The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the world like few events before it. But for Shukun Technology, a response required "a minor change in our strategy," according to its chief technology officer, Chao Zheng. That's because Shukun, a startup founded by some of China's brightest AI and medical minds, was busy refining its AI-powered platform to diagnose heart disease and strokes when the global pandemic struck. The company quickly shifted resources to develop a system that analyzes chest CT scans to help speed up diagnoses of COVID-19 patients. That system, called Lung Doc – pneumonia edition, has already been rolled out to 30 hospitals in China over the past few months, where it will grow more accurate as it learns from more data.

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.

Horrifying Glimpse Into How DARPA Will "Save" You From COVID-19 and Venezuela Coup Tied Back To Trump (7 May 2020). In my last two posts, The New World Emperor and Wake Up, You're Next, I stated that the main worry in the nCov pandemic is not just the virus - its origins, seriousness, the number of strains, and their forthcoming spread - but how the pandemic will be controlled. I argued that mass vaccines and tracking will involve the transition from computer-based to human-based operating systems. A series of pandemic outbreaks now and in coming years will be followed by successive vaccines, which will implant weaponized AI and nanotechnology on a mass scale, in order to establish brain-machine interfaces around the globe, paired with a cryptocurrency as a reward or punishment system. If you accept this technology into your body, the control of the few over the many will be complete, and the Internet of Thoughts will be born. To understand injectable technologies, see (above) The Last American Vagabond's 7 May 2020 interview with independent journalist, Whitney Webb.

Hong Kong (CNN)Australia has its first "loyal wingman." Boeing Australia presented the country's Air Force on Tuesday with a prototype of a jet-powered drone that they hope will one day fly alongside manned warplanes while bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield. The Loyal Wingman, at 38-foot-long (11.5 meters) and with a range of 2,000 miles (3,218.6 kilometers), will "use artificial intelligence to fly independently, or in support of manned aircraft, while maintaining safe distance between other aircraft," according to Boeing's website on the project. The drones will be able to engage in electronic warfare as well as intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance missions and swap quickly between those roles, according to Boeing. The aircraft delivered in Sydney on Tuesday is the first of three prototypes Boeing is producing.

LONDON (April 29, 2020) -- Global AI software revenue is projected to increase by 12-fold in the next seven years, skyrocketing from $10.1 billion in 2018 to $126.0 billion in 2025 according to Omdia. "The global AI market is entering a new phase in 2020 where the narrative is shifting from asking whether AI is viable to declaring that AI is now a requirement for most enterprises that are trying to compete on a global level," said Keith Kirkpatrick, principal analyst with Omdia. "AI is likely to trigger major transformations in industries where there is a clear case for incorporating AI, rather than in pie-in-the-sky use cases that may not generate a return on investment (ROI) for many years." Top use cases Demand for artificial intelligence in the consumer, enterprise, government and defense sectors is growing. Currently, the number of business-to-business (B2B) software opportunities related to AI total 333 and cover 28 industry sectors, with 203 unique use cases.

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.

GAINESVILLE, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Exactech, a developer and producer of innovative implants, instrumentation and computer-assisted technologies for joint replacement surgery, and KenSci, a healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) platform company, announced today that a collaborative, foundational study on using machine learning (ML) to predict outcomes after shoulder arthroplasty has been published in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, one of the premier scientific journals in orthopaedics. The research analyzes the potential of ML to use preoperative data to anticipate patients' post-operative results after anatomic total shoulder arthroplasty (aTSA) or reverse total shoulder arthroplasty (rTSA). These results can help surgeons preoperatively identify if a patient will achieve certain clinical improvement thresholds to appropriately risk-stratify patients for these elective procedures. Specifically, this research explores the efficacy of ML to predict the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgery (ASES), Constant, global shoulder function and VAS pain score, as well as to predict a patient's active range of motion in abduction, forward flexion and external rotation. This research also studies the ability of ML to identify if a patient may achieve clinical improvement that exceeds the minimal clinically important difference threshold as well as the substantial clinical benefit threshold for each outcome measure.

There are many who believe that the power of artificial intelligence (AI) might be what brings London out of the current Covid-19 crisis. In fact, many leaders in the AI industry in the UK and worldwide, from companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have even been attending meeting to discuss how their combined efforts might help to flatten the curve. One major strength that many of these companies have in common is their incredible means for gathering, sorting, and evaluating massive amounts of data. In some respects, these companies were literally created to help with a massive outbreak like this, especially in highly concentrated cities like London. Facebook, for example, has the information needed to gather data about population in the UK.

Microsoft has revealed 13 games coming to its Xbox Series X console when the machine launches this winter. In an hour-long presentation, streamed live on Thursday, the company announced that well-known titles such as the recently announced Assassin's Creed Valhalla, as well as Madden NFL 21 and Yakuza: Like a Dragon, will all be on Xbox Series X. Also featured was Paradox Interactive's vampire adventure, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. Codemasters presented its racer DiRT 5 complete with impressive lighting and mud splatter effects, and an option to run it in 4K at 60 frames-per-second or in a lower resolution at 120fps. Namco Bandai showed a new anime-style sci-fi thriller named Scarlet Nexus, about a group of psychic law enforcers. The rest of the games were from independent studios: futuristic first-person action shooter called Bright Memory Infinite, which is already coming to PC; supernatural horror game The Medium from Blair Witch creator Bloober Team (with music by Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka); a 1930s puzzle adventure named Call of the Sea from Swedish indie publisher Raw Fury; space combat shooter Chorus from Deep Silver; cyberpunk action-RPG The Ascent from Curve Digital; Second Extinction, a three-player co-op dinosaur shooter from Systemic Reaction; and finally, Scorn, a first-person horror adventure set in a sinister Giger-esque dream world developed by Serbian team, Ebb.

Last week saw the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2020) go virtual. Over 5600 people, from 89 different countries, registered to participate. Here we provide a round-up of tweets from event participants, speakers and organisers. We wanted to build something that was fun to browse, async first, and feels alive. All the papers (sorted by filters) are easily accessible (finding papers in poster sessions can be exhaustive).