Katyanna Quach

Google has settled out of court with 227 people, who had accused the web giant of age discrimination, for $11m. After all the legal fees are deducted, each person will, on average, get a payout of a little over $35,000. Back in 2015, a group of 234 techies banded together to sue Google, alleging that its recruiters “engaged in …

Talk about working smarter, not harder. A computer-science student has got the right idea, by building an intriguing code-completion tool that uses deep-learning software to finish lines of source. And while, yes, there are already a ton of source-code autocomplete tools available, this one, dubbed Deep TabNine, is said to be …

RoundupHello, welcome to this week’s roundup of news in the ever encroaching world of AI and machine learning. We’ll be talking about everyone’s favorite topic at the moment: facial recognition. First San Francisco, Somerville ... now Oakland: California's Oakland has become the third US city to ban its local government using facial …

Google, Facebook, and, surprisingly, Oracle are among the top ten third-party companies that frequently track your personal sexual interests every time you watch porn, according to new research. Switching to incognito mode in your browser might darken your screen and provide you with the perfect ambiance to surf the most …

Orlando cops have given up using Amazon’s controversial cloud-based facial recognition to monitor CCTV cameras dotted around the Florida city – after a nightmare year of technical breakdowns. The decision came after officers attempted and failed to tap into Amazon’s Rekognition API, which they hoped would automatically flag up …

AnalysisSilicon Valley bad boy Elon Musk's grand plan to build brain-machine interfaces to "achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence" is obviously more science fiction than fact at the moment. If you missed the presentation from Musk's latest company Neuralink on Tuesday, here's what the plan is: Build an implant that sticks …

AI algorithms can help you automatically fly a drone of your design, according to new research that will be presented at the SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics later this month. A bunch of boffins at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have devised a method that "computes a neural network controller for a hybrid …

PicPanic-stricken headlines claiming Earth will be slammed by an asteroid on September 9 this year should be ignored, the European Space Agency (ESA) assures us. The supposedly planet-menacing 100-foot-(30-metre)-diameter space rock, dubbed 2006 QV89, was discovered in August 2006. Following observations over ten days back then, …

A new neural-network can solve a Rubik’s cube twice as fast as the fastest human – though roughly three times slower than the fastest dumb algorithm – according to research published in Nature Machine Intelligence on Monday. Though the AI approach is not a nippy as the fastest traditional computational method, specifically the …

We may be able to survive and live on Mars in regions protected by thin ceilings of silica aerogel, a strong lightweight material that insulates heat and blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation while weighing almost nothing. Researchers at Harvard University in the US, NASA, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland envision …

AI systems have weird memories. The machines desperately cling onto the data they’ve been trained on, making it difficult to delete bits of it. In fact, they often have to be completely retrained from scratch with the newer, smaller dataset. That’s no good in an age where individuals can request their personal data be removed …

RoundupHello, here’s a few announcements from the world of machine learning beyond what we’ve already covered this week. AlphaStar is coming out to play: AlphaStar, the StarCraft II-playing bot built by DeepMind researchers, will be facing human players in a series of 1v1 games online. StarCraft II players can enter the open …

AnalysisNvidia and Google continue to dominate in AI hardware, according to the latest benchmarking results from the ML Perf project published this week. Tech companies all want a little slice of the machine learning pie: Nvidia has rebranded GPUs for AI, Intel is busy trying to tout its CPUs and push its new ASIC known as the NNP-T …

AnalysisArtificially intelligent software can comfortably outmatch human poker pros and amateurs in one-on-one matches, that much is known. Now, for the first time, an AI bot has been built that can beat humans professionals on six-player no-limit Hold’em tables no less, and has been described in an academic paper published on …

A Homeland Security official on Wednesday stressed the US government department would not use facial-recognition technology to monitor American citizens. John Wagner, the deputy executive assistant commissioner at the Office of Field Operations for Customs and Border Protection (CPB), told a House committee hearing not to …

Scientists think they've made a major leap towards nailing the expansion rate of the universe, known as Hubble's Constant, thanks to gravitational wave data. The astroboffins, based at Princeton in the US, estimate the constant to be anywhere from 65.3 to 75.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec, according to a paper …

GitHub has deleted a repository containing partial blueprints of DeepNude, the notorious AI-powered app that stripped clothes from women in photos to generate fake naked pics. These fragments of decompiled Python source code revealed the inner workings of the software, and were generated from a copy of the DeepNude application …

The newly discovered kilometre-sized asteroid dubbed 2019 LF6 has the shortest solar year around our Sun – compared to all the other space rocks found floating around the Solar System at just 151 days. 2019 LF6 belongs to a small group of space rocks classified as “Atira” asteroids, which orbit between the Earth and the Sun. …

RoundupThis week in AI, Facebook inadvertently showed us how it tags pics for machine learning, Baidu pushed out auto auto code to world+dog as well as announcing deals with Intel and Huawei, and there's $7,500 to be won for anyone who can whip up an animal-like intelligence. So this is how Facebook tags images using AI?: In the …

The world's largest single-dish radio telescope, an enormous white circle half a kilometre in diameter, has helped scientists uncover 84 new pulsars since it began collecting data two years ago. Jiang Peng, chief engineer at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou Province, southwest China, …

An academic paper published in Nature has been criticized by a data scientist – who found a glaring schoolboy error in the study when he tried to reproduce the machine-learning research. The paper in question, published in August last year, describes how neural networks can be trained to predict the location of aftershocks …

Fiber-optic cables linking Google Cloud servers in its us-east1 region physically broke today, slowing down or effectively cutting off connectivity with the outside world. For at least the past nine hours, and counting, netizens and applications have struggled to connect to systems and services hosted in the region, located on …

NASA engineers are trying to fix an instrument on the Mars Insight lander that was supposed to burrow five metres (16 feet) into the Red Planet's surface – and has instead tapped out at just 30 centimetres (one foot.) The device, known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), is essentially a very fancy hammer. …

From the department of closing the barn door after the horse has warped away at light speed, comes this latest news. Although the creators of DeepNude have torn down their slimy software that removes clothes from women in photos, the code continues to spread all over the internet. Some devs are even trying to reverse-engineer …

RoundupHere's your rapid-fire summary of AI-related news beyond what we've already covered lately. Google Maps can predict how long your bus is delayed: Engineers over at the Chocolate Factory have installed a new feature into Google Maps that uses machine learning to predicts how long an incoming bus will be delayed. The model, a …