AI in Action: From Art to Autonomous Fruit Pickers

This week in AI & Machine Learning: Autonomous Fruit picking robots, AI processing breakthrough, finding optimal ML Models, robot paintings, and more!

Artificial Intelligence News:

The AI field is growing fast! Here are some of the most interesting or thought provoking AI stories and applications that made the news this week.

This flying AI robot can pick fruit – preventing waste in the process

Hiring enough workers to pick fruit is always hard, but it has been especially difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn how Tevel Aerobotics Technologies is solving the worker shortage and reducing food waste with its flying autonomous fruit picking robots!

Ai-Da, the First Robot Artist To Exhibit Herself

There have been a lot of awesome AI generated art pieces, and even robots that paint them, but what makes the Ai-da exhibit a bit more fun is having the humanoid robot artist exhibit her work “in person”.

Samsung Develops Industry’s First High Bandwidth Memory with AI Processing Power

Samsung announces it has developed “the industry’s first High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) processing power”. Having more powerful AI processing chips from Samsung and other chip manufacturers will greatly affect where AI can be applied in the future! To learn more about the AI microprocessor field, check out the conversation with Jim Keller in the podcast section!

2021 Habitat Challenge launches to advance embodied AI research

The 2021 Habitat Challenge launched by Facebook AI and Georgia Tech challenges AI researchers to train machines to navigate real-world environments. Navigating real-world environments has been a long running problem in the AI and robotics community. It’s always neat to see more challenges aiming to improve navigation in complex environments.

We're excited to launch the third Habitat Challenge at the Embodied AI workshop with 15 research & academic institutions. The 2021 Habitat Challenge invites AI experts from around the world to teach machines to navigate real-world environments. #CVPR2021 https://t.co/wefO4xXCz0 pic.twitter.com/1Ai3PVyujN
— Facebook AI (@facebookai) February 17, 2021

Developer Tools & Education:

Keep up to date with the latest relevant developer tool releases & educational posts.

Introducing Model Search: An Open Source Platform for Finding Optimal ML Models

Google announces its open source domain-agnostic platform to help researchers develop the best ML models, efficiently and automatically with its AutoML solution, Model Search.

Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models

Google in collaboration with Deepmind and the University of Toronto introduce DreamerV2, the first deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent based on a world model to achieve human-level performance on the Atari benchmark. Read the arxiv paper here.

Presenting DreamerV2, the first world model-based #ReinforcementLearning agent to achieve top-level performance on the Atari benchmark, learning general representations from images to discover successful behaviors in latent space. Read more at https://t.co/V12CYFPWBy pic.twitter.com/ssS88f8Vsz
— Google AI (@GoogleAI) February 18, 2021

PyTorch Lightning V1.2.0 – DeepSpeed, Pruning, Quantization, SWA

PyTorch Lightning V1.2.0 is here! This brings some neat new features such as, PyTorch autograd profiler, DeepSpeed model parallelism, Pruning, quantization, Stochastic weights averaging and more stability improvements.

PyImageSearch University: You can master Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and OpenCV

PyImageSearch announces a new “university” tier of subscription. This is pretty exciting! It will allow a subscriber to pay for content organization, videos, certificates, and code while allowing pyimagesearch to still post free content for everyone to enjoy and learn from.

Interesting Podcasts & Interviews:

Listening to podcasts is a great way to stay updated with the ever changing world of AI, and often provides deeper insights into how brilliant people solve problems.