TOP 10 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMPANIES TO WORK FOR IN 2020
[PhilNote: The article contains 1-paragraph descriptions of each company's AI activity.]
Amazon
Graphcore
Altar.io
Nvidia - GauGAN, named after post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, is a deep-learning model that acts like an AI paintbrush, quickly changing over text descriptions, doodles, or fundamental representations into photorealistic, professional-quality images. Nvidia says art directors and concept artists from top film studios and video-game organizations are as of now utilizing GauGAN to prototype thoughts and roll out quick improvements to digital scenery. Computer scientists may likewise utilize the tools to make virtual universes used to train self-driving vehicles, the organization says.
HiSilicon
Syntiant
SoftServe
Intel
Kasisto
See the full story here: https://www.analyticsinsight.net/top-10-artificial-intelligence-companies-to-work-for-in-2020/
VR Can Be the Film Industry’s Future, but the Barriers to Entry Are Surreal
[PhilNote: this very good article is about VR experiences, not creating experiences in VR.]
A stately man identified only as Tom, who helped Simon organize the event after meeting him at a weekly VR town hall event called “The Evening News,” put the globe-spanning gathering in context. “This is just a cool exemplification of what VR can be,” Tom told the crowd. “An event in one part of the world is now an event for the entire world. It’s amazing that someone living 5,000 miles away would find this personal.”
In early March, as it became clear that crowded events would become impossible for quite some time, I purchased an entry-level ticket to VR with the Oculus Go. As it turns out, there is a whole world entirely free from COVID-19 hiding in plain sight.
VR can’t replace Cannes, but it will play host to Cannes XR, a virtual reality market with virtual parties; VR can’t replace moviegoing, but it has hosted premiere screenings and Q&As for films that had been scheduled to play at canceled festivals. And VR can’t replace filmmaking, but it’s a platform for storytellers finding new ways of exploring the medium.
[VR is] the ultimate panacea to sheltering in place, where people can gather without inhaling the same air in immersive spaces.
One quiet Saturday night a few pandemic weeks ago, I dropped into a Reggie Watts performance in Altspace and had a blast. Watts, whose boundary-pushing performances blend standup, beatboxing, and jazzy, discursive music layered across a dense set of tracks in real time, has exactly the kind of category-busting persona that makes sense for the VR space. As I watched his cartoon avatar flit about the stage, addressing multiple rooms at once while the audience gathered around him, I was swept up in the euphoria of experiencing spur-of-the-moment creativity in a crowded room. Watts used the technology to his advantage, leading us out to a virtual balcony for his climatic performance, where he invited the audience to set off fireworks that exploded into large images of his face across the sky. It was a dazzling, surreal, and otherworldly feat.
See the full story here: https://www.indiewire.com/2020/06/virtual-reality-could-save-film-industry-1202234384/
Artificial intelligence reaches the ‘podcast’
Maybe inspired by all these stories, the writer Manuel Bartual has just released Biotopia, a newsletter-like sound fiction that he began working on during confinement: “Biotopía is a center of investigation and advanced technological development in which the matter, the time and the space behave in a strange way. It is actually a sound fiction.
Speaking one night with the actress Nikki García while we were having dinner on Skype, it occurred to us that we could prepare a podcast to get my head busy with something in those days, so I started to think about how that could be podcast, taking advantage of the fact that she had the means to record herself from home and then I could edit everything from mine ”. Biotopia It is a project that is born from certain limitations and makes them a narrative virtue. For example, to incorporate other voices into Biotopia, Bartual was using the resource of phone calls, which has allowed the rest of the actors and actresses who have participated to record themselves from their homes, using most of their mobile phones.
One of the peculiarities of Biotopia is the use of algorithmic voices: “We have used a text reading application that allows you to choose between different voices. One of the Biotopia characters is AmaIA, an artificial intelligence developed by an entertainment science team whose latest work is Inside Biotopia, a series on the origin of this scientific community ”.
The idea of listening to a podcast complete whose host Be a non-human voice is not something crazy. James Ryan, a student at California’s Santa Cruz University, presented this idea as part of his doctoral thesis. ... It is almost a podcast infinite, because its plots are automatically generated by a software.
See the full story here: https://theunionjournal.com/artificial-intelligence-reaches-the-podcast-blog-wine-days-and-podcasts/
Manned Fighter To Face Autonomous Drone Next Year In Sci-Fi Movie-Like Showdown
The Air Force is hoping to pit an autonomous drone equipped with an artificial intelligence-driven flight control system against a fighter jet with a human pilot in a little over a year. The service has described this effort in the past as a "big moonshot" that could revolutionize air-to-air combat in ways that have so far been limited to the realm of fiction - at least as far as we know.
At its most basic, a UCAV would be able to perform many of the same functions as manned aircraft, but would be able to make key decisions faster and more accurately, taking into account much more information in a shorter period of time, without any concern about being distracted or confused by the general chaos of combat. They can also be networked into swarms that work cooperatively to maximize their combat effectiveness at any given time far beyond what a human-piloted formation could.
See the full story here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33866/manned-fighter-to-face-an-autonomous-drone-next-year-in-a-sci-fi-movie-like-showdown
WalkinVR is Looking to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible for Handicapped Users
Essentially, WalkinVR allows users to finely tune certain aspects of VR experiences. The developers behind the software say that it can “enhance [a] person’s movement and adapt them to play existing Virtual Reality games.” This takes the form of additions that allow easier turning, leaning, and crouching in games to go along with extended movement range when it comes to your hands. The program also can increase the dynamic of hand movements meaning that actions that could be slower in the real world could be seen as faster in the VR realm.
WalkinVR also lets users opt to use various pads to perform actions in games rather than the native buttons that appear on controllers. Plus, hand tracking via Kinect or Azure has also been implemented to the software so that those who can’t hold controllers can still have their motions followed.
WalkinVR website here: https://www.walkinvrdriver.com
See the full story here: https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/walkinvr-is-looking-to-make-virtual-reality-more-accessible-for-handicapped-users/
Why the buzz around DeepMind is dissipating as it transitions from games to science
- DeepMind shot to fame in 2016 when it built a computer program called AlphaGo that learned how to play the board game Go and became better than any human.
- The London AI lab, which is owned by Alphabet, is now going through a quieter period, with far less media attention.
- DeepMind is shifting its focus from building “AI agents” that can play games to building AI agents that can have real world impact, particularly in areas of science like biology.
One ex-DeepMinder said the buzz around the company is now more in line with what it should be. “The whole AlphaGo period was nuts,” they said. “I think they’ve probably got another few milestones ahead, but progress should be more low key. It’s a marathon not a sprint, so to speak.”
See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/google-deepmind-alphago-buzz-dissipates.html
