SenseTime, a leading Chinese startup specialized in artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, has established an alliance with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to promote the further application of the technology widely utilized in facial recognition. The Chinese AI researcher and developer, currently valued at around $3 billion, said the cooperation aims to explore new avenues across MIT in areas like computer vision, human-intelligence inspired algorithms, medical imaging, and robotics. Tang Xiao'ou, a founder of SenseTime who is also a PhD '96 MIT alumnus specialized in computer vision and deep learning, said he expects the cooperation between the world's best and brightest talents will further promote AI's development and benefit society. Founded in 2014, the Chinese startup is currently working with a number of well-known Chinese brands including China Mobile, UnionPay, Sina Weibo, as well as major smartphone companies in China to provide machine learning technology. SenseTime's advanced facial recognition expertise has also helped attract leading investments from Qualcomm and CDH Investments.

Late last week, NASA delivered a version of its six-foot-tall, 300-pound humanoid to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In November, NASA announced that it would give one Valkyrie humanoid, also called R5, to MIT and one to Northeastern University, along with $250,000 each, to advance the capabilities of the massively complex system. Valkyrie had a disappointing showing at the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge trials and didn't qualify for the finals, so its makers are looking for some outside help to get the robot, which has cost about $6M to develop so far, closer to mission-ready. The space agency hopes R5 will serve on long haul space missions, including those to Mars, both independently and alongside crew. A team of CSAIL researchers will program their new toy to autonomously perform a variety of tasks that would allow it to help or even replace astronauts on missions.