The first time I heard about ONNX was during my internship at INRIA. I was working to develop Neural Network Pruning algorithms in the Julia language. There weren't many pre-trained models yet that I could use, so utilizing ONNX to import models developed with other languages and frameworks might have been a solution. In this article, I want to introduce ONNX and explain its enormous potential by also seeing a practical example. ONNX, or Open Neural Network Exchange, is an open-source standard for representing deep learning models. It was developed by Facebook and Microsoft in order to make it easier for researchers and engineers to move models between different deep-learning frameworks and hardware platforms.

As AI is making its way into more companies, the board and senior executives need to mitigate the risk of their AI-based systems. One area of risk includes the reputational, regulatory and legal risks of AI-led ethical decisions. AI-based systems are often faced with making decisions that were not built into their models--decisions representing ethical dilemmas. For example, suppose a company builds an AI-based system to optimize the number of advertisements we see. In that case, the AI may encourage incendiary content that causes users to get angry and comment and post their own opinions.

Facebook today announced that Microsoft has expanded its participation in PyTorch, the social network's machine learning framework, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the PyTorch build for Windows. The intent is to bring the experience on Windows in line with other platforms, like Linux; historically, PyTorch on Windows has lagged behind due to a lack of test coverage, a convoluted installation experience, and missing functionality. PyTorch, which Facebook publicly released in January 2017, is an open source machine learning library based on Torch, a scientific computing framework and script language that in turn is based on the Lua programming language. While TensorFlow has been around slightly longer (since November 2015), PyTorch continues to see rapid uptake in the data science and developer community. It claimed one of the top spots for fastest-growing open source projects last year, according to GitHub's 2018 Octoverse report, and Facebook recently revealed that in 2019 the number of contributors to the platform grew more than 50% year-over-year to nearly 1,200.

Deepfakes have come across as serious problems this year and big companies are now paying attention. Amazon announced today it's joining the DeepFake Detection challenge (DFDC) driven by major corporations such as Facebook and Microsoft to boost efforts to identify manipulated content. The company is going to contribute $1 million in AWS credits over the next two years to researchers. AWS is also working with DFDC partners to explore hosting complicated datasets for deepfake detection on the cloud service using its Amazon S3 scalable infrastructure. Find out at TNW's Hard Fork Summit Amazon said researchers have to apply for a grant of a minimum of $1,000 and a maximum of $10,000.

The advertising world loves big, shiny, techy things. Agency and client ears perk right up when they hear about virtual reality kiosks, gadget-filled activations and holograms of dead rock stars. But then there are the tech innovations that sound a bit, or a lot, less sexy. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that essentially teaches computers to find patterns in sounds, images and other data. And while that may not seem like much fun to your average social marketer or copywriter, the tech giants--the Facebooks, Apples, Googles, Netflixes, Microsofts and Baidus of the world--are investing massive sums of money in it.

WASHINGTON: Firmly believing that artificial intelligence can help end social evils like caste system and reduce inequalities in India by 2030, the supporters of B R Ambedkar plan to celebrate 127th birth anniversary of the iconic Dalit leader at the UN headquarters in New York next month with the theme "Artificial Intelligence for Humanity". The anniversary is expected to be attended by representatives and artificial intelligence (AI) experts from companies like IBM, Google, Facebook and Microsoft who will discuss how the implementation of this latest technology can be used to eliminate caste system and reduce inequality in India by 2030, the event organisers said yesterday. The event is organised by the Foundation for Human Horizon-USA, in partnership with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. "AI if used properly can be main driver to reduce inequalities as it has ability to create and protect much-needed safe zone ie, the AI predication of caste violence by zipcode, or caste group can provide tools to develop preventive measures to stop caste violence similar to the western world where they are using'crime maps' or'diseases map'," said Deelip Mhaske of the Foundation for Human Horizon-USA. There is great research going on AI's use in preventing racial discrimination by IBM's "optimised pre-processing for discrimination", he said.

Apple is joining fellow tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM as the sixth founding member of the recently-formed artificial intelligence research group - the Partnership on AI. The non-profit said Apple has been "involved and collaborating with the Partnership since before it was announced" in September and is "thrilled to formalize its membership." "We glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI," Tom Gruber, Apple's head of development for its intelligence personal assistant Siri, said in a statement on the Partnership's website. "We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers." The Partnership also announced that six new non-industry trustees will be joining its board including Jason Furman, former top economic adviser for Barack Obama; Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of AI.

Human: what is the purpose of life? Machine: to serve the greater good. Human: what is the purpose of living? Human: what is the purpose of existence? Machine: to find out what happens when we get to the planet earth.

Vinod Iyengar is the director of product marketing at open source machine learning company H2O.ai. Forget Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump -- we need a trust-buster like Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1902 attacked the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company led by J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill. Amid the flurry of recent tech M&A deals, you would be forgiven for missing a relatively quiet acquisition: Apple bought Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup Turi for around 200 million. On its own, the Turi deal wouldn't raise eyebrows were it not for the record amount of M&A in artificial intelligence, with the giants Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft leading transactions. Consolidation in any market is expected, but AI is consolidating at such a rapid clip, at such an early stage and by so few companies that there are strong reasons to be concerned.