The University of Southern California and Amazon have joined forces to establish the Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning. Housed at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, the center will provide support to researchers who will focus on developing innovative approaches to privacy-preserving machine learning solutions. This university-industry partnership symbolizes both organizations' shared commitment to "advancing understanding and developing solutions," said USC Provost Charles F. Zukoski in the university's announcement of the partnership. Plans call for the center to leverage talent from both entities in a cooperative effort to unearth new research in this controversial area of study. In USC's announcement, Prem Natarajan, Alexa AI vice president of natural understanding, added, "We are delighted to bring together top talent at Amazon and USC in a joint mission to drive ground-breaking advances in privacy and security preserving machine learning--advances that enable us to continue to safely and securely deliver experiences that enrich and delight our customers worldwide."

Artificial intelligence vision silicon company Ambarella is partnering with Amazon Web Services to allow AWS customers to use the tech giant's services to train machine learning models and run them on devices equipped with Ambarella's CVflow AI vision chip. According to Ambarella, developers previously had to manually optimize machine learning models for devices based on the company's AI vision system on chip (SOC), a step that could add delays and errors to the app development process. In an announcement, the companies said they collaborated to simplify the process by integrating the Ambarella toolchain with the Amazon SageMaker Neo cloud service. Now, developers can bring trained models to Amazon SageMaker Neo and automatically optimize the model for Ambarella's CVflow-powered SoCs, the companies said. Using MXNet, TensorFlow, PyTorch or XGBoost, customers can train the model using Amazon SageMaker in the cloud or their local machine.

Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance (PHDA) announced today that it is working closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com A unique consortium formed four years ago by UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the PHDA uses the "big data" generated in health care -- including patient information in the electronic health record, diagnostic imaging, prescriptions, genomic profiles and insurance records -- to transform the way that diseases are treated and prevented, and to better engage patients in their own care. New machine learning technologies and advances in computing power, like those offered by Amazon SageMaker and Amazon EC2, are making it possible to rapidly translate insights discovered in the lab into treatments and services that could dramatically improve human health. Through the AWS Machine Learning Research sponsorship, PHDA scientists from both Pitt and CMU expect to accelerate research and product commercialization efforts across eight projects, including those with the potential to create an individual risk score for every cancer patient, thus enabling doctors to better predict the course of a person's disease and response to treatment; use a patient's verbal and visual cues to diagnose and treat mental health symptoms; and reduce medical diagnostic errors by mining all the data in a patient's medical record. Data are secure, anonymized and stay with PHDA institutions.

Amazon has extended a grant valued at $2 million to Harvard Medical School so researchers can experiment with machine learning and AI to streamline clinical workflow, Bloomberg reported March 4. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center started purchasing Amazon's cloud services in 2016 in an effort to ensure the hospital's data remained safe and accessible in the case of an emergency, according to Bloomberg. Three years later, Amazon's Web Services unit is working with Beth Israel to make day-to-day tasks like patient scheduling and finding paperwork more cost-effective and efficient. It's well-known that scientists hope to leverage AI and machine learning for better-quality care and quicker, more accurate diagnoses, but Taha Kass-Hout, the senior leader for healthcare and AI at Amazon, said Beth Israel will first focus on alleviating time-consuming manual work so physicians and their staff can better focus on quality.

Amazon wants to put its digital voice assistant, Alexa, into as many devices as possible. For help, it's partnering up with more chipmakers to make it easier for outside developers to get Alexa up and running on devices like speakers, thermostats and wearables. On Wednesday, Conexant, maker of audio processing chips, announced it's releasing a development kit approved by Alexa Voice Services, which is Amazon's program for hooking up third-party products to Alexa in its cloud. The kit provides hardware developers with two microphones and a processor loaded with software for picking up the "Alexa" wake word. The kit is supposed to enable devices to recognize the wake word in noisy environments. Similarly, chipmaking giant Intel announced last week that it would be integrating Alexa into its smart home platform kit, called the Smart Home Hub.