AAAI AI-Alert for Jun 25, 2019
Amazon Explores Having Its Drones Provide 'Home Surveillance' For Customers
Gur Kimchi, vice president of Prime Air, talks about Amazon's drone delivery service. Federal officials recently approved a patent for the company to explore allowing its drones to provide "home surveillance" for its customers. Gur Kimchi, vice president of Prime Air, talks about Amazon's drone delivery service. Federal officials recently approved a patent for the company to explore allowing its drones to provide "home surveillance" for its customers. Going on vacation and want some extra security around your home?
Airlines Divert Flights Around Iran After U.S. Drone Is Shot Down
Several international airlines were diverting planes from flying over the Strait of Hormuz and parts of Iran on Friday, a day after the Iranian military shot down an American surveillance drone and the United States went to the brink of launching a retaliatory strike. The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order early Friday that prohibited all American flights in Tehran-controlled airspace above the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman because of "heightened military activities and increased political tensions." The agency said that flight operations in the area were prohibited "until further notice." United Airlines said in a statement that after a security assessment, it had suspended flights between Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey and Mumbai, India, that typically fly through Iranian airspace. The German airline Lufthansa said in an emailed statement that its planes would not fly over the Strait of Hormuz and that the diversion area was likely to expand.
The future of AI research is in Africa
In 2016, the Johannesburg team at IBM Research discovered that the process of reporting cancer data to the government, which used it to inform national health policies, took four years after diagnosis in hospitals. In the US, the equivalent data collection and analysis takes only two years. The additional lag turned out to be due in part to the unstructured nature of the hospitals' pathology reports. Human experts were reading each case and classifying it into one of 42 different cancer types, but the free-form text on the reports made this very time-consuming. So the researchers went to work on a machine-learning model that could label the reports automatically.
Voice Assistants: A Big R&D Bet Which People Rarely Use
"Alexa's responses are protected by the First Amendment" Big tech would really like you to engage with their products using your voice. Firms like Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Apple (NASDAQ:APPL), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) have collectively spent tens of billions of dollars perfecting the technology that allows their gadgets to listen attentively for your voice, understand your commands, and respond obediently. A recent survey by market research firm SUMO Heavy has found that approximately 30% of US adults are active users of voice assistants. As far as the device type, the bulk (49%), use voice assistants with their smartphone, followed by smart speaker, and then PC. Those that do use voice assistants on their smartphone tend to be iPhone users.
Renault and Nissan agree to explore driverless services partnership with Waymo in France and Japan
DETROIT/PARIS - French automaker Renault SA, its partner Nissan Motor Co. and tech giant Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo have agreed to assess the feasibility of a partnership to develop and use self-driving vehicles to transport people and goods in France and Japan, the companies said on Thursday. The potential venture could also be expanded to other markets, the companies said. If the partnership is realized, it will have ramifications for other alliances and other self-driving projects, most of which have yet to hit the road. Automakers across the world are rethinking independent autonomous vehicle efforts, and are instead looking for partners to share rising investment costs and regulatory risks. A potential competitor to a Renault-Nissan-Waymo venture in Japan would be Monet Technologies, a self-driving project involving Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. backed by SoftBank Group Corp. SoftBank and Honda have also invested in General Motors Co.'s Cruise self-driving car unit.
Iran says Revolutionary Guard shot down U.S. drone
TEHRAN - Iran's Revolutionary Guard said Thursday it shot down a U.S. drone amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington over its collapsing nuclear deal. The U.S. military declined to immediately comment. The reported shootdown of the RQ-4 Global Hawk comes after the U.S. military previously alleged Iran fired a missile at another drone last week that responded to the attack on two oil tankers near the Gulf of Oman. The U.S. blames Iran for the attack on the ships, which Tehran denies. The attacks come against the backdrop of heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran following President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers a year ago.
Self-driving car startup Argo AI is giving researchers free access to its HD maps โ TechCrunch
Argo AI is releasing curated data along with high-definition maps to researchers for free, the latest company in the autonomous vehicle industry to open-source some of the information it has captured while developing and testing self-driving cars. The aim, the Ford Motor-backed company says, is to give academic researchers the ability to study the impact that HD maps have on perception and forecasting, such as identifying and tracking objects on the road, and predicting where those objects will move seconds into the future. In short, Argo sees this as a way to encourage more research and hopefully breakthroughs in autonomous vehicle technology. Argo has branded this collection of data and maps Argoverse, which is being released for free. Argo isn't releasing everything it has.
Machine learning tutorial: How to create a recommendation engine
What do Russian trolls, Facebook, and US elections have to do with machine learning? Recommendation engines are at the heart of the central feedback loop of social networks and the user-generated content (UGC) they create. Users join the network and are recommended users and content with which to engage. Recommendation engines can be gamed because they amplify the effects of thought bubbles. The 2016 US presidential election showed how important it is to understand how recommendation engines work and the limitations and strengths they offer.