+++ Near-perfect point-goal navigation from 2.5 billion frames of experience +++ Google’s ML-fairness-gym: A Tool for Exploring Long-Term Impacts of Machine Learning Systems +++ Facebook launches PyTorch3D, a 3D deep learning library +++ White House reportedly aims to double AI research budget to $2B +++ Facebook has acquired Scape Technologies, a London-based computer vision startup +++ Avigilon’s Appearance Search Can Tell Schools Where Students Are And Where They’ve Been +++ Google, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter demand Clearview stop scraping images for facial recognition +++ Quantifying Independently Reproducible Machine Learning +++ RGISTools: Downloading, Customizing, and Processing Time-Series of Remote Sensing Data in R +++ Ignite the Spark: Running Apache Spark on Kubernetes using PySpark +++

+++ Google says its new chatbot Meena is the best in the world +++ Facebook is Open-sourcing Polygames, a new framework for training AI bots through self-play +++ An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus +++ Europe wants single data market to break U.S. tech giants’ dominance +++ Meena: Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About Anything +++ Survey of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Motion Planning of Autonomous Vehicles +++ A Survey of Deep Learning Techniques for Autonomous Driving +++

For a quite some time I had planned to build my own small mobile robot. During the last weeks I ordered the components and played a little bit with an Arduino and ultrasonic distance sensors (as described in an earlier post). Now I have finally found the time to put the basic setup in place and go for a first test drive. Before getting lost in potentially boring details, let’s look at a video of the first test drive (turning on the spot). Note that the Raspberry is acting as video streaming server (see here for documentation) so that the live transmission of this noteworthy event can be seen on the notebook in the back:

+++ Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning +++ Microsoft open sources BERT optimizations in ONNX runtime +++ Introducing the Hopsworks Feature Store – the Data Warehouse for Machine Learning +++ Why Google thinks we need to regulate AI +++ A Look Back on Baidu’s AI Innovations in 2019 +++ Kernel-Based Ensemble Learning in Python +++ An introduction to audio data analysis using Python +++ Spark in Docker in Kubernetes: A practical approach for scalable NLP +++

This is the first post in short series that I write on the basics of differential or Riemannian geometry. Differential geometry is a key mathematical foundation of general relativity, and the terminology presented here is a prerequisite for reading some of the more advanced textbooks, such as the ones by Carroll, MTW, Wald, Straumann or Hawking/Ellis. Here I start with differentiable manifolds. The following posts will cover tangent spaces, tensors, covariant derivatives and parallel transport. The presentation will be informal, focusing mostly on motivation, definitions and key facts, not on mathematical proofs.

+++ Google’s AI language model Reformer can process the entirety of novels +++ World Economic Forum launches toolkit to help corporate boards build AI-first companies +++ Apple has quietly acquired low-power AI startup Xnor.ai for about $200M +++ Up to two billion times acceleration of scientific simulations with deep neural architecture search +++ Researchers propose system that taps AI to see hidden objects around corners +++

+++ Uber is Open Sourcing Manifold, a Visual Debugging Tool for Machine Learning +++ Lyft releases Flyte, a platform for maintaining AI workflows +++ Google Research: Looking Back at 2019, and Forward to 2020 and Beyond +++ Facebook AI year in review: 2019 +++ An Idea From Physics Helps AI See in Higher Dimensions +++

+++ An artificial intelligence predicts the future +++ Google’s AI breast cancer screening tool is learning to generalize across countries +++ The Decade of Deep Learning +++ Using Machine Learning to “Nowcast” Precipitation in High Resolution +++ A Decade in Review in Tech +++ Catalog of Variable Transformations To Make Your Model Work Better +++

In this project I am interfacing the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor module to a Raspberry Pi to measure distance. Later on the Raspberry as well as the sensor will be part of an obstacle avoiding robot. I use my oscilloscope to check whether the sensor is working as announced.

+++ Facebook has a neural network that can do advanced math +++ Google’s AI can identify wildlife from trap-camera footage with up to 98.6% accuracy +++ Intel acquires AI chip startup Habana Labs for $2 billion +++ eBay open-sources AI platform Krylov +++ AI experts urge machine learning researchers to tackle climate change +++ Top 10 Python libraries of 2019 +++