In October, Walmart-owned Sam’s Club opened a test store in Dallas where it planned to trial new technology including mobile checkout, an Amazon Go-like camera system, in-store navigation wayfinding technology, electronic shelf labels, and more. This morning, the retailer announced it will now begin testing a revamped Scan & Go service as well, which leverages […]
Computer Vision
It's obviously important to Australians to make sure their koala population is closely tracked — but how can you do so when the suckers live in forests and climb trees all the time? With drones and AI, of course.
Koala-sensing drone helps keep tabs on drop bear numbers
"If AI is so easy, why isn't there any in this room?" asks Ali Farhadi, founder and CEO of Xnor, gesturing around the conference room overlooking Lake Union in Seattle. And it's true — despite a handful of displays, phones, and other gadgets, the only things really capable of doing any kind of AI-type work are the phones each of us have set on the table. Yet we are always hearing about how AI is so accessible now, so flexible, so ubiquitous.
Xnor’s saltine-sized, solar-powered AI hardware redefines the edge
Wildfires are consuming our forests the institutions and technologies to keep these environments healthy have suffered decades of neglect. DroneSeed is a Seattle-based startup that aims to combat this problem with drones, artificial intelligence, and biological engineering. And it's even more complicated than it sounds.
That night, a forest flew: DroneSeed is planting trees from ...
A group of computer vision researchers from ETH Zurich want to do their bit to enhance AI development on smartphones. To wit: They’ve created a benchmark system for assessing the performance of several major neural network architectures used for common AI tasks. They’re hoping it will be useful to other AI researchers but also to […]
Computer vision researchers build an AI benchmark app for Android ...
In May, Facebook teased a new feature called 3D photos, and it's just what it sounds like. But beyond a short video and the name, little was said about it. But the company's computational photography team has just published the research behind how the feature feature works and, having tried it myself, I can attest that the results are really quite compelling.
How Facebook’s new 3D photos work
A couple years ago I was eagerly expectant of an app that would identify anything you pointed it at. Turns out the problem was much harder than anyone expected — but that didn't stop high school senior Michael Royzen from trying. His app, SmartLens, attempts to solve the problem of seeing something and wanting to identify and learn more about it — with mixed success, to be sure, but it's something I don't mind having in my pocket.
‘SmartLens’ app created by a high schooler is a step ...
We've trained machine learning systems to identify objects, navigate streets, and recognize facial expressions, but as difficult as they may be, they don't even touch the level of sophistication required to simulate, for example, a dog. Well, this project aims to do just that — in a very limited way of course. By observing the behavior of A Very Good Girl, this AI learned the rudiments of how to act like a dog.
Who’s a good AI? Dog-based data creates a canine machine ...
A self-driving vehicle made by Uber has struck and killed a pedestrian. It's the first such incident and will certainly be scrutinized like no other autonomous vehicle interaction in the past. But on the face of it it's hard to understand how, short of a total system failure, this could happen when the entire car has essentially been designed around preventing exactly this situation from occurring.
Here’s how Uber’s self-driving cars are supposed to detect pedestrians
Autonomous cars gather up tons of data about the world around them, but even the best computer vision systems can't see through brick and mortar. But by carefully monitoring the reflected light of a laser bouncing off a nearby surface, they might be ab...