RoundupHere's a roundup of news beyond what we've covered already in the world of machine-learning. Huge facial-recognition database scrutinized: An AI startup called Clearview claims to have a database of more than three billion photos, scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other websites and services, and all used to train a …

The European Commission is weighing whether to ban facial recognition systems in public areas for up to five years, according to a draft report on artificial intelligence policy in the European Union. A copy of the unreleased report [PDF] was published on Thursday by EURACTIV, a Belgian non-profit media think tank. The …

Artificial intelligence with frickin' lasers beams attached can see objects hidden around corners, according to a study published in the journal Optica on Thursday. Academics, led by boffins at the Stanford University, hope the technology will allow self-driving cars to spot potential hazards, such as pedestrians crossing at …

VidA recent US government report investigating the accuracy of facial recognition systems across different demographic groups has sparked fresh questions on how the technology should be regulated. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing to discuss the dossier and surrounding issues on Wednesday. “Despite the …

Academics have applied for a patent describing how a neural network can detect low blood-sugar levels by analyzing heartbeat patterns rather than a blood sample. Keeping track of glucose levels is annoying and painful. Multiple times per day, diabetics have to prick their finger, place the small drop of blood on a test strip, …

RoundupWelcome to the first AI round up of this year. AI continues to spread like wildfire and everyone wants a slice of the pie - even Hollywood. Read on for the latest flop in facial recognition, too. Hollywood is cozying up to AI algos: Warner Bros, the massive American film studio and entertainment conglomerate, is employing …

GPT-2, OpenAI’s giant text-generating language model, can play chess – despite having no prior knowledge of the game’s rules. That may seem pretty odd, at first. The system is mostly well-known for spitting out passages of text after receiving a sentence or two as a prompt, after all. Trained on around eight million newspaper …

Facebook has vowed to delete at least some fake videos that appear to have been manipulated by machine-learning algorithms to crack down on the spread of disinformation. The AI technology used to create such forged content – generative adversarial networks (GANs) – has been rapidly improving over the past five years. GANs, …

The US government has placed software designed to train neural networks to analyse satellite and aerial snaps under new export controls – to prevent foreign adversaries using said code. The decision, made by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), is effective today. Vendors shipping software subject to the controls …

RoundupAs much of the Western world winds down for the Christmas period, here's a summary of this week's news from those machine-learning boffins who haven’t broken into the eggnog too early. Finland, Finland, Finland: The Nordic country everyone thinks is part of Scandinavia but isn’t has long punched above its weight on the …

Intel has snapped up AI accelerator chip designer Habana Labs for a hefty $2bn to bolster its efforts in bringing Chipzilla-flavored machine-learning tech to cloud platforms and big biz. The microprocessor giant is hell-bent on getting internet giants and enterprises to use its neural-network math coprocessors, rather than …

RoundupIt's nearly the end of the year, and if you're not bored of AI yet, here's more bits and bytes for you to consume. How fair is your model? Check with TensorFlow: Folks over at Google have released Fairness Indicators, a range of tools to help developers calculate how fair a classifier model is. The software looks for things …

AI algorithms are helping scientists map ten billion cells from the human body in an attempt to unlock the mysteries of how life emerges from the embryo, or how diseases like cancer manifest. Dana Pe’er, the current chair and professor in computational and systems biology at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a …

Boring 2D images can be transformed into corresponding 3D models and back into 2D again automatically by machine-learning-based software, boffins have demonstrated. The code is known as a differentiable interpolation-based renderer (DIB-R), and was built by a group of eggheads led by Nvidia. It uses a trained neural network to …

RoundupHello, welcome to this week's machine learning musings. We bring you news about the hottest topics in AI: Facial recognition, the so-called AI arms race between the US and China, and erm, GPUs in the cloud. US citizens won’t be subjected to facial biometric scans as they fly in and out of America, after all: The Department of …

An engineer has built something that is sure to be the envy of any self-respecting Lego fan: an AI-powered Lego sorting machine. Daniel West, a software engineer from Australia, built the device, which is also made out of Lego, of course, over two years. The impressive gizmo stands about 80 centimetres tall, contains over 10, …

re:InventAmazon Web Services has made Inf1, its cloud instance for running machine-learning software on its custom-designed AI chip Inferentia, available to all. AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced the service on Tuesday during the internet goliath's annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Inf1 is available as an EC2 instance, where …

US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are examining how federal agencies and healthcare companies are tackling algorithmic biases – after a recent study found that black patients were less likely to be referred to care programs by software than white patients, despite being sicker. On Tuesday, Wyden (D-OR) and …