It was reported that Venture Capital investments into AI related startups made a significant increase in 2018, jumping by 72% compared to 2017, with 466 startups funded from 533 in 2017. PWC moneytree report stated that that seed-stage deal activity in the US among AI-related companies rose to 28% in the fourth-quarter of 2018, compared to 24% in the three months prior, while expansion-stage deal activity jumped to 32%, from 23%. There will be an increasing international rivalry over the global leadership of AI. President Putin of Russia was quoted as saying that "the nation that leads in AI will be the ruler of the world". Billionaire Mark Cuban was reported in CNBC as stating that "the world's first trillionaire would be an AI entrepreneur".

DURHAM – The National Science Foundation has awarded Duke University a $3 million, five-year Research Traineeship grant to develop a program for graduate students to develop expertise in using artificial intelligence (AI) for materials science research. The aiM (AI for Understanding and Designing Materials), program will fill a vital workforce gap by training the next generation in the new convergent field of materials and computer science research. "To achieve the promise of the U.S. Materials Genome Initiative of accelerated discovery, design and application of new materials, we must integrate the traditional tools of experimentation, theory and computation with the emerging tools of data science to transform the way we approach materials understanding and discovery," said Cate Brinson, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science and director of aiM. The Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), launched in 2011, is a multi-agency federal government effort to accelerate the development and deployment of new, advanced materials to address a host of challenges in clean energy, national security, health and welfare. "The MGI promoted a paradigm shift from slow individual experiments and computation to the beginnings of data-driven AI approaches in materials science research," added Brinson.

How is AI Ethics and Responsible AI currently being taught in Computer Science and Engineering Curriculums across Africa? What issues related to this topic are relevant to students and faculty? And what roadblocks or challenges are instructors facing to bring more discussion of AI ethics to classrooms? The goal of this workshop is to foster a discussion on how to effectively integrate AI Ethics into Computer Science/Engineering programs at African Universities. This is an initial step to gather perspectives on the current situation at representative universities in different countries in Africa, and to initiate a discussion on how we can better support each other with lessons learned and share materials/curriculums to further develop AI ethics programs in higher education. After identifying the current state, the interests of students and faculty and the needs of departments in this workshop session, the goal is to continue the series with more in-depth workshops on specific topics.

Grab a copy of The Elements of Statistical Learning ("the machine learning bible") and you might be a little overwhelmed by the mathematics. For example, this equation (p.34), for a cubic smoothing spline, might send shivers down your spine if math isn't your forte: In order to grasp that equation, nested firmly in the "Introductory" section of the book, you need to know function notation, sigma (summation) notation, derivatives, and Greek letters. Basically, if you haven't taken a calculus class, you're not going to be able to follow along. But, do you really need to know all of that math to grasp the fundamentals of ML? An Introduction to Statistical Learning covers much of the same material, but in a less mathematical way.

Speech-to-text applications have never been so plentiful, popular or powerful, with researchers' pursuit of ever-better automatic speech recognition (ASR) system performance bearing fruit thanks to huge advances in machine learning technologies and the increasing availability of large speech datasets. Current speech recognition systems require thousands of hours of transcribed speech to reach acceptable performance. However, a lack of transcribed audio data for the less widely spoken of the world's 7,000 languages and dialects makes it difficult to train robust speech recognition systems in this area. To help ASR development for such low-resource languages and dialects, Facebook AI researchers have open-sourced the new wav2vec 2.0 algorithm for self-supervised language learning. The paper Wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations claims to "show for the first time that learning powerful representations from speech audio alone followed by fine-tuning on transcribed speech can outperform the best semi-supervised methods while being conceptually simpler." A Facebook AI tweet says the new algorithm can enable automatic speech recognition models with just 10 minutes of transcribed speech data.

The overall structure of this new edition is three-tier: Part I presents the basics, Part II is concerned with methodological issues, and Part III discusses advanced topics. In the second edition the authors have reorganized the material to focus on problems, how to represent them, and then how to choose and design algorithms for different representations. They also added a chapter on problems, reflecting the overall book focus on problem-solvers, a chapter on parameter tuning, which they combined with the parameter control and "how-to" chapters into a methodological part, and finally a chapter on evolutionary robotics with an outlook on possible exciting developments in this field. The book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in artificial intelligence and computational intelligence, and for self-study by practitioners and researchers engaged with all aspects of bioinspired design and optimization.

For non-native speaking English students, trying to get good grades while learning a new language can be challenging at the best of times, but as classes turn virtual some students are being left behind. BUCKEYE, Az. -- Virtual classrooms are the new normal for many students, but for non-native speaking English students, trying to get good grades can be challenging in the best of times. As classes turn virtual due to COVID-19, some students are being left behind. Valeria Gonzalez, 11, told Fox News that her school in Buckeye, Az., doesn't offer a virtual English as a second language (ESL) program. All of her classes are taught by an English speaking teacher with no Spanish translation.

Every once in a while, a machine learning framework or library changes the landscape of the field. In this article, we'll quickly understand the concept of object detection and then dive straight into DETR and what it brings to the table. In Computer Vision, object detection is a task where we want our model to distinguish the foreground objects from the background and predict the locations and the categories for the objects present in the image. Current deep learning approaches attempt to solve the task of object detection either as a classification problem or as a regression problem or both. For example, in the RCNN algorithm, several regions of interest are identified from the input image.

Be prepared in the near future when you gaze into the blue skies to perceive a whole series of strange-looking things – no, they will not be birds, nor planes, or even superman. They may be temporarily, and in some cases startlingly mistaken as UFOs, given their bizarre and ominous appearance. But, in due course, they will become recognized as valuable objects of a new era of human-made flying machines, intended to serve a broad range of missions and objectives. Many such applications are already incorporated and well entrenched in serving essential functions for extending capabilities in our vital infrastructures such as transportation, utilities, the electric grid, agriculture, emergency services, and many others. Rapidly advancing technologies have made possible the dramatic capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV/drones) to uniquely perform various functions that were inconceivable a mere few years ago.

In the field of machine learning based on the condition of learning classified into three types. In this phase we teach or train the machine using data ie: information which is well labeled that means some data is already have with the correct answer. In this phase, the machine is provided with the new set of example ie: data so that machine analyses the training data (set of training example) and produces a correct outcome from the labeled data. Here the name itself indicates the presence of supervisor as a teacher. Here certain technical parameter which is ease in understanding.