How Microsoft is trying to become more innovative

Microsoft Research is a globally distributed playground for people interested in solving fundamental science problems.
These projects often focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence, and since Microsoftis on a mission to infuse all of its products with more AI smarts, it’s no surprise that it’s also seeking ways to integrate Microsoft Research’sinnovations into the rest of the company.
Across the board, the company is trying to find ways to become more innovative, e

In its first year of operation, the Intelligent Towing Tank (ITT) conducted about 100,000 total experiments, essentially completing the equivalent of a PhD student’s five years’ worth of experiments in a matter of weeks.The automated experimental facility, developed in the MIT Sea Grant Hydrodynamics Laboratory, automatically and adaptively performs, analyzes, and designs experiments exploring vortex-induced vibrations (VIVs). Important for engineering offshore ocean structures like

AWS held its annual re:Invent customer conference last week in Las Vegas. Being Vegas, there was pageantry aplenty, of course, but this year’s model felt a bit different than in years past, lacking the onslaught of major announcements we are used to getting at this event.
Perhaps the pace of innovation could finally be slowing, but the company still had a few messages for attendees. For starters, AWS CEO Andy Jassy made it clear he’s tired of the slow pace of change inside the enterp

There are too many worrying developments in tech – traumatised moderators, AI bias, facial recognition – to be anything but pessimistic about the futureFor my sins, I get invited to give a few public lectures every year. Mostly, the topic on which I’m asked to speak is the implications for democracy of digital technology as it has been exploited by a number of giant US corporations. My general argument is that those implications are not good, and I try to explain why I think th

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):Robotic Arena – January 25, 2020 – Wrocław, PolandDARPA SubT Urban Circuit – February 18-27, 2020 – Olympia, Wash., USALet us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’

Cameras and computers together can conquer some seriously stunning feats. Giving computers vision has helped us fight wildfires in California, understand complex and treacherous roads — and even see around corners. Specifically, seven years ago a group of MIT researchers created a new imaging system that used floors, doors, and walls as “mirrors” to understand information about scenes outside a normal line of sight. Using special lasers to produce recognizable 3D images, t

Earlier this week, AWS launched DeepComposer, a set of web-based tools for learning about AI to make music and a $99 MIDI keyboard for inputting melodies. That launch created a fair bit of confusion, though, so we sat down with Mike Miller, the director of AWS’s AI Devices group, to talk about where DeepComposer fits into the company’s lineup of AI devices, which includes the DeepLens camera and the DeepRacer AI car, both of which are meant to teach developers about specific AI conce

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell joined AWS CEO Andy Jassy on stage to announce a new partnership to use machine learning to help reduce head injuries in professional football.
“We’re excited to announce a new strategic partnership together, which is going to combine cloud computing, machine learning and data science to work on transforming player health and safety,” Jassy said today.
NFL football is a fast and violent sport involving large me

When mobile manipulators eventually make it into our homes, self-repair is going to be a very important function. Hopefully, these robots will be durable enough that they won’t need to be repaired very often, but from time to time they’ll almost certainly need minor maintenance. At Humanoids 2019 in Toronto, researchers from the University of Tokyo showed how they taught a PR2 to perform simple repairs on itself by tightening its own screws. And using that skill, the robot was also a

As part of the founding of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the largest academic unit at MIT, has been restructured to provide a stronger base for enhancing existing programs, creating new opportunities, and increasing connections to other parts of the Institute.Jointly part of the School of Engineering and Schwarzman College of Computing, EECS is now composed of three overlapping sub-units in electrical eng

Functional, intelligent robots the size of a single cell are within reach, said Cornell University Professor Paul McEuen at the inaugural Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture at MIT on Nov. 13.“To build a robot that is on the scale of 100 microns in size, and have it work, that’s a big dream,” said McEuen, the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science at Cornell University and director of Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. “One hundred microns is a very specia

Enterprise AI company Dataiku has announced some changes in its capitalization table. CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund, is investing in the startup by buying out some of Serena Capital’s shares.
Serena Capital has been an investor in Dataiku since 2014. “Serena was looking for a bit of liquidity. They invested in Dataiku when the valuation was 100 times less than what it is following today’s transaction,” Dataiku co-founde

Figuring out just what an AI is good at is one of the hardest thing about understanding them. To help determine this, OpenAIhas designed a set of games that can help researchers tell whether their machine learning agent is actually learning basic skills or, what is equally likely, has figured out how to rig the system in its favor.
It’s one of those aspects of AI research that never fails to delight: the ways an agent will bend or break the rules in its endeavors to appear good at whatever

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new search tool called Kendra, which provides natural language search across a variety of content repositories using machine learning.
Matt Wood, AWS VP of artificial intelligence, said the new search tool uses machine learning, but doesn’t actually require machine learning expertise of any kind. Amazon is taking care of that for customers under the hood.
You start by identifying your content repositories. This could be anything

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced AutoPilot, a new tool that gives you greater visibility in automated machine learning model creation, known as AutoML. This new tool is part of the new SageMaker Studio also announced today.
As AWS CEO Andy Jassy pointed out on stage today, one of the problems with AutoML is that it’s basically a black box. If you want to improve a mediocre model, or just evolve it for your business, you you have no idea how it was built.
The idea

AI experts gathered at MIT last week, with the aim of predicting the role artificial intelligence will play in the future of work. Will it be the enemy of the human worker? Will it prove to be a savior? Or will it be just another innovation—like electricity or the internet?As IEEE Spectrum previously reported, this conference (“AI and the Future of Work Congress”), held at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, offered sometimes pessimistic outlooks on the job- and industry-destro

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced AutoPilot, a new tool that gives you greater visibility into automated machine learning model creation, known as AutoML. This new tool is part of the new SageMaker Studio also announced today.
As AWS CEO Andy Jassy pointed out on stage today, one of the problems with AutoML is that it’s basically a black box. If you want to improve a mediocre model, or just evolve it for your business, you have no idea how it was built.
The idea be

Let me begin this review by saying that the Skydio 2 is one of the most impressive robots that I have ever seen. Over the last decade, I’ve spent enough time around robots to have a very good sense of what kinds of things are particularly challenging for them, and to set my expectations accordingly. Those expectations include things like “unstructured environments are basically impossible” and “full autonomy is impractically expensive” and “robot videos rarely

Credit: Pexels Smartphones are truly remarkable devices that can connect us to the sum total of human knowledge at a moment’s notice, but you shouldn’t be doing that while driving. Countries around the world are clamping down on distracted driving by banning the use of phones while in the car, but Australia is the first to leverage AI to catch people. The Australian state of New South Wales is the first in the world to deploy phone detection cameras on its roads. While many pla

Canalysreleased its latest cloud infrastructure spending numbers for China today, and it’s all trending upward. For starters, the market reached $2.9 billion for the quarter, an increase of 60.8%. China now accounts for 10.4% of worldwide cloud spending, meaning its second only to the US in overall spending.
That is pretty amazing given that China was late in coming to the cloud, but also not surprising given the sheer size of the overall potential market. Once it got going, it was bound t

As part of the flurry of announcements coming this week out of AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced the release of Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes, a way for data scientists and developers to simplify training, tuning and deploying containerized machine learning models.
Packaging machine learning models in containers can help put them to work inside organizations faster, but getting there often requires a lot of extra management to make it all work. AmazonSageMaker Operators for Kubernetes

Today, as AWS re:Invent begins, Amazon announced DeepComposer, a machine-learning driven keyboard aimed at developers.
“AWS DeepComposer is a 32-key, 2-octave keyboard designed for developers to get hands on with Generative AI, with either pretrained models or your own,” AWS’ Julien Simon wrote in a blog post introducing the company’s latest machine learning hardware.
The keyboard is supposed to help developers learn about machine learning in a fun way, and maybe create s

Amazonis expanding its automatic transcription service for AWS, Amazon Transcribe, to include support for medical speech, the company announced this morning at its AWS Re:Invent conference. The new machine-learning powered service, Amazon Transcribe Medical, will allow physicians to quickly dictate their clinical notes and speech into accurate text in real-time, without any human intervention, Amazon claims.
Unlike some services, the physicians won’t have to say things like “comma&rd

This is part six of a six-part series on the history of natural language processing.In February of this year, OpenAI, one of the foremost artificial intelligence labs in the world, announced that a team of researchers had built a powerful new text generator called the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 2, or GPT-2 for short. The researchers used a reinforcement learning algorithm to train their system on a broad set of natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, including reading comprehensi

It’s not friend portability, but Facebook has announced the launch today of a photo transfer tool to enable users of its social network to port their photos directly to Google’s photo storage service, via encrypted transfer.
The photo portability feature is initially being offered to Facebookusers in Ireland, where the company’s international HQ is based. Facebook says it is still testing and tweaking the feature based on feedback but slates “worldwide availability”

Areas with higher probability of automation match those with greater percentage of BrexitersBrexit supporters are more likely to live in areas most threatened by the economic impact of automation, according to a study of the impact of robots and artificial intelligence in the workplace.A map of the parts of the UK likely to be hit by automation fits more closely with the map of leave voters than any other factor, said the Institute for the Future of Work (IFW). Related: Automation could destroy