Last week, Google announced that its AI had defeated a 2 dan Go player in Europe. We covered this news, as did many outlets. The news, however, has far greater implications than many outlets let on. This is, perhaps, the largest single advancement in AI development since Marvin Minsky arrived at MIT. Perhaps that’s why … continue reading
This week, there was a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence researchers. Google’s AI system AlphaGo won a contest of the ancient strategy game Go, the first time an AI system was able to do so for it. The rules of Go are simple: Players take turns placing black or white stones on a board, and … continue reading
The computer science industry has lost another pioneer. This time, it was a man who had a vision of artificial intelligence, something that is currently impacting the advancement of technology and software. Marvin Minsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died on Sunday night in Boston at the age of 88, according to … continue reading
It seems like neural networks are taking over. We see their code open-sourced, they power our self-driving vehicles, we use them as programming assistants, and we’ve even let them rate our selfies. Now, deep neural networks have analyzed 50,000 fonts, just because. The man behind this crazy font fun is Erik Bernhardsson, a CTO at … continue reading
Microsoft has announced that it is making the tools that its researchers use for artificial intelligence available to developers. It has released its Computational Network Toolkit on GitHub. Researchers said that they developed the open-source toolkit, called CNTK, for “necessity,” according to a blog post. Microsoft’s chief speech scientist, Xuedong Huang, said he and his … continue reading
Yesterday, Baidu Research’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) released open-source code called Warp-CTC to GitHub. The goal is for this code to be used in the machine learning community. Warp-CTC is a tool that can plug into existing machine learning frameworks to speed up the development of artificial intelligence, and according to SVAIL, it will … continue reading
Oculus is opening Rift preorders today to put VR in the hands of people around the world, and the company is also going to give a free Kickstarter Edition Oculus Rift to all of the Kickstarter backers who pledged for a Rift development kit. In a letter obtained by Wired, Oculus said those who pledged … continue reading
NVIDIA is looking to power self-driving cars with an artificial intelligence supercomputer. The NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 utilizes deep learning and situational awareness to tackle complexities inherent in autonomous driving. It features a surround view solution, a deep neural network pipeline, and sensor fusion. “Drivers deal with an infinitely complex world,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, cofounder … continue reading
Remember the character Jarvis (Just a Rather Very Intelligent System) from Marvel’s “Iron Man”? Tony Stark’s AI butler could be coming to the home of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, because his 2016 agenda includes building a simple artificial intelligence assistant. He wants to explore the technology as it exists now, and invent something he can … continue reading
Much ink was spilled in 2015 about the Internet of Things. It’s a concept that has been bandied about for several years—remember the use case of your refrigerator letting your local grocer know when you’re out of milk? The coming together of smartphones, sensors, GPS, Bluetooth and other technologies that enable mobile interconnectivity has moved … continue reading
How can programmers benefit from the “the year of Neural Nets”? Statistical machine learning techniques have been surging in popularity in academic settings for years, but 2015 was a watershed in terms of industry awareness and deployment. It was not long ago when the term “Deep Neural Networks” seemed about as dubious an explanation as … continue reading
Kids can build their own computer this holiday. Kano, a computer and coding kit for children ages 6 and up, released the new Kano Screen Kit in time for the holidays. Kids can use the kit to build a computer with plug-and-play pieces, make music, create games, code with Minecraft, and they can also learn … continue reading
