A consortium of companies is offering foreign visitors in Tokyo a taste of autonomous driving, in the world's first demonstration of a project that uses both an airport shuttle bus and a self-driving taxi to provide smooth travel from the airport to the Marunouchi shopping district near Tokyo Station. The Mobility as a Service experiment, which allows reservations by smartphone, is to be operated from Jan. 20 to Feb. 1. Foreign nationals are able to reserve a shuttle bus from Haneda or Narita airport to Tokyo City Air Terminal, and then ride an autonomous taxi from there on the around 3 kilometers leg to Marunouchi. They will also be able to ride in a fully autonomous single-seat vehicle for free on select days, and use a tablet to choose their destination within the Marunouchi area. The autonomous taxi will have a backup driver for safety reasons. Reservations for foreign nationals via smartphone app began on Dec. 2 and will run until Jan. 9.

BOSTON--In July 2018, Curtis Berlinguette, a materials scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, realized he was wasting his graduate student's time and talent. He had asked her to refine a key material in solar cells to boost its electrical conductivity. But the number of potential tweaks was overwhelming, from spiking the recipe with traces of metals and other additives to varying the heating and drying times. "There are so many things you can go change, you can quickly go through 10 million [designs] you can test," Berlinguette says. So he and colleagues outsourced the effort to a single-armed robot overseen by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm.

As computers and other personal devices have become increasingly prevalent, interest in conversational AI has grown due to its multitude of potential applications in a variety of situations. Each conversational AI framework is comprised of several more basic modules such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), and the models for these need to be lightweight in order to be effectively deployed on the edge, where most of the devices are smaller and have less memory and processing power. However, most state-of-the-art (SOTA) ASR models are extremely large -- they tend to have on the order of a few hundred million parameters. This makes them hard to deploy on a large scale given current limitations of devices on the edge. To tackle this problem, NVIDIA is releasing QuartzNet, a new end-to-end neural ASR model architecture based on Jasper that is smaller than all other competing models.

Autonomous vehicles received the largest percentage of private artificial intelligence (AI) investment for 2018 and 2019. Global driverless car technology startups scooped up $7.7bn, accounting for 9.9% of total private AI investment. That's according to the AI Index 2019, a report compiled by the Stanford Human-Centred AI Institute, in collaboration with McKinsey & Company, AI21 Labs, Genpact, Google and OpenAI. The annual report examines the biggest trends in the AI industry between January 2018 and October 2019, such as AI growth by country and the number of peer-reviewed research papers. It found that while autonomous vehicles – also known as AVs – are largely being tested in the US, at least 25 countries are testing them.

A conspicuous gathering of specialists frightened by the unsafe social impacts of artificial intelligence called Thursday for a prohibition on mechanized investigation of outward appearances in procuring and other significant choices. The AI Now Institute at New York University said activity against such programming driven "influence acknowledgment" was its top need since science doesn't legitimize the innovation's utilization and there is still time to stop across the board appropriation. The gathering of educators and different scientists refered to as a risky model the organization HireVue, which sells frameworks for remote video interviews for bosses, for example, Hilton and Unilever. It offers Engineer AI to investigate facial developments, manner of speaking and discourse designs, and doesn't reveal scores to the activity applicants. The charitable Electronic Privacy Information Center has recorded a grievance about HireVue to the US Federal Trade Commission, and AI Now has condemned the organization previously.

Couger CEO Atsushi Ishii appeared as a technical specialist on the program "What is Human? What is Human? is an educational entertainment program that explores the definition of being human by looking at the latest applications of AI and discussing trending AI-related topics. The program featuring Couger's Atsushi Ishii examined the intersection of AI, work and what it means to be human. One popular claim when it comes to work and AI comes from the University of Oxford's Professor Osborne. He has previously stated that within the next 10 to 20 years, about 47 percent of US jobs risk being replaced by automation.

United Imaging, a global leader in advanced medical imaging and radiotherapy equipment, followed a strong appearance at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) with a win in a competition jointly organized by Facebook AI Research and NYU Langone Health. The company's United Imaging Intelligence America subsidiary led out of Boston won top prize in the multi-coil 4x acceleration category, a clinically relevant challenge designed to accelerate MRI scans using artificial intelligence (AI). "Using AI to create highly accurate images from significantly smaller amounts of raw data could result in much faster scans," commented Dr. Terrence Chen, CEO of United Imaging Intelligence America. "This could improve the patient experience and make scans more accessible." Fast and accurate MRI image reconstruction from under-sampled data is critically important in clinical practice.

Qualcomm Ventures said Thursday that it has invested $8 million in a New York-based Internet of Things startup that helps companies predict when their machines will fail. Augury, founded in 2011, collects data from equipment via advanced sensors and then applies artificial intelligence algorithms to anticipate when they will break down. It saves customers money by flagging the need for maintenance ahead of a problem. Qualcomm Ventures believes the investment will help jumpstart the emergence of wireless connected factories, shipyards and other industrial operations -- all of which are expected to accelerate with the rollout of new 5G networks. In industrial settings, every machine generates data.

Artificial intelligence is here, it's just the beginning, and it's time to start thinking about how to regulate it. Those were the takeaways from the Technology Alliance's AI Policy Matters Summit, a Seattle event that convened experts and government officials for a conversation about artificial intelligence. Many of those experts agreed that the government should start establishing guardrails to defend against malicious or negligent uses of artificial intelligence. But determining what shape those regulations should take is no easy feat. "It's not even clear what the difference is between AI and software," said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, on stage at the event. "Where does something cease to be a software program and become an AI program?

BEIJING – Wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a red T-shirt, an 8-year-old Chinese boy is logged in for an online coding lesson -- as the teacher. Vita has set up a coding tutorial channel on the Chinese video streaming site Bilibili since August and has so far garnered nearly 60,000 followers and over 1 million views. He is among a growing number of children in China who are learning coding even before they enter primary school. The trend has been fueled by parents' belief that coding skills will be essential for Chinese teenagers given the government's technological drive. "Coding's not that easy but also not that difficult -- at least not as difficult as you have imagined," said Vita, who lives in Shanghai.