Shimon the singing songwriting robot has been taught to write his own lyrics by studying tens of thousands of songs written by the musical greats. Developed by researchers from the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, the robot collaborates with human musicians and even has an album out in the spring. The robot was given a dataset of 50,000 lyrics covering all genres including rock, hip-hop, jazz and progressive as part of its song writing education. As well as writing the lyrics the robot can sing them and dance while performing with'his band' made up of Georgia Tech students and researchers. Professor Gil Weinberg, creator of Schimon said he works with humans to create music, they are a mixture of songs made by human and robot together.

A billionaire supermarket tycoon used the creepy facial recognition app Clearview AI to investigate his daughter's date as she dined in a Manhattan restaurant. Gristedes Food CEO John Catsimatidis, 71, spotted his daughter, Andrea, on a date with an unfamiliar man while dining at Cipriani Downtown, an Italian restaurant in the SoHo neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan, in the October of 2018. Enlisting a waiter to secure a photo of the mystery individual, Mr Catsimatidis ran the image through the Clearview AI facial recognition system, which cross referenced the image with photos scraped from sites like Facebook and Instagram. The app produced a selection of other images of the man, along with the websites on which they appeared. The billionaire was able to discover that his daughter's date was a venture capitalist who hailed from San Francisco, California -- information he proceeded to text to Ms Catsimatidis from across the restaurant.

Banjo relies on info scraped from social media, satellite imaging data and the real-time info from law enforcement. Banjo claims its "Live Time Intelligence" AI can identify crimes -- everything from kidnappings to shootings and "opioid events" -- as they happen. Banjo presents many of the same concerns that similar companies have encountered. One of the strongest arguments against surveillance practices by Clearview AI has been that the company's data storage and security protocols were untested and unregulated. As Clearview AI proved earlier this month, that can lead to massive data leaks.

This week at the MLSys Conference in Austin, Texas, researchers from Rice University in collaboration with Intel Corporation, announced a breakthrough deep learning algorithm called SLIDE (sub-linear deep learning engine) that can rapidly train deep neural networks on CPUs (central processing units) and outperform GPUs (graphical processing units). This new deep learning technique is a potential game-changer for not only both hardware and AI software industries, but also any organization using deep learning. To understand why requires a bit of background knowledge of the role of GPUs in artificial intelligence (AI). GPUs have more logical cores than CPUs. The CPU is the brain of the computer where calculations are performed.

Coronavirus has not yet been labelled a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. However, since its transmission rate is concerning, everyone needs to take all possible precautions to avoid getting infected. Additionally, Identifying identifying people infected with the virus is also a task in itself, but the Chinese tech giant Alibaba has come up with a new AI-powered diagnosis system. This new system claims to detect new coronavirus cases with an accuracy rate of up to 96 percent. The new coronavirus detection system by Alibaba makes use of Computed Tomography images.

Last week the daughter of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, Katerina Tikhonova, was appointed to head the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute located at Moscow State University. The university has produced 13 Nobel prizes, six Fields Medals and one Turing award, so in matters of science, putting the AI institute there is a big deal. In Russian, if a husband's last name is, for instance, Komlev, the wife's surname becomes Komleva. Thinking algorithmically, you add an "a" at the end of the husband's or the father's last name to get the wife's or the daughter's last name. So Katerina's surname is Tikhonova, which means that her husband's or one of her paternal ancestor's last name was Tikhonov.

Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), a committee that maintains various JPEG image-related standards, has started exploring a way to involve AI to build a new compression standard. In a recent meeting held in Sydney, the group released a call for evidence to explore AI-based methods to find a new image compression codec. The program, aptly named JPEG AI, was launched last year; with a special group to study neural-network-based image codecs. Under the program, it aims to find possible solutions towards finding a new standard. To do that, it has partnered with IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) to call for papers under the Learning-based Image Coding Challenge. These papers will be presented at the International Conference of Image Processing (ICIP) scheduled to be held at Abu Dhabi in October.

Mary L. Gray is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research as well as an E.J. Safra Center for Ethics Fellow and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University. Mary also maintains a faculty position in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Mary, an anthropologist and media scholar by training, focuses on how everyday uses of technologies transform people's lives. Mary is the author, with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019. It was named a Financial Times' Critic's Pick and awarded the McGannon Center for Communication Research Book Prize in 2019.

AI can be used for the early detection of virus outbreaks that might result in a pandemic. On December 31st, a Toronto-based startup called BlueDot identified the outbreak in Wuhan, several hours after the first cases were diagnosed by local authorities. The BlueDot team confirmed the info its system had relayed and informed their clients that very day, nearly a week before Chinese and international health organisations made official announcements.

AI can be used for the early detection of virus outbreaks that might result in a pandemic. On December 31st, a Toronto-based startup called BlueDot identified the outbreak in Wuhan, several hours after the first cases were diagnosed by local authorities. The BlueDot team confirmed the info its system had relayed and informed their clients that very day, nearly a week before Chinese and international health organisations made official announcements.