Chinese search giant Baidu has left The Partnership on AI (PAI), a US-led effort to foster collaboration on the ethical challenges raised by artificial intelligence. Baidu is said to have cited the cost of membership and recent financial pressures for the move. But as relations between the US and China worsen, the departure comes amid growing challenges for companies and people in the two countries to collaborate, or find common ground, when it comes to critical technologies like AI. In a statement, Baidu said it "shares the vision of the Partnership on AI and is committed to promoting the ethical development of AI technologies. We are in discussions about renewing our membership, and remain open to other opportunities to collaborate with industry peers on advancing AI." Terah Lyons, executive director of PAI, says the company cited a weaker financial outlook for the decision, adding: "Baidu remains committed to our mission and hopes to be able to resume membership in 2021."

This morning, Ford announced driving assist tech that can better compete with GM's Super Cruise and Tesla's Autopilot, but there's some bad news -- Active Drive Assist won't arrive until late 2021. The electric Mustang Mach-E crossover is its first vehicle where customers can order Co-Pilot360 2.0 features and a "prep package" of hardware that will be ready for an over-the-air software update to add hands-free driving tech later. Researchers have found a way to turn simple line drawings into photo-realistic facial images. Developed by a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, DeepFaceDrawing uses artificial intelligence to help "users with little training in drawing to produce high-quality images from rough or even incomplete freehand sketches." It doesn't require the same level of detail in source sketches that previous AI iterations needed, and it works largely through probability -- instead of requiring detailed eyelid or lip shapes, for example, the software refers to a database of faces and facial components and considers how each facial element works with others.

Mobilized Construction are global providers of data and AI analytics. This data identifies road network quality and highlights areas in need of improvement. To collect this data they use a custom sensor that can attach to any moving vehicle, on any road, globally. Their solutions have been used in every type of road environment, seeing them work around the world, including the United Kingdom, Kenya, and Uganda. With a strong focus on optimising the speed at which a pothole is recognised from when it first develops, Mobilized had the hardware to collect data on potholes but no way of utilising this valuable information.

A research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the City University of Hong Kong have unveiled DeepFaceDrawing, an AI-powered framework that turns sketches into photorealistic portraits. This deep learning system uses modules to generate the images, or in other words, it identifies the most notable facial features individually, like the eyes, nose, mouth, face shape, etc., before these vectors are merged to create realistic images. There are other deep image-to-image translation techniques that may generate face images from freehand sketches faster, but they require professional sketches or even edge maps as input. DeepFaceDrawing can implicitly model the shape space of recognizable face images and then proceeds to synthesize a face image in this space to approximate an input sketch. Our method essentially uses input sketches as soft constraints and is thus able to produce high-quality face images even from rough and/or incomplete sketches," said researcher Shu-Yu Chen.

WINNIPEG -- Canadians may soon be getting fewer scam calls. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has approved a 90-day trial of Bell's plan to use artificial intelligence to help put an end to fraudulent phone calls. According to a news release, Bell's new system uses "defined sets of call characteristics and proprietary machine learning algorithms" to identify which calls are fraudulent. It said this system could stop about 120 million scam calls every month, in addition to the 220 million fraudulent calls it shuts down using a plan implemented in 2019. Bell is the parent company of CTV News.

The maker community and manufacturers have come together along with their 3D-printers to fight the pandemic. People ranging from garage hobbyists to established companies are 3D-printing equipment from face shields through swabs to ventilator parts. Telemedicine is a technology that provides medical advice to the concerned people in home confinement. Technology has found a quick fix during the pandemic. Telemedicine is a ready-made option, wherein, concerned people can consult doctors from the comfort of their homes regarding their symptoms.

When Lauren Dry heard last year that facial recognition cameras were being trialled in the suburb of East Perth, she thought it was a joke. "I just thought to myself: What do you mean facial recognition cameras, that's sci-fi! That doesn't happen in Perth," she told 7.30. "And I looked into it and I was, like, this is real." Ms Dry enjoys a quiet life at home with her young family in Perth's leafy suburbs.

Can machine learning learn new physics – or do we have to put it in by hand? A workshop organised by Ilya Nemenman (Emory University), and featuring a number of experts in the field, aimed to find out more. There has been a rapid increase in research using machine learning to elucidate experimental data from a range of physical systems, from quantum to biological, from statistical to social. However, can these methods discover fundamentally new physics? Is it unrealistic to expect machine learning systems to be able to infer new physics without specifically adapting them to find what we are looking for?

Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into emerging technologies and up-and-coming startups working on artificial intelligence. As there are many startups working on various different applications, we want to share our insights with you. Here, we take a look at 5 promising genetic algorithm startups. For our 5 top picks, we used a data-driven startup scouting approach to identify the most relevant solutions globally. The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 5 interesting examples out of 111 relevant solutions.