Machines are getting smarter and smarter every year, but artificial intelligence is yet to live up to the hype that's been generated by some of the world's largest technology companies. Artificial Intelligence can excel at specific narrow tasks such as playing chess but it struggles to do more than one thing well. A seven-year-old has far broader intelligence than any of today's AI systems, for example. "AI algorithms are good at approaching individual tasks, or tasks that include a small degree of variability," Edward Grefenstette, a research scientist at Meta AI, formerly Facebook AI Research. "However, the real world encompasses the significant potential for change, a dynamic which we are bad at capturing within our training algorithms, yielding brittle intelligence," he added.

She founded Kingfisher Labs, an AI consulting company based in Cambridge, and works with companies that are building voice and language technology, including areas such as speech-to-text, natural language processing and human-computer dialogue. But one of the big topics on her radar right now is addressing ethical issues in AI. 'There's always the question of whether a particular technology should be built or not' – CATHERINE BRESLIN While plenty of stakeholders, from the EU, to UNESCO to individual companies, have been examining how AI can be developed and deployed in an ethical way, the area of voice technology presents specific challenges. It is an area of assistive AI that is still just developing, and has seen acceleration in the past year due to the pandemic. "As voice technology has become more prevalent, it's right that ethical issues are brought to the forefront. AI ethics is a broad umbrella though, and we need to be specific in order to address the issues," Breslin told Siliconrepublic.com.

Thousands of historical images from across Ireland are being brought to life in color for the first time, thanks to a new AI-led photo project. Combining digital technology with painstaking historical research, professors John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley at the National University of Ireland, Galway, have been able to turn photos, originally shot in black in white, into rich color images. It includes portraits of key figures like Oscar Wilde and poet W.B. Yeats, as well as defining moments in history, like the Titanic setting sail from the Belfast shipyard where it was constructed. Yet, some of the most compelling photos depict everyday scenes -- people herding pigs, spinning wool or packed onto the back of horse-drawn carts. And while poverty is evident in pictures of barefoot villagers crowding around for a photo, or of Dublin's working-class tenement buildings, there are also well-to-do family shots and depictions of upper-class pastimes like fox hunting.

We explore Neural Networks (NNs) for keyword spotting (KWS) on IoT devices like smart speakers and wearables. Since we target to execute our NN on a constrained memory and computation footprint, we propose a CNN design that.