Roundupwelcome to the last AI round up of the year; thank you for reading. We bring you the horrors of Amazon's plans to install doorbells with facial recognition software and some new (and improved) classical piano pieces generated by a neural network. Spying doorbell: The American Civil Liberties Union is clashing with Amazon …

AI systems can now create images of humans that are so lifelike they look like photographs, except the people in them don’t really exist. See for yourself. Each picture below is an output produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN), a system made up of two different networks including a generator and a discriminator. …

Delivery biz Postmates on Tuesday showed off a wheeled robotic box named Serve that should soon start showing up in cities around the US, carrying goods for customers. The autonomous snack bin is expected to show up first in Los Angeles, city government permitting, and in other cities over the course of the next year. "Serve …

The US and Europe might be top dogs in machine learning at the moment, but the East is catching up fast, helped by massive government spending. That's one of the key findings the second annual AI Index, a compendium that empirically tracks how AI research is progressing over time. The organization tracks research papers, …

Self-driving cars won’t learn to drive well if they only copy human behaviour, according to Waymo. Sure, people behind the wheel are more susceptible to things like road rage or the urge to run red lights but they’re pretty good drivers overall. When researchers from Waymo, the self-driving arm under Google’s parent company …

AI is reported in extreme terms: it's revolutionising our roads, our workplaces and our homes – or it's stealing our jobs and will eradicate humanity. But what about operating in a war zone? What is the rightful role of engineers in such circumstances? Can programmers whose code finds its way into systems involved in war or …

RoundupHello, welcome to this week's AI roundup. This week we have Google trying to fix its gender bias problem by offering both male and female pronouns for its translation service, but it dismisses gender neutral ones. The US Secret Service is testing facial recognition software to track "subjects of interest," but the ACLU has …

The inner designs of today's artificial intelligence are often inspired by the human brain, yet there other biological structures perhaps better suited to crafting next-gen machine-learning software and hardware. “Biology has been computing at many scales long before brains came on the scene,” Michael Levin, a professor and …

EventsThe call for papers for MCubed 2019 is open, so if you're using machine learning or AI in real life we'd love to hear from you. And if you're not ready to take the stage next year, you can grab a front row seat by snapping up one of our cut price blind bird tickets. MCubed, brought to you by Situation Publishing and Heise, …

Tumblr is hoping to automatically cleanse its social media platform of explicit pornographic content, genitals and female nipples, by using machine learning algorithms. Jeff D’Onofrio, Tumblr's CEO, announced it would be rolling out a system to flag content uploaded to the site, as well as removing existing smut, from 17 …

In conjunction with opening of AI conference NeurIPS, until recently known as NIPS, chip biz Nvidia has demonstrated a system that generates 3D environments using neural networks, open sourced its PhysX physics engine, and announced its Titan RTX GPU. Nvidia created a driving game for NeurIPS attendees that allows players to …

RoundupHello, welcome back to The Register's weekly AI roundup. There is news who is funding who for AI projects, but things have also got a little weird as popstars start making AI-inspired hits. Listen below! AI and law: The University of Oxford has received £1.2m to study the different ways that AI might revamp the legal industry …

AI-powered robo-painters are getting somewhat better at ripping off masterpieces, judging by the following fresh research. A team of academics at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Princeton University in America, and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, have crafted a new system dubbed …

Montezuma’s Revenge, the classic Atari platform game, has finally been fully solved by machine learning, researchers from Uber AI Labs claim. Reinforcement learning (RL) eggheads have been fascinated with the old 1980s game for a while. It features an Indiana Jones-like character named Panama Joe, who goes around exploring …

#F_AI_LAn Artificial Intelligence system in China publicly shamed one of the country’s most prominent business executive for jaywalking - after spotting their mug going past on the side of a bus. Dong Mingzhu, the chair and public face of industrial giant Gree Electric is a well known public figure in China, and beyond: Fortune named …

Sponsored“Machine learning is eating the world,” writes Clarence Chio in Machine Learning and Security with David Freeman, who heads a team of ML engineers charged with detecting and preventing fraud and abuse across LinkedIn. Chio went on to write that in fact: “Cybersecurity is also eating the world,” and he has a point. The UK’s …

The National Physical Laboratory has quantified many fundamentals during its lifetime – SI units for the second and the metre, for example. NPL - which is the birthplace of the atomic clock - is now participating in an ambitious project for a universally agreed, standard definition of "what data is". Data is already beginning …

UpdatedTesla CEO Elon Musk asked the Tesla owners among his millions of Twitter followers last week what aspect of their electric cars they'd most like to see improved or fixed. Among the 24,000 or so replied, there's a fair amount of concern about Autopilot, the assistive driving software in Tesla Model S cars. The first reply came …