A San Francisco-based technology company called Chooch AI is trying to narrow that gap with the help of artificial intelligence, reducing the time between a fire's eruption and the moment it's spotted by people. The company, which is working with state agencies, researchers and technologists, is working to develop an AI tool that would scour hyper-detailed imagery from satellites for evidence of wildfires largely invisible to the naked eye. If successfully refined, experts believe, the tool could lead to earlier wildfire detection that would almost certainly save more people and property from destruction.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 6 ― The American software company has taken advantage of its Adobe Max conference, which runs in Los Angeles until November 6, to showcase its latest creations, notably with regard to the integration of artificial intelligence using its proprietary Sensei technology, in a range of different products. Along with updates for most of its software packages, Adobe has also announced a number of remarkable innovations. First presented one year ago, Photoshop for iPad is at last available for unrestricted download. The application features a wide variety of high-performance retouching and compositing tools, which are presented in a fully developed tactile interface. Photoshop for iPad is designed to be intuitive and open to everyone, professionals and beginners alike.

This program unlocks a new chapter for the computing industry in Europe. According to Jiang Tao, VP of Intelligent Computing BU, "Huawei is committed to investing in the AI computing industry in Europe, enabling enterprises and individual developers to leverage the Ascend AI series products for technological and business innovation. Over the next 5 years, Huawei plans to invest 100 million euros in the AI Ecosystem Program in Europe, helping industry organizations, 200,000 developers, 500 ISV partners, and 50 universities and research institutes to boost innovation." First, Huawei will work with partners to shape the AI industry in Europe. Second, Huawei will develop joint solutions with ISV partners.

Ignite is also very much a forward-looking conference that keeps the changing role of IT in mind. And while there isn't a lot of consumer news at the event, the company does tend to make a few announcements for developers, as well. This year's Ignite was especially news-heavy. Ahead of the event, the company provided journalists and analysts with an 87-page document that lists all of the news items. If I counted correctly, there were about 175 separate announcements.

L'Oréal's recently acquired Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence entity, ModiFace, and L'Oréal Research & Innovation, have announced the launch of a digital skin diagnostic for consumers based on 15 years of scientific research on skin aging by L'Oréal R&I evaluation teams. This new technology is based on an Artificial Intelligence-powered algorithm developed by ModiFace and nourished by L'Oréal's skin aging expertise and photo database. Using deep learning, the algorithm has been trained on 6000 clinical images from L'Oréal's R&I evaluation and knowledge studies conducted with Skin Aging Atlases, and then a new model has been created on over 4500 smartphones selfies for 3 groups of women (Asian, Caucasian and Afro-American) in 4 different lighting conditions. The results, which were developed with dermatologists, achieved a high level of skin assessment precision. Accurate results were obtained with different facial expressions and photo taking conditions (light, phone position) similar to those used by consumers.

Automatic speech recognition, or ASR, is a foundational part of not only assistants like Apple's Siri, but dictation software such as Nuance's Dragon and customer support platforms like Google's Contact Center AI. It's the thing that enables machines to parse utterances for key phrases and words and that allows them to distinguish people by their intonations and pitches. Perhaps it goes without saying that ASR is an intense area of study for Facebook, whose conversational tech is used to power Portal's speech recognition and who is broadening the use of AI to classify content on its platform. To this end, at the InterSpeech conference earlier this year the Menlo Park company detailed wave2vec, a novel machine learning algorithm that improves ASR accuracy by using raw, untranscribed audio as training data. Facebook claims it achieves state-of-the-art results on a popular benchmark while using two orders of magnitude less training data and that it demonstrates a 22% error reduction over the leading character-based speech recognition system, Deep Speech 2. Wav2vec was made available earlier this year as an extension to the open source modeling toolkit fairseq, and Facebook says it plans to use wav2vec to provide better audio data representations for keyword spotting and acoustic event detection.

On the first episode of the final season of HBO comedy series Silicon Valley, tech startup engineer Bertram Gilfoyle lets an AI version of himself take over his instant messaging duties. "Do you need the real me for this conversation?" he asks his colleague. It may sound extreme, but the existence of spellcheckers predates the personal computer by a decade. Since 1992, grammar checking has also come as standard in word processors. For the better part of a generation, we've been OK with robots watching and correcting our language, occasional run-ins with Clippy aside.

Over the last 15 years, the United States military has developed a new addition to its arsenal. The weapon is deployed around the world, largely invisible, and grows more powerful by the day. That weapon is a vast database, packed with millions of images of faces, irises, fingerprints, and DNA data -- a biometric dragnet of anyone who has come in contact with the U.S. military abroad. The 7.4 million identities in the database range from suspected terrorists in active military zones to allied soldiers training with U.S. forces. "Denying our adversaries anonymity allows us to focus our lethality. It's like ripping the camouflage netting off the enemy ammunition dump," wrote Glenn Krizay, director of the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency, in notes obtained by OneZero.

Fleet management is one of the areas that AI is disrupting. The growing need to put driver safety first without compromising cost or efficiency has led to the adoption of smart fleet management systems. For the average driver, the presence of AI can be felt heavily in the use of smartphones and telematics devices that recommend the best routes to take in traffic. This used to be a herculean task marked by paper maps and listening to radio broadcasts of traffic routes; today, we have complex traffic apps that combine GPS and artificial intelligence to make drivers' lives easier. Fleets benefit from powerful AI-based applications that handle anything from route recommendation to road risk data analysis and even driver coaching.

Fleet management is one of the areas that AI is disrupting. The growing need to put driver safety first without compromising cost or efficiency has led to the adoption of smart fleet management systems. For the average driver, the presence of AI can be felt heavily in the use of smartphones and telematics devices that recommend the best routes to take in traffic. This used to be a herculean task marked by paper maps and listening to radio broadcasts of traffic routes; today, we have complex traffic apps that combine GPS and artificial intelligence to make drivers' lives easier. Fleets benefit from powerful AI-based applications that handle anything from route recommendation to road risk data analysis and even driver coaching.