Amazon makes three major AI announcements during re:Invent 2019

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Amazon has kicked off its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas and made three major AI announcements.

During a midnight keynote, Amazon unveiled Transcribe Medical, SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes, and DeepComposer.

Transcribe Medical

The first announcement we'll be talking about is likely to have the biggest impact on people's lives soonest.

Transcribe Medical is designed to transcribe medical speech for primary care. The feature is aware of...

3 December 2019 | Amazon

Wyze is ‘temporarily’ axing its AI-powered person detection

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Security camera maker Wyze will "temporarily" remove its AI-powered person detection feature. 

Wyze's partner for the feature, Xnor.ai, made the decision to terminate their agreement.

In a post on its forums, Wyze explained its agreement with Xnor.ai included a clause allowing the contract to be terminated “at any moment without reason.”

A reason for the abrupt contract termination has not been provided. AI News has reached out to Xnor.ai for comment but...

28 November 2019 | Hardware

GE Healthcare’s new initiative aims to boost AI adoption by health providers

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GE Healthcare launched its Edison Developer Program on Tuesday, an initiative aimed at boosting the adoption of AI by health providers.

Edison is an AI platform launched last year to help with leveraging data from imaging devices.

Kieran Murphy, President and CEO at GE Healthcare, says:

“We introduced Edison just one year ago at RSNA to help health providers take advantage of data in new and significant ways.

With the introduction of the Edison...

27 November 2019 | Adoption

Opinion: AI for software development is already here

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Being a developer is more demanding than ever. The repetitive tasks that make up so much of software development can be time-consuming and error-prone. Talent is in short supply, teams are overworked, and many businesses can’t keep up with both increasingly complex existing code and the growing market for new application development. 

For AI enthusiasts, speculating about how artificial intelligence can improve software development is exciting. Will AI help create prototypes in...

25 November 2019 | Developers

Do you even AI, bro? OpenAI Safety Gym enhances reinforcement learning

Elon Musk-founded OpenAI has opened the doors of its "Safety Gym" designed to enhance the training of reinforcement learning agents.

OpenAI describes Safety Gym as "a suite of environments and tools for measuring progress towards reinforcement learning agents that respect safety constraints while training."

Basically, Safety Gym is the software equivalent of your spotter making sure you're not going to injure yourself. And just like a good spotter, it will check your...

22 November 2019 | OpenAI

F-Secure details nature-inspired AI project harnessing ‘swarm intelligence’

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Cybersecurity giant F-Secure has detailed Project Blackfin, an AI initiative which harnesses nature-inspired “swarm intelligence” techniques.

The concept sounds similar to Fetch.ai in that decentralised autonomous AI agents will collaborate in order to achieve common goals.

Cambridge-based Fetch.ai is focusing its efforts on the use of autonomous AI agents for IoT purposes. Naturally, F-Secure is currently seeking to use such agents to further improve the company’s...

21 November 2019 | Security

Japan will welcome Pope Francis with a song partly composed by AI

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A Japanese artist will use a song partly composed by AI to welcome Pope Francis, who recently shared his concerns about the technology.

The song, “Protect all Life - The Signs of the Times,” is written by Jun Inoue.

Inoue is a Catholic himself and created an AI program which can generate a song in just a few seconds.

“I thought I should give everything I had to the song, so I decided to put in all the cutting-edge technology I had,” Inoue told...

20 November 2019 | Japan

Gaming legend John Carmack is stepping back at Oculus to focus on AI

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Gaming industry legend John Carmack is stepping back from his role at Oculus to focus on AI development.

Carmack made his name in the video game industry after being responsible for groundbreaking titles such as Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake. He took up the role of CTO at Oculus to help bring about the next big thing in gaming, VR.

While not entirely stepping down from Oculus, Carmack is transitioning into a "Consulting CTO" role. This role, he says, will enable him to...

14 November 2019 | AGI

Project Nightingale: Google denies using private health data for its AI research

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Google has denied using private health data for its own AI research following The Wall Street Journal’s exposé of Project Nightingale.

Project Nightingale is Google’s codename for its partnership with Ascension, the US’ second-largest health system. The project enables Google to access the health information of around 50 million American patients.

Ascension reportedly did not tell doctors and patients that it was sharing data – including the names, histories,...

13 November 2019 | Ethics

Deepfake has Johnson and Corbyn advocating each other for Britain’s next PM

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A think tank has released two deepfake videos which appear to show election rivals Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn advocating each other for Britain’s top role.

The clips are produced by Future Advocacy and intend to show that people can no longer necessarily trust what they see in videos, not just to question what they read and hear.

Here’s the Johnson video:

Boris Johnson has a message for you.#GE2019...

12 November 2019 | Deepfakes