Package delivery giant UPS has invested in TuSimple, a self-driving startup based in San Diego, California, to develop autonomous trucks, the mega-corp announced on Thursday. The two companies have been testing vehicles by shuttling truckloads of goods on a well-established freight route between Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona …

Having failed to grasp the lesson of Microsoft's annoying animated Office assistant, Clippy – humans hate being hectored by software – Google has empowered its Assistant software to remind people to do things at the behest of another. On Thursday, the Chocolate Factory declared that it has created Assignable Reminders, which …

The Attorney General of Ohio has banned cops and the Feds from accessing the US state's database of drivers' license plates and faces until the officers and g-men receive adequate privacy compliance training. “I share the privacy and civil-liberty concerns of those who fear misuse of this powerful identification technology,” …

Google Health's so-called augmented-reality microscope has proven surprisingly accurate at detecting and diagnosing cancerous tumors in real time. The device is essentially a standard microscope decked out with two extra components: a camera, and a computer running AI software with an Nvidia Titan Xp GPU to accelerate the …

Facebook secretly employed hundreds of contractors to listen to clips of its addicts' private voice calls to transcribe parts of conversations its AI software couldn't understand. Basically, if you allowed Facebook Messenger to automatically transcribe your voice calls, and the antisocial network's machine-learning code …

UK health secretary Matt Hancock has been accused of being "obsessed by technology" for its own sake following the UK government's vague announcement about injecting £250m into a AI laboratory for the NHS. The fund is aimed at improving cancer screening by speeding up the results of tests – including mammograms, brain scans, …

If you use Skype's AI-powered real-time translator, brief recordings of your calls may be passed to human contractors, who are expected to listen in and correct the software's translations to improve it. That means 10-second or so snippets of your sweet nothings, mundane details of life, personal information, family arguments …

RoundupHere's a quick summary of what's been happening in the machine learning lately, beyond what we've already reported. Newsflash! Facial recognition systems are still racist: The latest benchmarking tests performed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, reveals that facial recognition algorithms made by a French …

AnalysisChinese tech giant Alibaba claims to have designed the fastest RISC-V processor to date, and reckons it will open source at least some of the blueprints for others to use. The chip was unveiled this week at Alibaba's Cloud Summit in the Middle Kingdom, though details are curiously thin. Word reaches us of the development, …

GM Cruise, the General Motors-owned autonomous vehicle startup based in San Francisco, won’t be rolling out self-driving robotaxis in 2019 after all, as the technology isn't quite yet safe enough. Dan Ammann, CEO of Cruise, said on Wednesday that the biz is still testing its vehicles on the city’s roads and will be ramping up …

JPMorgan Chase is integrating AI into its internal security systems to thwart malware infections within its own networks. A formal paper [PDF] emitted this month by techies at the mega-bank describes how deep learning can be used to identify malicious activity, such as spyware on staff PCs attempting to connect to hackers' …

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 …

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 …

AnalysisInternet companies depend on free labor. Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google rely upon content creators who give their work away for the sake of platform participation or perhaps naive altruism. A startup called Intuition Machines believes there's a better way, one that involves machine learning (software) and a …

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 …

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 …

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 …