As countries around the world are gradually reopening following lockdowns, government authorities are using surveillance drones in an attempt to enforce social distancing rules. In India, police are using AI-equipped drones developed by US start-up Skylark Labs to monitor evening curfews and the distance between people who are outside during the day. The drones are being flown in six cities in the northern state of Punjab, and are also being trialled in the southern city of Bangalore, says Skylark Labs CEO Amarjot Singh. Each drone is fitted with a camera and an AI that can detect humans within a range of 150 metres to 1 kilometre. If it spots people it can send an alert to police in the district located nearest to the sighting.

Anyone looking for an illustration of how rapidly shopping habits changed when covid-19 hit needed only to glance at the top 10 search terms on Amazon in the week of April 12 to 18. In place of former mainstays like phone cases, phone chargers, and Lego sets were "toilet paper," "face mask," "hand sanitizer," "paper towels," "Lysol spray," "Clorox wipes," "mask," "Lysol," "masks for germ protection," and "N95 mask." People weren't just searching; they were buying, too--and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying the new Amazon #1 best seller, "Face Mask, Pack of 50." Nozzle, a London-based consultancy specializing in algorithmic advertising for Amazon sellers, captured the rapid change back in February in this simple graph.

Artist, designer and programmer Cyril Diagne recently created a bit of tech that looks more like science fiction that science fact. Using a combination of augmented reality and machine learning tech, he's figured out a way to "copy and paste" objects from the real world into Photoshop, using just a smartphone. What might, at first blush, seem like special effects trickery or an April Fools prank is actually a piece of bona-fide tech that he's actually published to GitHub. As the description on GitHub explains, this is "an AR ML prototype that allows cutting elements from your surroundings and pasting them in an image editing software." According to Diagne, the "secret sauce" is a piece of machine learning (AKA "Artificial Intelligence") tech called BASNet, which automatically recognizes and cuts out real-world objects when taking a photograph.

The remote-controlled, four-legged machine built by Boston Dynamics was first deployed in a central park on Friday as part of a two-week trial that could see it join other robots policing Singapore's green spaces during a nationwide lockdown.

Google is using its speech recognition tech to help kids read. Google on Thursday shared early access to its Read Along app for Android, which is designed to help kids 5 years and older learn to read. The app provides verbal and visual feedback as children read stories aloud. Read Along is one of several online platforms meant to keep students engaged and learning as schools remain closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Read Along features an in-app reading buddy named Diya, who uses Google's text-to-speech and speech recognition technologies to determine if a child who's reading is struggling.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - After a week or so sick in bed in their New York City apartment in March, members of the Johnson-Baruch family were convinced they had been stricken by the novel coronavirus. Subsequent test results left them with more questions than answers. Tests both for the virus itself and for the antibodies the immune system produces to fight the infection are becoming more widely available, but they are not perfect. For Maree Johnson-Baruch, her husband, Jason Baruch, and their two teenage daughters, their experience ran the gamut. They all became sick around the same time with the same symptoms.

MathWorks today introduced Release 2020a with expanded AI capabilities for deep learning. Engineers can now train neural networks in the updated Deep Network Designer app, manage multiple deep learning experiments in a new Experiment Manager app, and choose from more network options to generate deep learning code. R2020a introduces new capabilities specifically for automotive and wireless engineers in addition to hundreds of new and updated features for all users of MATLAB and Simulink. More details are available in the Release 2020a video. "MathWorks provides a comprehensive platform for building AI-driven systems," said David Rich, MATLAB marketing director.

Researchers have proposed a technique for shrinking deep learning models that they say is simpler and produces more accurate results than state-of-the-art methods. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have proposed a technique for compressing deep learning models, by retraining a smaller model whose weakest connections have been "pruned," at its faster, initial rate of learning. The technique's groundwork was partly laid by the AutoML for model compression (AMC) algorithm from MIT's Song Han, which automatically removes redundant neurons and connections, and retrains the model to reinstate its initial accuracy. MIT's Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin determined that the model could simply be rewound to its early training rate without tinkering with any parameters. Although greater shrinkage is accompanied by reduced model accuracy, in comparing their method to AMC or earlier work by Frankle on weight-rewinding techniques, Frankle and Carbin found that it performed better regardless of the amount of compression.

It was not long ago that the world watched World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov lose a decisive match against a supercomputer. IBM's Deep Blue embodied the state of the art in the late 1990s, when a machine defeating a world (human) champion at a complex game such as chess was still unheard of. Fast-forward to today, and not only have supercomputers greatly surpassed Deep Blue in chess, they have managed to achieve superhuman performance in a string of other games, often much more complex than chess, ranging from Go to Dota to classic Atari titles. Many of these games have been mastered just in the last five years, pointing to a pace of innovation much quicker than the two decades prior. Recently, Google released work on Agent57, which for the first time showcased superior performance over existing benchmarks across all 57 Atari 2600 games. The class of AI algorithms underlying these feats -- deep-reinforcement learning -- has demonstrated the ability to learn at very high levels in constrained domains, such as the ones offered by games.

If any automaker has made its name synonymous with safety, it's Volvo. The Swedish outfit's marketing department deserves some credit there, for sure, but they've got good stuff to work with. Over the decades, Volvo has led the industry with three-point seatbelts, rear-facing child seats, blind-spot monitoring systems, and more. Now it's once again in the vanguard, announcing Wednesday that it will be the first automaker to use a lidar laser vision system to enable what it calls "fully autonomous highway driving" in its cars, starting in 2022. That news is the result of a deal with Luminar, the eight-year-old lidar company helmed by 25-year-old Austin Russell.