In the News
Million-dollar babies
As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to their AI stars
The Humans hiding behind the chatbots
Interesting deep-dive into the work of humans who currently power popular chatbots and virtual assistants.
Chatbots — Igniting Division of Labour in AI
Will the best chatbots be highly specialized and if so, how will tasks be divided in the world of bots?
Inside Facebook’s biggest AI project
Review by Fortune of Facebook's evolution towards an AI powerhouse
Also in the news this week...
- Paul Allen doubles down on AI research in Seattle. More
- Google lauched an AI agent in its Calendar offering to help you achieve your goals. More
- Rutger University scientists show algorithms could judge creativity in art. More
Acquisitions and financing rounds:
- Salesforce acquired Metamind for an undisclosed amount. Metamind built services to automate customer service. The Announcement
- Luka raises $4.4M to build AI-powered chat bots. More
- Digital Genius raises $4M to make customer service agents superhuman. More
Learning
Deep Learning Book by Goodfellow and Bengio
This free online book on Deep Learning by experts Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio is now finished and available for all.
Generating Large Images from Latent Vectors
Very interesting work, using so-called Compositional Pattern Producing Networks to represent entire images as a function rather than a set of pixels. This could become a useful solution to improve current image compression and rendering approaches.
Software tools & code
Colorful Image Colorization
This new approach to transform black-and-white to color images using neural networks yields stunning results that fooled humans 20% of the time.
A Neural Network Playground
Beautiful visual tool to play with neural network training and learn how things such as the learning rate, the number of hidden layers, the activation function etc impact the network's learning capacity.
Visual question answering demo in Python notebook
Answering questions such as "What are they playing?", "What vehicle is in the picture?"
Introducing Keras 1.0
Keras is a popular Deep Learning library for Python, and its version 1 is now ready and available.
Hardware
Nvidia creates a 15B-transistor chip for deep learning
Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang announced that the company has created the Tesla P100, a new chip with 15 billion transistors. It’s the biggest chip ever made, Huang said.
Some thoughts
Music Language Modeling with RNN's
A Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network was trained on a dataset of around 650 jigs and folk tunes. The model was then used to generate musical pieces.
About
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