The Latest Development in AI That You Should Know About

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way in the past years. While its development has been unparalleled lately, it doesn’t seem like it will come to a halt anytime soon. There is an influx of AI development news happening on a daily basis, and it’s getting harder to keep up with what’s going on.

That’s why we’ve compiled all of the latest AI updates everyone needs to know. These are the present and future of AI.

AI for Store Protection

AI’s capacity to protect establishments from possible threats is huge. Using facial recognition, store owners could potentially identify people with criminal records. In Japan, AI is being used not only to detect faces but also to detect body language and look for signs of potential shoplifting.




Take software called VaakEye for instance. It is AI-powered and uses behavior detection to predict criminal activity. To create the algorithm, the team behind the software studied over 100,000 hours of surveillance data that covered everything from the facial expressions of the shoplifters to their movements and clothing.

VaakEye is currently being used in 50 stores in Japan. The company claimed that it was able to lessen shoplifting losses by at least 77% during a test run. Hopefully, the project will become a success and roll out in other stores worldwide.

AI used To Reimagine Games

In video games, AI is used to give life to games through non-playable characters (NPCs). Thanks to the developing technology, AI can now be used to refurbish old titles to create better visuals.

Although the technology is still in its early stages, gamers are already excited to get their hands on the rebuilt and redesigned gaming experience. The thought of having to bring old games back to life with improved graphics is a great prospect, especially for older gamers.

The technique being used is AI upscaling. Basically, the user will have to feed an algorithm a low-res image. And based on its training data and what it knows, it will turn the image into a better one — the one with more pixels.

Upscaling has been around for years, but thanks to modern developments and AI, it can now be used more efficiently and effectively. This tech innovation comes at a time when retro gamers are starting to clamor for games of days gone by.

With technology, they no longer have to rely on game companies for remasters as it will be something they can do themselves.

AI That Monitors Living Conditions

One of the biggest differences between AI then and AI now is that human emotions and actions are now accounted for. This big change allows for an endless amount of possible applications. It can even monitor the living condition in different areas so that people know what they are getting into before moving in or traveling to a certain city.

People from Imperial College London have trained AI to detect inequalities. The technology is now being used in four cities in the UK. It is powered by government statistics such as income, crime, housing, and living environment.

It was also fed with public images taken by Google Street View. In total, the AI was fed over 525,000 images from 156,581 postcodes in London.

The AI was successful at spotting the differences in the quality of living and income across of the cities it was installed in.

If fully developed, this technology could be used to give the government a broad view of the current status in certain cities. It will also give them a chance to determine which areas are in need of development.

Facebook Next In Line To Develop an AI Assistant

AI voice assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa took the world by storm when they were launched a few years back. At present, these assistants, along with Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri, remain on top of the industry.

However, they are about to get a new competitor. And this time, it is coming from the social media giant Facebook.

According to news reports, Facebook is working on developing an AI voice assistant that has similar functionality to those currently in the market. The project has been in the works since early 2018.

No final name has been given for the assistant yet, but the project itself is dubbed as Facebook Assistant.

If the reports are true, this wouldn’t be Facebook’s first foray into AI technology. It has already integrated the technology in its messenger service before. The difference this time is that the Facebook Assistant might rely on hardware devices like Portal and the Oculus Rift VR.

AI Finds Home In Protein Research

Studying protein is a crucial part of medical science as it reveals the inner workings of the body’s building blocks. However, studying proteins is no easy task. Processes such as protein folding are both costly and time-consuming. But thanks to AI, we can get results at a faster rate.

Harvard Medical School biologist, Mohammed AlQuraishi, recently used machine learning to easily identify patterns in proteins for protein folding. While the results are not yet precise enough for folding applications, they are still acquired at rates a million times faster than traditional computing methods.

Protein folding is a supplement to other healthcare processes such as medicine manufacturing. If the technology is developed to produce more accurate results, then it will be another great application of AI in medicine.

Bottom Line

AI is continuously evolving. Needless to say, we are excited to see what the future holds for technology. Hopefully, these recent updates bring forth better news for the industry as a whole.

As more projects are developed, we are sure that more developers will be encouraged to put AI on the spotlight as well.

Categories: Technology