Microsoft: The UK must increase its AI skills, or risk falling behind

A report from Microsoft warns that the UK faces an AI skills gap which may harm its global competitiveness.

The research, titled AI Skills in the UK, shines a spotlight on some concerning issues.

For its UK report, Microsoft used data from a global AI skills study featuring more than 12,000 people in 20 countries to see how the UK is doing in comparison to the rest of the world.

Most notably, compared to the rest of the world, the UK is seeing a higher failure...

12 August 2020 | Adoption

DARPA’s AI-powered jet fight will be held virtually due to COVID-19

An upcoming event to display and test AI-powered jet fighters will now be held virtually due to COVID-19.

“We are still excited to see how the AI algorithms perform against each other as well as a Weapons School-trained human and hope that fighter pilots from across the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as military leaders and members of the AI tech community will register and watch online,” said Col. Dan Javorsek, program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology...

10 August 2020 | Government

University College London: Deepfakes are the ‘most serious’ AI crime threat

Researchers from University College London have released a ranking of what experts believe to be the most serious AI crime threats.

The researchers first created a list of 20 expected ways AI will be used by criminals within the next 15 years. 31 experts were then asked to rank them by potential severity.

Deepfakes – AI-generated images, videos, and articles – ranked top of the list as the most serious threat.

New and dangerous territory

It’s of little...

6 August 2020 | Deepfakes

AI tool detects child abuse images with 99% accuracy

A new AI-powered tool claims to detect child abuse images with around 99 percent accuracy.

The tool, called Safer, is developed by non-profit Thorn to assist businesses which do not have in-house filtering systems to detect and remove such images.

According to the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK, reports of child abuse images surged 50 percent during the COVID-19 lockdown. In the 11 weeks starting on 23rd March, its hotline logged 44,809 reports of images compared...

31 July 2020 | Applications

Google’s Model Card Toolkit aims to bring transparency to AI

Google has released a toolkit which it hopes will bring some transparency to AI models.

People are wary of big tech companies like Google. People are also concerned about AI. Combine the two and you've got a general distrust which can hinder important advancements.

Model Card Toolkit aims to step in and facilitate AI model transparency reporting for developers, regulators, and downstream...

30 July 2020 | Adoption

Researchers create AI bot to protect the identities of BLM protesters

Researchers from Stanford have created an AI-powered bot to automatically cover up the faces of Black Lives Matter protesters in photos.

Everyone should have the right to protest. And, if done legally, to do so without fear of having things like their future job prospects ruined because they've been snapped at a demonstration – from which a select few may have gone on to do criminal acts such as arson and looting.

With images from the protests being widely shared on...

29 July 2020 | Bots

Musk predicts AI will be superior to humans within five years

Elon Musk has made another of his trademark predictions – this time, it’s that AI will be superior to humans within five years.

Musk has been among the most vocal prominent figures in warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence. In 2018, for example, Musk famously warned that AI could become “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape” and that the technology is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

Speaking in a New York Times interview, Musk...

28 July 2020 | Adoption

Deep learning is being used to predict critical COVID-19 cases

Researchers from Tencent, along with other Chinese scientists, are using deep learning to predict critical COVID-19 cases.

Scientists around the world are doing incredible work to increase our understanding of COVID-19. Thanks to their findings, existing medications have been discovered to increase the likelihood of surviving the virus.

Unfortunately, there are still fatalities. People with weakened immune systems or underlying conditions are most at risk, but it’s a...

23 July 2020 | Healthcare

DeepCode provides AI code reviews for over four million developers

AI-powered code reviewer DeepCode has announced it’s checked the code of over four million developers.

DeepCode’s machine learning-based bot is fluent in JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C/C++, and Python.

“Our data shows that over 50% of repositories have critical issues and every second pull-request has warnings about issues that need to be fixed,” said Boris Paskalev, CEO and co-founder of DeepCode.

“By using DeepCode, these issues are automatically...

21 July 2020 | Applications

British AI chipmaker Graphcore claims Nvidia’s crown with GC200 processor

Graphcore, a British AI chipmaker, has unveiled a powerful new processor which takes Nvidia’s crown.

Bristol-based Graphcore ranked number one on Fast Company’s top 10 most innovative AI companies of 2020 list. Nvidia, for comparison, ranked fifth.

Fast Company’s confidence in Graphcore clearly isn’t misplaced. Announcing its GC200 processor, Graphcore says its new chip is the world’s most complex.

The GC200 processor boasts 59.4 billion transistors...

15 July 2020 | Hardware