When Aliens: Colonial Marines dropped in 2013, it has built up a ton of hype that made it seem as though the game would transport players into the terror-filled and action-packed Alien universe. Instead, they got an absolute mess of a game that, as it turns out, may have been just one letter away from being good—or at…
It’s been rumored for months that Facebook might be interested in building its own, in-house processing chips. Now it appears the social network company is really going for it. Bloomberg reported Friday that Facebook managed to snag one of Google’s top silicon engineering directors to head up its own efforts in the…
Photographers already face an uphill battle in trying to preventing people from using their digital photos without permission. But Nvidia could make protecting photos online much harder with a new advancement in artificial intelligence that can automatically remove artifacts from a photograph, including text and…
An instructor of mine once compared mixing a song to baking a cake. The various tracks are the ingredients, and once everything is mixed and baked, as with a cake, those ingredients can’t be deconstructed. Or can they? AI researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created an app…
In a self-congratulatory move, Microsoft announced some major improvements today to its fundamentally biased facial recognition software. The Azure-based Face API was criticized in a research paper earlier this year for its error rate—as high as 20.8 percent—when attempting to identify the gender of people of color,…
When it comes to groundbreaking research, there are two fields that seem to occupy the newscycle: carbon nanotubes and artificial intelligence. The potential combination of those two fields of study seems like it could radically change the word as we know it, or, as South Korean scientists have discovered, at least…
Lovers of quality audio content you’re probably not paying for, rejoice. Google has finally released its own Google Podcasts app, providing users a dedicated place to enjoy their shows, find personalized recommendations, and soon take advantage of upcoming accessibility features. It’s also one of the few Android-only…
One of the hardest video effects to fake is slow motion. It requires software to stretch out a clip by creating hundreds of non-existent in-between frames, and the results are often stuttered and unconvincing. But taking advantage of the incredible image-processing potential of deep learning, Nvidia has come up with a…
Meet DeepCube, an artificially intelligent system that’s as good at playing the Rubik’s Cube as the best human master solvers. Incredibly, the system learned to dominate the classic 3D puzzle in just 44 hours and without any human intervention.
By now, you’ve probably seen the satirical posts where someone claims to have “forced a bot” to watch thousands of hours of video and then write their own script. The posts are funny, but if you haven’t realized, they’re jokes that don’t quite encapsulate how artificial intelligence works.
The information age has generated far more data than humanity can ever hope to manually process, but with the help of artificial intelligence, that avalanche of data is now revealing itself to be far more useful than we ever thought possible. The omnipresent wireless signals that keep us connected can now be used like…
It looks like Uber has a growing interest in the behaviors of its users. According to a patent application filed by the company Thursday, Uber is planning to use machine learning to better understand the “state” of a passenger when they request a ride.
Mozilla announced on Tuesday that it’s offering five-figure grants to researchers and creatives studying the impact of artificial intelligence on society. This latest round of the annual Mozilla awards will net lucky winners up to $50,000 for producing AI-awareness content: videos, browser extensions, or interactive…
Researchers are teaching machines to get stuff done using video simulations, a database of chores, and a virtual home reminiscent of your favorite time-wasting video game. The end goal? Teaching robots the same way you teach yourself how to install a toilet: instructional videos.
Siri easter eggs can range from dorky to almost fun, but a new one is hinting that Apple’s voice assistant is about to get a major upgrade.
At Google I/O 2018, Google announced that its digital assistant was getting upgraded with more natural-sounding speech in addition to six new alternate voices. Then, Google promptly scared the hell out of everyone by using the Google Assistant’s new skills to mimic a real voice so well, people on the other end of a…
The technical skills of programmer John Carmack helped create the 3D world of Doom, the first-person shooter that took over the world 25 years ago. But it was level designers like John Romero and American McGee that made the game fun to play. Level designers that, today, might find their jobs threatened by the …
Although Facebook’s ability to track and remove terrorist content was one of his favorite talking points when CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress last month, a new report from the social media network shows that there’s still a lot of work to do. The company’s first content moderation report, released…
Yesterday, the White House announced the creation of a new committee that will coordinate federal efforts related to artificial intelligence. The move makes sense given the rapid rise of AI, but the new group better be prepared to tackle all that AI has to offer—both the good and the bad.
A team of computer science students has embedded subliminal audio signals into music, allowing them to secretly seize control of devices that respond to voice commands.
