Media
Could Artificial Intelligence Predict the Next 'Avengers: Infinity War'?
Some movies are obvious hits. Like, for example, Avengers: Infinity War, which made a record-breaking $258 million at the domestic box office last weekend, filling seats and the pockets of Marvel Studios parent company Disney. But not every summer--or spring, or fall--blockbuster has the benefit of 10 years and 18 movies of built-up audience goodwill. So while the Mouse House knew they had a potentially earth-shattering hit on their hands well before opening night, other studios trying to catch up have no way of predicting whether their latest attempts to hit big will do so. Machine learning is everywhere, and artificial intelligence is no longer just a Spielberg-Kubrick collaboration.
Artificial Intelligence for Telecommunications Applications
The telecommunication service provider industry is one of the biggest businesses in the world. It also has historically been a capital-intensive industry with high fixed costs, which has put pressure on telecom operators to control their variable costs, particularly human capital. This tension surrounding profitability is intensifying. Many telecom operators crossed the point where revenue per bit is lower than cost per bit in 2017. Telecom operators are threatened by fast and highly-efficient web-scale companies and are straining under the challenge posed by digital transformation.
Atlantic AI Labs Opens Artificial Intelligence Research Center in Africa
"Our guiding principles are: Innovation, Collaboration, and Excellence," said Joel Amoussou, Founder and Director of Atlantic AI Labs . Mr. Amoussou has over 23 years of experience in providing consulting services to Fortune 500 companies in the US and Canada and is a member of the US-based Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The use of AI in healthcare will help alleviate the shortage of specialist physicians in Africa. For example, cancer incidence and mortality rates in Africa are increasing rapidly. AI can be used to analyze patients' clinical data and automatically deliver personalized care recommendations based on globally accepted evidence-based clinical practice guidelines while leveraging the widespread use of smartphones in Africa.
Kids, Meet Alexa, Your AI Mary Poppins?
The new Amazon Echo Dot For Kids is that little green thing on the bedside table. The new Amazon Echo Dot For Kids is that little green thing on the bedside table. "Alexa, why is Pluto so awesome?" "Alexa, what is seven plus three?" "Alexa, who is Harry Potter?" "Alexa, I'm bored." "Alexa, where do babies come from?"* Families who have an artificially intelligent "smart speaker" at home like Amazon's Echo may be used to kids saying stuff like this.
This soft robotic arm is straight out of Big Hero 6 (it's even from Disney)
The charming robot at the heart of Disney's Big Hero 6, Baymax, isn't exactly realistic, but its puffy bod is an (admittedly aspirational) example of the growing field of soft robotics. And now Disney itself has produced a soft robot arm that seems like it could be a prototype from the movie. Created by Disney Research roboticists, the arm seems clearly inspired by Baymax, from the overstuffed style and delicate sausage fingers to the internal projector that can show status or information to nearby people. "Where physical human-robot interaction is expected, robots should be compliant and reactive to avoid human injury and hardware damage," the researchers write in the paper describing the system. "Our goal is the realization of a robot arm and hand system which can physically interact with humans and gently manipulate objects."
โฌ3.9m data journalism project to build the tech to fight fake news
European research project to see how data science and other digital technologies can bolster's journalism's abilities in an era of fake news. With social media flooding us with information from multiple sources โ many of which are of dubious origin โ it is more important than ever that there is technology out there capable of filtering through the information to put together stories based on cold, hard facts. So it will be welcome news to newshounds in Europe โ and elsewhere โ that a new โฌ3.9m European research project called Journalism and Leadership Transformation (JOLT) is to be launched to investigate technical, business, and ethical aspects of contemporary journalism. Funded for the next four years, the project will be led by Dublin City University's (DCU) Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo) and will see 15 PhD researchers hired to conduct the research.
Towards Diverse Text Generation with Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Shi, Zhan, Chen, Xinchi, Qiu, Xipeng, Huang, Xuanjing
Text generation is a crucial task in NLP. Recently, several adversarial generative models have been proposed to improve the exposure bias problem in text generation. Though these models gain great success, they still suffer from the problems of reward sparsity and mode collapse. In order to address these two problems, in this paper, we employ inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for text generation. Specifically, the IRL framework learns a reward function on training data, and then an optimal policy to maximum the expected total reward. Similar to the adversarial models, the reward and policy function in IRL are optimized alternately. Our method has two advantages: (1) the reward function can produce more dense reward signals. (2) the generation policy, trained by "entropy regularized" policy gradient, encourages to generate more diversified texts. Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method can generate higher quality texts than the previous methods.