Nvidia made a number of compelling announcements at this week’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2019) in San Jose, California. The company unveiled its GauGAN AI image creator that uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to turn sketches into nearly photorealistic images. As part of its cloud pursuits, the company unveiled its latest RTX server configuration that is designed for Hollywood studios and those who want to create visual content quickly (each server pod can support up to 1,280 GPUs). Nvidia also announced partnerships with 3D software makers including Adobe, Autodesk and Unity to integrate Nvidia’s RTX ray-tracing platform. Continue reading Nvidia Demos New Products at Deep Learning & AI Confab

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a draft of its 20-year roadmap for AI research in the U.S., with numerous proposed steps and a call for ongoing support from the federal government to maintain dominance. The roadmap was the work of companies and researchers who held workshops in fall 2018 and in early 2019. USC director of knowledge technologies Yolanda Gil and Stanford University professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li were two of the roadmap organizers. Last month, President Trump signed the American AI Initiative. Continue reading Industry Roadmap Outlines Path to Continued AI Dominance

The U.K. government released a 150-page report stressing that the country needs to update its antitrust policies to deal with big technology companies. The report, which was ordered by the U.K.’s top treasury official, Exchequer chancellor Philip Hammond, states that the U.K. should implement tighter rules on acquisition in the tech sector to make it easier for new competitors to arise. The European Union and U.S. presidential hopefuls Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Amy Klobuchar have expressed similar points of view. Continue reading U.K. Considers Big Tech Regulation in Preparation for Brexit

Microsoft debuted its AI Business School, offering instructional videos and case studies to help business executives create and implement AI within their companies. The school, which is similar to such guides as Andrew Ng’s AI Transformation Playbook, grew out of three years of conversations with customers already implementing AI, as well as the company’s own experiences. Microsoft vice president of AI marketing and productization Mitra Azizirad said the guide will focus on strategy, culture, technology basics and AI ethics. Continue reading Microsoft Opens an AI Business School For Non-Tech Execs

Facebook AI Research, the Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications (LORIA), and University College London recently conducted a study to determine if AI can navigate a fantasy text-based game, dubbed “LIGHT.” To examine the AI agents’ comprehension of the virtual world, the study investigated the so-called grounding dialogue, comprised of mutual knowledge, beliefs and assumptions allowing communication between two people. The large-scale, crowdsourced “LIGHT” environment allows AI and humans to interact. Continue reading Study’s Fantasy Text-Based Game Tests AI Agents’ Abilities

Google has unveiled GPipe, an open-sourced library that makes training deep neural networks more efficient under the TensorFlow framework Lingvo for sequence modeling. According to Google AI software engineer Yanping Huang, “in GPipe … we demonstrate the use of pipeline parallelism to scale up DNN training,” noting that larger DNN models “lead to better task performance.” Huang and his colleagues published a paper on “Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks Using Pipeline Parallelism.” Continue reading Google GPipe Library Speeds Deep Neural Network Training

Neuroscientist and Intel’s chief technology officer of AI Amir Khosrowshahi revealed that he is remaining at Intel with a team of researchers building an innovative integrated circuit (IC). The IC under development will feature transistors that will, hope the researchers, function at voltages as low as 100 millivolts, a step towards matching voltage of communication in the brain. The existence of such an IC would unleash power-hungry AI applications targeting climate change, waste management and other global problems. Continue reading Intel Team Focuses on Low Voltage Transistor to Power AI

CBS has partnered with New York startup Canvs to use its AI-powered tool Canvs Surveys that automates the coding of natural language responses. CBS began using it in Q4 2018. The broadcaster has now expanded its use to process natural-language feedback to all its major events, including Super Bowl LIII and the Grammy Awards, as well as its entire slate of programming. CBS chief research/analytics officer Radha Subramanyam said the AI system processes the data far more efficiently than humans. Continue reading CBS Turns to AI-Powered Tool for Parsing Viewer Feedback

Google unveiled the Deep Planning Network (PlaNet) agent, created in collaboration with DeepMind, to provide reinforcement learning via images. Reinforcement learning uses rewards to improve AI agents’ decision-making. Whereas model-free techniques work by getting agents to predict actions from observations, agents created with model-based reinforcement learning come up with a general model of the environment leveraged for decision-making. In unfamiliar surroundings, however, agents must create rules from experience. Continue reading Google Debuts Deep Planning Network Agent with DeepMind

The National Security Agency and security firm FireEye recently detected extensive attacks by Iran on U.S. banks, businesses and government agencies, prompting the Department of Homeland Security to declare an emergency during the government shutdown. The attacks from Iran took place at the same time that China renewed its efforts to steal trade and military secrets, from Boeing, General Electric Aviation and T-Mobile. Meanwhile, Microsoft detected a Russian government operation targeting think tanks critical of Russia. Continue reading Chinese, Iranian, Russian Hackers Honing Their Attack Skills

During this week’s HPA Tech Retreat, BBC production standard lead Andy Quested reported on Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) screens, which are enjoying a robust 10 percent year-on-year growth. In 2018, these screens were estimated to have a 40 percent reach in the U.S., with an 11 to 18 percent reach worldwide. These advertising billboards play digital video, often mixed with artificial intelligence, interactivity and other new technology tricks, and are now responsible for a 50 percent share of the U.K.’s out-of-home ad dollars. Continue reading HPA Tech Retreat: Advance of Digital Out-of-Home Screens

In what has been an annual presentation at the HPA Tech Retreat, Thompson Coburn attorney Jim Burger delivered his update of legislation and litigation from the nation’s capital. His take on “administrative-legislative developments in copyright” was summed up by a slide of stars and the sounds of crickets, reflecting the government shutdown. Burger first briefly defined copyright as “an original expression in a fixed tangible medium,” and described the four-factor test that defines non-exclusivity. Continue reading HPA Tech Retreat: Jim Burger Presents Washington Update

What if you could restore a film — at 12 million frames per second — in two weeks? That’s a case study that Video Gorillas chief executive Jason Brahms described in detail at the HPA Tech Retreat, capping off how his company has spent the last ten years developing tools enabled by artificial intelligence. In 2007, Brahms, who was with Sony Pictures Imageworks, first met a developer pitching his facial recognition software. “I asked him if he had software that could compare different movie cuts and find differences between them,” he recalled. Continue reading HPA Tech Retreat: In Pursuit of AI-Powered Film Restoration

Google has selected Equinix for its Los Angeles cable landing station that will support the Curie subsea cable system to Chile. The high-capacity subsea cable, expected to go live this year, will connect in El Segundo, California at the Equinix LA4 International Business Exchange data center. “With the significant increase in global data traffic, we see corporations running global businesses demanding access to high-capacity, low-latency networks capable of connecting them to data centers across oceans with stringent levels of reliability,” said Equinix VP of business development Jim Poole. Continue reading Equinix Selected for Google’s Subsea Cable Landing Station

The Entertainment Technology Center’s team of journalists and analysts reported live from CES 2019 in Las Vegas last month. Our extensive post show analysis — which includes video reports, keynote and panel overviews, and coverage of trends regarding products and services that will impact media & entertainment — is now available online. This year’s report examines key areas such as 5G technology, emergence of the Data Age, introduction of commercial quantum computing, advances in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, AR/VR, smart homes, digital assistants, robotics, and an array of CE products and services related to these growing sectors. Continue reading ETC@USC Publishes Coverage and Analysis of CES 2019