Nvidia today announced plans to open an AI research facility in Toronto to further explore novel approaches to deep learning. The team will be led by deep learning and computer vision expert and University of Toronto assistant professor Sanja Fidler. The lab will operate out of Nvidia's Toronto office, which will double its current headcount of 50 employees in order to triple the number of AI and deep learning researchers working there by the end of the year, according to a Nvidia blog post published today. Though hiring is underway, Nvidia does not anticipate opening the research lab until August, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. A Nvidia robotics research lab in Seattle is also scheduled to open in the coming months, senior director Dieter Fox told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Modern day artificial intelligence machines learn and improve themselves based on ever-increasing amounts of data that humans and machines generate with each passing day. This happens largely through supervised learning which is a major branch of Artificial Intelligence. But such machines also make mistakes. In the new Brookings India Development Seminar, Vasant Dhar, Professor, Stern School of Business, New York University, will walk us through various situations in our everyday lives – investing, playing sports, riding in driverless cars, using social media platforms – to encourage us to question the faith we put in technology. He proposes methods to inform executive and policy makers in evaluating the risks associated with data infrastructure initiatives, such as those proposed in his recent Hindustan Times editorial.

FILE - In this April 6, 2017, file photo, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks in New York. The Justice Department's internal watchdog is expected to criticize the FBI's handling of the Clinton email investigation, stepping into a political minefield as it details how a determinedly non-partisan law enforcement agency came to be entangled in the 2016 presidential race. President Donald Trump will look to the inspector general report to provide a fresh line of attack against the FBI's two former top officials, Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, as he claims that a politically tainted bureau tried to undermine his campaign and, through the Russia investigation, his presidency.

June's NAACL conference saw machine learning specialists from technology company Iprova present a paper introducing a new and effective method for the unsupervised training of machine learning algorithms to infer sentence embeddings. The NAACL (North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) Human Language Technologies (HLT) conference took place at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans hotel, Louisiana, from June 1–6, 2018. The research paper, entitled "Unsupervised Learning of Sentence Embeddings using Compositional n-Gram Features", will be presented by Matteo Pagliardini. Pagliardini is a senior machine learning engineer at Iprova and one of the three scientists that authored the research paper and developed the new model for unsupervised training, Sent2Vec. While there have been several successes in deep learning in recent years, the paper notes that these have almost exclusively relied on supervised training.

Researchers in Tokyo are developing human muscles that can be attached to, and used by, machines.

Africa's nascent artificial intelligence sector just got its biggest boost from Google which is opening its first Africa AI research center in Accra, Ghana's capital. Though Accra has a vibrant tech industry, it would not have been the obvious location for many Africa tech watchers when compared with Nairobi or nearby Lagos where Google has already announced it would open its first Launchpad Space outside the US. Last month, Facebook also opened its first startup hub in Africa there. Google had been laying the pipeline, both figuratively and physically, for future developments in Accra for a few years now. Back in 2015, the Mountain View, California tech giant started work on a fiber optic network, called Project Link, across the city to improve internet speeds.

With Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis-led delegation in Canada, the government inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with their firms to give a boost to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the state. On Tuesday, Fadnavis and Quebec deputy prime minister Dominic Anglade held talks at Montreal in Canada about use of artificial intelligence in various sectors. "Artificial intelligence will not lead to loss of jobs, but will create more job opportunities," said Fadnavis, speaking at a seminar organised by the International Economic Forum of the Americas on administration and artificial intelligence. "The gap between the rich and poor will be bridged with resolution of many problems." According to the chief minister's office (CMO), as part of the MoU between FRQNT of Quebec government and the state government, an international study group will be set up to increase the use of AI in agriculture technology, soil management and pest control.

Wandering the halls of CES Asia it's easy to spot the automotive companies, but sometimes you have to look at the logos instead of looking for actual vehicles on display. The booths here at the show in Shanghai, China are full of global and domestic brands showing off everything from self-driving vehicles to futuristic concepts to useful doo-dads for today's cars. The focus of the automakers here at @CESAsia is obviously not on the cars themselves, but on mobility. You hear this a lot, but to see the @Honda booth with no actual cars in it really drives that home. Just because Honda didn't have any actual vehicles on display is not to say that every company wanted to promote mobility ideas over cars.

In these areas, advanced technologies are playing an increasingly significant role. The confluence of advanced technology with the healthcare ecosystem is set to bring in more efficiency, speed, and cost optimization for hospitals and practitioners while making medical treatment more accessible, timely, and affordable for patients. Here's a look at how Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) is applying advanced technologies in this area. The World Health Organization (WHO) database reveals that over 45% of its member states report to have less than 1 physician per 1,000 population. The data published by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) shows that the U.S. could face a shortage of up to 120,000 physicians by 2030, impacting patient care across the nation.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced a few hours back that it will integrate its artificial intelligence (AI) voice assistant Bixby with a wide range of home appliances in order to achieve its vision of establishing an Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem. In case you missed my previous post on CES 2018 and Samsung showcasing smart appliances, click here. Headquartered in South Korea, the global leader held a press conference in Seoul demonstrating how consumers can develop their own at-home IoT ecosystem with its AI voice recognition system being integrated into consumer electronics such as television sets, refrigerators, air conditioners, ovens, vacuum cleaners and washing machines. According to Kim Hyun-suk, head of Samsung's consumer electronics division, the integration of AI into home appliances will increase consumer convenience. "As Samsung already declared its AI vision at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in January, we have been trying to make all Samsung-connected devices intelligent by 2020," Kim said.