Insights August 30th, 2017

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In the EXPONENTIAL MINDS’ Artificial Intelligence Bulletin – Writing Game of Thrones we see AI writing the next GoT book, a $1 billion dollar fund, surveillance, the real truth behind AI, and demining Cambodia.

Artificial Intelligence Is Attempting To Write The Next Game Of Thrones Book

Are you tired of waiting for George R. R. Martin to finish his latest installment of A Song of Ice And Fire, called The Winds of Winter? Well, maybe you don’t have to be.
A software engineer called Zack Thoutt has used artificial intelligence (AI) to try to write the book himself, reports Motherboard. Known as a recurrent neural network (RNN), it has trawled through the 5,376 pages of the first five books, and has taken a stab at writing the sixth.
The results are interesting, if not grammatically perfect. Thoutt began each chapter supplying a prime word to the RNN, and then told it how many words to write. Then the network was left to its own devices. You can read the first five chapters on GitHub.
“Tyrion could hear Lord Aemon’s coughing,” the RNN begins. “’I miss for it. Why did you proper?’”
Read more at IFLScience!

Baidu and China Life set up US$1 billion AI fund

China Life and Baidu (China Search engine company) will set up a US$1 billion investment fund in Artificial Intelligence and Fintech.
China Life on Thursday said it had teamed up with internet search company Baidu to form a 7 billion yuan (US $ 1 billion) private equity fund. China Life will invest 5.6 billion yuan while Baidu will cover the remainder. The fund will invest in unlisted companies Involved in artificial intelligence (AI) and internet finance.
Baidu has invested heavily in artificial intelligence: Building image-recognition technology, investing in autonomous driving, launching digital assistants, similar to Apple’s Siri, and even developing personal home robots. In May, the firm amended its mission statement to reflect the change in direction.
In July, Baidu said more than 50 groups have signed on to build and improve on Apollo, its autonomous driving platform, including top Chinese car manufacturers Chery Auto, Great Wall Motors and Changan Automobile, and even ridesharing company Grab Taxi. Foreign partners included Ford and Intel.
Read more at Next Big Future

The age of AI surveillance is here

Artificial intelligence researchers struggled for years to build algorithms that could look at an image and tell what it depicts. The complexity of images, each containing millions of pixels that form unique patterns, was just too complicated for hand-coded algorithms to reliably work.
Then in 2012, researchers demonstrated that a technique called deep learning, a system that took the general idea of our brains’ interconnected neurons and translated it into mathematical functions, worked far better when working with large amounts of images. If a deep neural network, as the system was called, was given enough examples it could suss out shared patterns between images, like the shape and textures common between cats.
Since then the systems have grown in complexity and scale: Researchers began making larger networks of “neurons,” while hardware manufacturers like Nvidia began building specialty processors to make the networks exponentially faster. The result has been an explosion in what the systems can accomplish. Given a large dataset of images or video, these systems can be trained to learn what a person’s face looks like, and reliably identify it again and again.
Read more at Quartz

11 Tech Leaders Share The Real Truth About Artificial Intelligence (And What Really Matters)

Oh, the deep world of artificial intelligence. There’s an endless sea of content as it pertains to best practices, how to leverage AI for your business, how it will impact consumers, and the list goes on (way on). The truth is, some AI is too complex and unnecessary for businesses to be worrying about investing in for their brand at this stage, especially given current and short-term demands. But with constant talk of AI and automation in the media, the pressure is on, it’s tense, and it’s noisy. In an attempt at cutting through that exact noise, insights were gathered from 11 tech leaders that go deeper on where that focus should be (and why).
Read more at Forbes

A Cambodian engineer is building robots to demine his home country

An engineering graduate from the University of Waterloo in Canada, Yim’s first encounter with landmines came when he was eight years old and growing up in Phnom Penh, when his aunt died after stepping on one of the fist-sized devices. A decade later, and halfway around the world in Canada, he started the Landmine Boys, a company rebranded this month as Demine Robotics, which is developing technology meant to help eradicate landmines with minimal human exposure to the explosive devices.

“This is for the country, this is for the world, this is for those countries that still have landmines and the thousands of people who suffer because of landmines and the millions more who are restricted of land and denied the ability to take part in agricultural activities because of landmines,” Yim said.

Drawing on his technical expertise, Yim created two machines to enter the demining process in place of humans. One is designed with arms that plunge under a mine to lift it out of the ground, uncovering the detonator for the second machine, which pinches and disables the trigger before slicing into the mine and melting the explosive material inside.

Read more at SEA Globe
 
 

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