In the News
Chatbots with social skills will convince you to buy something
Virtual assistants that can read social cues and nonverbal signals are less jarring—and surprisingly persuasive.
What to know before you get in a self-driving car
Uber thinks its self-driving taxis could change the way millions of people get around. But autonomous vehicles aren’t anywhere near to being ready for the roads.
Also in the news this week...
- Alphabet creates a stand-alone self-driving car business. More
- Uber has quietly launched Uber freight, its effort to run autonomous trucks, based on Otto's technology. More
- Pittsburgh will be rolling out smart traffic signals. They will have both smart cars (with Uber's experiment) and smart traffic signals. Interesting. More
- Yoshua Bengio launches Element AI, a Deep Learning incubator. More
- Apple Hires Carnegie Mellon AI Academic to Push Machine Learning. More
Learning
Raising money as a Deep Learning startup
"Deep learning startups are in vogue, but that doesn’t mean fundraising is easy. Here are the pitfalls startups should avoid to get funded and build a business."
Google AI creates its own cryptographic algorithm
The Google Brain Team built 3 neural networks named Alice, Bob, and Eve. Alice had to send a secure message to Bob; Bob had to try and decrypt the message; and Eve had to try and eavesdrop on the message and try to decrypt it.
Software tools & code
Cognitive Toolkit 2.0 by Microsoft
Microsoft announced the beta launch of version 2.0 of its open-source general-purpose deep learning framework (previously called CNTK, and now called "Cognitive Toolkit"), along with better Python support.
Neural-enhance: Super Resolution for images
Docker image and tools to train your own super-resolution neural network. Best results are achieved with networks specifically trained for your task.
spaCy v1.0: Deep Learning with custom pipelines and Keras
The author claims that this is "the fastest NLP library in the world".
Hardware
How AI is shaking up the chip market
Google and Microsoft are building their own chips to run Deep Learning application (TPU and FPGAs), signaling a radical shift in the chip market and a possible threat to Intel, nVidia, IBM.
Inside Apple’s custom GPU for the iPhone
Apple originally licensed its iPhone/iPad GPUs from Imagination Technologies but has now moved to building its own custom GPU. Here's a technical look into this piece of hardware.
Some thoughts
Why I’m teaching Twitch to predict the future
"If you devote 20 solid hours to predictions over the next 6 months; I’m 70% confident you’ll evaluate yourself as being 10% better at predicting the future when you review your predictions."
Memo to the DOJ by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Facial Recognition’s threat to privacy is worse than anyone thought"
About
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