamline and curate data, today announced that it has raised $70 million in equity growth financing. CEO Billy Bosworth says it will fuel the expansion of the company’s product capabilities as well as its go-to-market and engineering operations, which could benefit businesses looking to connect, analyze, and process data while accelerating database queries.Dremio offers a virtualization toolkit that bridges the gaps among relational databases, Hadoop, NoSQL, ElasticSearch, and other data stores, connecting to business intelligence software as if it were a primary data source and querying it via SQL. The startup’s eponymous platform maintains a catalog of sources, physical and virtual datasets, and data sets’ lineage, making it easy to search and find data sets and see how data are being transformed.

An AI system exposed the shameful number of Brits who ignored advice to stay home, socially distance, and only travel if essential amid the coronavirus outbreak. British PM Boris Johnson said he wanted to avoid the draconian measures in place in other countries if possible. However, if coronavirus cases and deaths continue to climb –... Read more » The post AI exposed Brits ignoring advice to stay home and socially distance appeared first on AI News.

Still in a development stage, quantum computing is starting to advance into a new era, where it is posed to accelerate AI and IoT.

A University of California, Berkeley robotics lab is developing AI systems for polyculture gardening as part of AlphaGarden, an AUTOLAB project that wants to find out if humans can train robotic control systems to fully automate a polyculture garden of edible plants and invasive species. The AUTOLAB robotics laboratory is perhaps best known for creating the DexNet system for robotic grasping.AUTOLAB director Ken Goldberg said the goal is to find out if AI can learn a function as complex as polyculture gardening, or farming with multiple species of plants growing alongside one another, instead of monoculture growing, a single-crop strategy commonly practiced today.“I think that’s an open question. I don’t know if we can,” he said. “It certainly might be interesting to be able to have a fully automated garden. In my own view it’s probably unlikely to be viable as a real functioning productive garden. I think that it’s going to be very hard to learn, and that’s the art side of the lesson, which is that nature is very complex, and that we can put some very complex machinery on it, but it’s not going to necessarily open up and be controllable.”

When it comes to fighting online toxicity and sexual abuse of children, most companies say they are supportive. But complying with the laws can become tricky.The proposed federal legislation, dubbed the EARN IT Act (short for Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies), creates incentives for companies to “earn” their liability protection for laws that take place on their platform, particularly related to online child sexual abuse. Civil libertarians have condemned it as a way to circumvent encryption and an attempt to scan all messages.If passed, the bipartisan legislation could force companies to react, said Carlos Figueiredo, director of community trust and safety at Two Hat Security, in an interview with VentureBeat. The legislation would take the extraordinary step of removing legal protections for tech companies that fail to police the illegal content. That would lower the bar for suing tech companies.

In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers affiliated with Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 AI Research describe a challenge — video-and-language inference — that tasks AI with inferring whether a statement is entailed or contradicted by a given video clip. The idea is to spur investigations into video-and-language understanding, they say, which could enhance tools used in the enterprise for automatic meeting transcription.As the researchers explain, video-and-language inference requires a thorough interpretation of both visual and textual clues. They to this end introduce a video data set comprising realistic scenes paired with statements from crowdsourced workers via Amazon Mechanical Turk, who watched the videos accompanied by subtitles. The workers wrote statements based on their understanding of both the videos and subtitles, which not only describe explicit information in the video (e.g., objects, locations, characters, and social activity) but that also reveal comprehension of complex plots (understanding events, interpreting human emotions and relations, and inferring causal relations of events).

Google today released Semantic Reactor, a Google Sheets add-on for experimenting with natural language models. The tech giant describes it as a demonstration of how natural language understanding (NLU) can be used with pretrained, generic AI models, as well as a means to dispel intimidation around using machine learning.“Companies are using NLU to create digital personal assistants, customer service bots, and semantic search engines for reviews, forums and the news,” wrote Google AI researchers Ben Pietrzak, Steve Pucci, and Aaron Cohen in a blog post. “However, the perception that using NLU and machine learning is costly and time-consuming prevents a lot of potential users from exploring its benefits.”

Huawei has officially announced a new voice-activated virtual assistant that will be made available outside of China as the tech titan continues to build out its own versions of Google’s services.Huawei already offered its own assistant, called Xiaoyi, but the Chinese company has reportedly been working on a version for international markets for a while. Celia, as the new assistant is called, will be available first on the company’s just-announced P40 flagship lineup in six markets. There are plans to bring the assistant to other devices in future.Celia will be available in the U.K., France, Spain, Chile, Mexico, and Colombia and will be conversant in three languages — English, French, and Spanish.

Xprize, the nonprofit organization aiming to spark projects that solve “societal grand challenges,” today unveiled the Pandemic Alliance, a coalition dedicated to accelerating solutions that can be applied to COVID-19. As part of the launch, the Alliance — which includes the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Ending Pandemics, Intel, Illumina, IEEE Standards Association, MIT Solve, C2 International, Cloudbreak Health, the Foundation Botnar, McGill University, Nvidia, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, PPE Coalition, and UCSD — is calling for data scientists, clinicians, and others to share their work using the newly launched Xprize COVID-19 portal.“Technology can play a role in helping us to address the world’s largest challenges,” said Stacey Shulman, chief innovation officer and VP of Intel’s IoT Group. “Intel is partnering with Xprize to enable the larger community to find creative and impactful solutions for this global pandemic.”

Sorting through millions of possibilities, a search for battery materials delivered results in five weeks instead of 50 years.