Boffins have devised a way to make eavesdropping smartwatches, computers, mobile devices, and speakers with endearing names like Alexa better aware of what's going on around them. In a paper to be presented today at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in Berlin, Germany, computer scientists …

Roundup Hello, here's a quick roundup of what's been happening in AI outside of the headlines. Machine learning is increasingly being applied to new domains, and human resources is one of them. It's a controversial area and looks like Amazon ran into the problem of creating biased models. Nvidia announced new software integrations for …

The notion of deploying armed human soldiers on the ground to fight wars will disappear over time, according to one of America's top military scientists. “We have to get used to the radical idea that we, human beings, will be just one species of intelligent beings,” Alexander Kott, chief of the Network Science Division of the …

Artificially intelligent bots are notoriously bad at communicating with, well, anything. Conversations with the code, whether it's between themselves or with people, often go awry, and veer off topic. Grammar goes out the window, and sentences become nonsensical. Remember the time this happened between a pair of Facebook-built …

Artificial intelligence can help developers design mobile phone apps that drain less battery, according to new research. The system, dubbed DiffProff, will be presented this week at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation conference in California, was developed by Charlie Hu and Abhilash Jindal, who …

Roundup How about we kickstart the week with artificial intelligence goodies? PyTorch 1.0 is (almost) out: Details about PyTorch 1.0, the latest version of the popular AI framework developed by Facebook, were teased out at the inaugural PyTorch Developer Conference this week in San Francisco. PyTorch 1.0 comes with new updates that …

The best way to tackle fake news using artificial intelligence is to go straight to the source, according to a new study. Specifically, smartypants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in America, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in Qatar, and Sofia University in Bulgaria, trained a classifier to determine how …

If you’ve been thinking about trying to learn deep learning, here’s a new software library that promises to make things easy. Fast.ai, a startup co-founded by Rachel Thomas and Jeremy Howard, a professor and research scientist both working at the University of San Francisco, have released a free open source framework that …

Pics Images generated by AI have always been pretty easy to spot since they are always slightly odd to the human eye, but it’s getting harder to differentiate what’s real and fake. Researchers from DeepMind and Heriot-Watt University in the UK have managed to significantly boost the quality of images simulated by a generative …

Comment We're hearing more about AI or machine learning being used in security, monitoring, and intrusion-detection systems. But what happens when AI turns bad? Two interesting themes emerged from separate recent studies: the growth of artificial intelligence coupled with concerns about their potential impact on security. A survey of …

Roundup Welcome to this week's AI Roundup. It looks live the US government does care about AI, and four Senators are urging the government to use more of it in new legislation. Microsoft had a few announcements at its Ignite conference, and DeepMind is collaborating with Unity for its research. New playground for AI: DeepMind is …

AI can get pretty good at creating content like images and videos, so researchers are trying to get them to design game levels. Machines are okay working on their own and can regurgitate the same material seen in the numerous training examples fed by its human creators. It's fine if what you're after is more of the same thing …

So, you’ve hunkered down and finally completed that online course on machine learning. It took weeks. Now, you have all sorts of ideas running through your mind on developing your own intelligent code and neural networks. You assume you'll have to fork out a considerable wedge for a decent GPU-powered number-crunching rig, …

New York University's AI Now Institute, a research hub investigating the wider social impacts of machine learning algorithms, has published a report critiquing how the US government uses the technology. The report, emitted this week, is based around a series of case studies discussed during a workshop held in June earlier this …

All the biggest labs leading AI research will have you believe that their fancy game-playing software bots will one day be applicable to the real world. The skills from playing Go, Poker or Dota 2 will be transferable to algorithms designing new drugs, controlling robots, teaching computers how to negotiate – you name it. One …

Roundup Good morning – here's some machine-learning bits and bytes to kick start your week. If this sort of tech is right up your street, then perhaps check out our AI conference, M3, in London, England. OK, on with the show... Alibaba to make its own AI chips: Jack Ma, CEO and chairman of Alibaba, the giant Chinese e-commerce …

Roundup Hello, here's a roundup tying up all the bits of AI news together for this week. Google has a new competition to challenge developers to defend or attack image classification systems with adversarial examples. DeepMind are planning to test its algorithms for head and neck radiotherapy algorithms on humans. And Microsoft have …

Dealing with chatbots and virtual assistants can be so frustrating that it’s normal for humans to start getting snarky. Such run-ins would be a little more entertaining if the machines could give some of that sass back. Unfortunately, it’ll be awhile before that can happen since computers don’t really understand sarcasm at all …