Deep Learning

​We've already seen several dog-like quadruped robots, which move by walking with their four backward-bending legs. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University are now getting in on the act, with their artificially-intelligent (and dog-headed) Astro robot.

They're known as deepfakes – photos or videos that have been very convincingly manipulated to depict people saying or doing things that they never actually said or did. They're potentially quite the problem, so an experimental new deep neural network has been designed to spot them.

​Starting at the end of next year, some of Vienna's walk-light push-buttons will be disappearing from the city's pedestrian crossings. Instead, a new system will be trialled, that uses cameras and computers to visually detect when people wish to cross the road.

Using the latest trend in artificial intelligence – adversarial learning – Samsung has demonstrated that it can take a single image of a person and turn it into a talking head. And if watching the Mona Lisa come to life doesn't send chills down your spine, you need to check your pulse.

A deep learning model, trained on thousands of mammograms, can now predict whether a person is at a high risk of developing breast cancer. Better than any current model, the new system can identify subtle changes in breast tissue and determine how likely cancer could develop within five years.

Already deployed in over 50 stores around Japan, the VaakEye system constantly monitors security camera footage, detects suspicious activities and alerts staff, who can instantly review the footage and act on it. And the company is getting ready to launch Amazon-style auto-checkout as well.

​Forget large arrays of sensors and radars. Forget hard-coded road rules. British startup Wayve taught a car to teach itself to drive, and using only some cameras, a sat-nav and 20 hours' worth of experience, it's already driving itself short distances on unfamiliar UK roads.

Intel and the US Department of Energy will deliver the world’s first exascale supercomputer in 2021, boosting many different fields of research. Named Aurora, the new system will be a thousand times more powerful than the petascale generation that began in 2008 and is still in wide use today.

You might think you're safe from being spotted by a camera if your face is covered or turned away, but the latest developments in AI-powered recognition tech are coming for you. NEC has announced a system that can identify people who are partially obscured, or even facing the other way.

Researchers from Columbia Engineering have gone and done it, giving a robot arm some form of self-awareness – at least in a rudimentary sense, which allows it to better adapt to changing conditions.

To speed up the creation of virtual environments, researchers at Nvidia have taught artificial intelligence systems how to generate and detail new virtual cityscapes, by training neural networks on real video footage.

It's taken a couple of years, but 21-year-old drone entrepreneur George Matus has finally got his flagship Teal One drone into production. Fast, compact and smart, the Teal One packs an Nvidia Jetson TX processor and has its own app platform to enable AR, autonomy and deep learning applications.