Robotics & Automation News

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Archives for February 20, 2016

Salesforce signs up machine learning company PredictionIO to its empire

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salesforce tower, san farancisco
Salesforce’s billion-dollar tower in San Francisco is set for completion in 2017

Salesforce has signed a “definitive agreement” to buy startup company PredictionIO, which owns an open source machine learning server for developers and data scientists to build and deploy predictive applications.

“We couldn’t be more excited to join Salesforce,” writes Simon Chan, co-founder and CEO of PredictionIO, on his blog.

Just over six months ago, UK-based PredictionIO raised $2.5 million in seed funding from a number of investors, including Stanford University’s StartX Fund. [Read more…] about Salesforce signs up machine learning company PredictionIO to its empire

Nvidia profits from growing market for artificial intelligence systems

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Chipmaker Nvidia claims it has earned record-breaking revenues in the last quarter thanks to its achievements in a range of newfangled technologies, such as driverless cars and deep learning.

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia, says: “Nvidia is at the center of four exciting growth opportunities – PC gaming, VR, deep learning, and self-driving cars.

“We are especially excited about deep learning, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence algorithms that takes advantage of our GPU’s ability to process data simultaneously. [Read more…] about Nvidia profits from growing market for artificial intelligence systems

Google open sources TensorFlow Serving

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Tensor_Flow_Diagram1_Serving_FINALAfter releasing its deep learning or machine learning library TensorFlow as open source software a few months ago, Google has now followed up by open sourcing TensorFlow Serving, which the company says makes it easier to take models into production.

Noah Fiedel, Google software engineer, writes on his blog: “TensorFlow Serving makes the process of taking a model into production easier and faster.

“It allows you to safely deploy new models and run experiments while keeping the same server architecture and APIs.”

TensorFlow Serving is written in C++ and supports Linux. Fidel says the software requires minimal overhead. “In our benchmarks we recoded approximately 100,000 queries per second per core on a 16 vCPU Intel Xeon E5 2.6 GHz machine, excluding gRPC and the TensorFlow inference processing time.”

DeepMind boss developing special AI to solve all of humanity’s problems

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Demis Hassabis. Photograph: David Ellis for Google
Demis Hassabis. Photograph: David Ellis for Google

The founder of one of the most interesting startups in recent years says he is working on a special kind of artificial intelligence that will potentially solve all of humanity’s problems, according to an interview on The Guardian website. 

Demis Hassabis, whose DeepMind company was bought by Google a couple of years ago for $625 million, refers to his version of AI as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

He says AGI can potentially find solutions to “cancer, climate change, energy, genomics, macroeconomics, financial systems, physics”, and many of the systems which are getting too complex for humans to master.

Hassabis says: “There’s such an information overload that it’s becoming difficult for even the smartest humans to master it in their lifetimes. How do we sift through this deluge of data to find the right insights? One way of thinking of AGI is as a process that will automatically convert unstructured information into actionable knowledge. What we’re working on is potentially a meta-solution to any problem.”

DeepMind recently beat a grandmaster in the ancient Chinese game Go, a feat that was previously thought beyond the abilities of computers. Hassibis himself is a former chess master and video games designer.

Full story at The Guardian website 

UN technology boss proclaims the end of human innovation

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United Nations CITO Atefeh Riazi. Image: New York City Housing Authority
United Nations CITO Atefeh Riazi. Image: New York City Housing Authority

United Nations Chief Technology Officer Atefeh Riazi says the end is nigh for human innovation. 

In an interview with TechRepublic, Riazi says all future innovations will be made by computers.

“The next innovations will come through artificial intelligence,” says Riazi. “It will be the AI innovating.

“We need to think about our role as technologists and we need to think about the ramifications – positive and negative – and we need to transform ourselves as innovators.”

Full story at TechRepublic