This week in AI & Machine Learning: Amazon Astro, AI adoption is skyrocketing, super resolution, sensor guided optical flow, accelerating start-up growth with machine learning and more.
My Top AI Highlight:
Amazon Launches “Astro”, an Ambitious Take at Household Robots
This week Amazon launched Astro, an experimental robot that can autonomously navigate and patrol your household. Of course it comes with Alexa built-in to understand voice commands, but it also has plenty of sensors to help with its navigation and following abilities. Including a periscope camera that can be used to check higher surfaces.
Astro also comes equipped with a decently sized display that can be used for video calling and showing the robots expressions.
This is a very ambitious next step for Alexa and Amazon’s smart home devices. I’ll be curious to see how many people adopt Astros into their homes, and look forward to the new use cases this personal home robot will unlock.
🤖 Artificial Intelligence News:
- AI Adoption Skyrocketed Over the Last 18 Months
- AI can predict if it will rain in two hours’ time
- Artificial Intelligence Myth Vs Reality: Where Do Healthcare Experts Think We Stand?
- Amazon’s ‘custom’ AI features showcase the potential of unsupervised learning
- Apple’s no-code Trinity AI platform handles complex spatial datasets
🛠️ Developer Tools & Education:
- Pixel Shuffle Super Resolution with TensorFlow, Keras, and Deep Learning
- Optical character recognition with TensorFlow Lite: A new example app
- CompilerGym: Making compiler optimizations accessible to all
- MiniHack: A new sandbox for open-ended reinforcement learning
- High-Quality, Robust and Responsible Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation
- Improving Generalization in Reinforcement Learning using Policy Similarity Embeddings
- Efficient Partitioning of Road Networks
🎤 Interesting Podcasts & Interviews:
- Jeffrey Shainline: Neuromorphic Computing and Optoelectronic Intelligence
- Do You Dare Run Your ML Experiments in Production? with Ville Tuulos
- Delivering Neural Speech Services at Scale with Li Jiang
- Accelerating Start-up Growth with A.I. Specialists — with Parinaz Sobhani
- Balancing human intelligence with AI
📄 Notable Research Papers:
- Sensor-Guided Optical Flow
- Unsupervised Few-Shot Action Recognition via Action-Appearance Aligned Meta-Adaptation
- LayoutTransformer: Layout Generation and Completion with Self-attention
- Real Robot Challenge using Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Understanding and Overcoming the Challenges of Efficient Transformer Quantization
- CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation
