Amazon for several years has worked on self-driving technology to deliver goods, a natural fit with its shopping business. Last year, it invested in Aurora, a driverless-technology start-up. Mr. Wilke expressed concerns in the past that Uber, through its ride-hailing business, could build a direct delivery relationship with customers that it could use to compete with Amazon, according to a person with direct knowledge of the comments. He would speak only anonymously because he feared retaliation for discussing internal conversations. Uber has said it wants to be the Amazon of transportation, though its self-driving ambitions have been derailed by cost-cutting and legal battles.

Computer scientists at Loughborough University in the U.K. have developed artificial intelligence algorithms that could revolutionize player performance analysis for football (soccer) clubs. Computer scientists at Loughborough University in the U.K. have developed artificial intelligence algorithms that could revolutionize player performance analysis for football (soccer) clubs. The researchers designed a hybrid system that accelerates and supplements human data entry with camera-based automation to meet demand for timely performance data generated from large amounts of videos. The team applied the latest computer vision and deep learning technologies to identify actions by detecting players' body poses and limbs, and trained the deep neural network to track individual players and capture data on individual performance throughout the match video. Loughborough's Baihua Li said the new technology "will allow a much greater objective interpretation of the game as it highlights the skills of players and team cooperation."

A US university's claim it can use facial recognition to "predict criminality" has renewed debate over racial bias in technology. Harrisburg University researchers said their software "can predict if someone is a criminal, based solely on a picture of their face". The software "is intended to help law enforcement prevent crime", it said. But 1,700 academics have signed an open letter demanding the research remains unpublished. One Harrisburg research member, a former police officer, wrote: "Identifying the criminality of [a] person from their facial image will enable a significant advantage for law-enforcement agencies and other intelligence agencies to prevent crime from occurring."

A da Vinci surgical robot system performs heart surgery in 2017 at a hospital in Hefei, China.Credit: Shutterstock In 2006, China highlighted the importance of robotics in its 15-year plan for science and technology. In 2011, the central government fleshed out these ambitions in its 12th five-year plan, specifying that robots should be used to support society in a wide range of roles, from helping emergency services during natural disasters and firefighting, to performing complex surgery and aiding in medical rehabilitation. Guang-Zhong Yang, head of the Institute of Medical Robotics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says that China's robotics research output has been growing steadily for two decades, driven by three major factors: "The clinical utilization of robotics; increased funding levels driven by national planning needs; and advances in engineering in areas such as precision mechatronics, medical imaging, artificial intelligence and new materials for making robots." Yang points out that funding levels for medical robotics from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Science and Technology began to increase more sharply in 2011 compared to the previous decade. The accompanying rises in research output are closely related to the introduction of specialized robotics equipment in medical-research facilities, says Yao Li, a research scientist at Stanford Robotics Laboratory in California and founder of the company Borns Medical Robotics, based in both Chengdu, China, and Silicon Valley, California.

A photo of the alleged suspect in a theft case in Detroit, left, next to the driver's license photo of Robert Williams. An algorithm said Williams was the suspect, but he and his lawyers say the tool produced a false hit. A photo of the alleged suspect in a theft case in Detroit, left, next to the driver's license photo of Robert Williams. An algorithm said Williams was the suspect, but he and his lawyers say the tool produced a false hit. Police in Detroit were trying to figure out who stole five watches from a Shinola retail store.

Behind these smart drones are well-trained deep-learning models based on Baidu's PaddlePaddle, the first open-source deep-learning platform in China. Like mainstream AI frameworks such as Google's TensorFlow and Facebook's PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, which was open sourced in 2016, provides software developers of all skill levels with the tools, services, and resources they need to rapidly adopt and implement deep learning at scale. PaddlePaddle is being used by more than 1.9 million developers and 84,000 enterprises globally. Industries throughout China are using the platform to create specialized applications for their sectors, from the automotive industry's acceleration of autonomous vehicles to the health-care industry's applications for fighting covid-19. Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic, which has spread over 150 countries and caused a worldwide economic shock, is increasing demands for AI transformation.

The news: An open letter from a growing coalition of AI researchers is calling out scientific publisher Springer Nature for a conference paper it reportedly planned to include in its forthcoming book Transactions on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence. The paper, titled "A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing," presents a face recognition system purportedly capable of predicting whether someone is a criminal, according to the original press release. It was developed by researchers at Harrisburg University and was due to be presented at a forthcoming conference. The demands: Citing the work of leading Black AI scholars, the letter debunks the scientific basis of the paper and asserts that crime-prediction technologies are racist. It also lists three demands: 1) for Springer Nature to rescind its offer to publish the study; 2) for it to issue a statement condemning the use of statistical techniques such as machine learning to predict criminality and acknowledging its role in incentivizing such research; and 3) for all scientific publishers to commit to not publishing similar papers in the future.

University of Tokyo create a new integrated three-dimensional circuit architecture for artificial intelligence applications with spiraling stacks of memory modules. Researchers at the University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science in Japan stacked resistive random-access memory modules for artificial intelligence (AI) applications in a novel three-dimensional spiral. The modules feature oxide semiconductor access transistors, which boost the efficiency of the machine learning training process. The team further enhanced energy efficiency via a system of binarized neural networks, which restricts the parameters to be either 1 or -1, rather than any number, to compress the volume of data to be stored. In having the device interpret a database of handwritten digits, the researchers learned that increasing the size of each circuit layer could improve algorithmic accuracy to approximately 90%.

Specialized replicated compute accelerators (RCA) are multiplied up by having multiple copies per ASICs, multiple ASICs per server, multiple servers per rack, and multiple racks per datacenter. Server controller can be an FPGA, microcontroller, or a Xeon processor. Power delivery and cooling system are customized based on ASIC needs. If required, there would be DRAMs on the PCB as well. Each ASIC interconnects its RCAs using a customized on-chip network.

Mixed precision training with 8-bit floating point.