Google’s AI lab establishes first international office in Canada

DeepMind

Even after Google acquired artificial intelligence firm DeepMind three years ago, the British company has kept its offices in London. This time, though, they’re finally making their way to this side of the world and putting up shop right in Edmonton. It’s fitting for DeepMind to put its roots here as the company works closely with the AI research community at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. DeepMind says nearly a dozen of Alberta grads work for them and they sponsored the university’s machine learning lab for a number of years.

DeepMind’s new office will be led by Richard Sutton, a professor of computing science at Alberta who also served as DeepMind’s first outside advisor. He’ll be working with his colleagues Michael Bowling and Patrick Pilarski. There will be seven other researchers who’ll join them. The Verge points out though that while DeepMind calls the Edmonton office its “first international research office,” there are a team of researchers from the company that are based in Google’s Mountain View headquarters to “bridge the gap between Google and [the] team in London.” And these 20 researchers focus on the “applied” side of DeepMind, which looks at the practical applications of AI in real-life situations.

Amazon Echo can fact-check politicians

Amazon Echo wants to keep the US presidential candidates and possibly any other politician in check with its new feature: fact-checking. Duke Reporters’ Lab introduced the new Echo skill that’ll make it easier for you to check if the candidates are just speaking lies. Echo gets its data from PolitFact, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post. It isn’t a perfect feature and you’ll have to go through an opening spiel to get right to asking it questions. Duke emphasizes that you need to mention major keywords to get a correct answer from it.

Source: Engadget

Apple’s newest hire looks to address Siri’s shortcomings

Looks like Apple want to make sure Siri keeps up with its competition. The tech company has hired Carnegie Mellon University Professor Russ Salakhutdinov to head its team working on artificial intelligence, which is considered a big part of the industry’s future. And if this is your line of work, Salakhutdinov is even hiring people for his team. He’ll also remain as a professor at Carnegie Mellon. One of latest researches involve work on how to better derive context behind the questions people pose. If applied to Apple’s tech, that can come quite handy and perhaps put them back in the running in the virtual assistant space.

Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my teamhttps://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA

— Russ Salakhutdinov (@rsalakhu) October 17, 2016

 

Source: Recode

Etsy to bring AI into its search with latest acquisition

Etsy’s looking to make the online shopping on its platform just a bit easier with its latest purchase. The design and craft marketplace bought Blackbird Technologies, a startup that specializes in developing algorithms that can help Etsy boost its search feature. The acquisition could bring things like natural language processing, analytics, and image recognition.

Financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed but all members of the team (a lean 10 people) will be coming onboard to Etsy. And since Etsy will be using their tech, any clients they may have won’t get access to the API anymore. This new purchase can also help keep its competitors at bay and give a better experience for its shoppers.

Source: TechCrunch