Amazon is introducing a voice-activated gaming feature called Alexa Game Control that lets players dictate the action. The February 2023 release “Dead Island 2” will be the first game to incorporate Alexa Game Control. Currently in private beta, the new feature will initially roll out to a wider audience only in North America. Players who want to use the technology will need either a free Amazon account or Amazon Prime. With that in place, one can activate Game Control using push-to-talk or with a hands-free Voice Activity feature that automatically detects speech. Continue reading Amazon Schedules Rollout of Alexa Voice Control for Gamers

Meta AI, the artificial intelligence unit of Meta Platforms has developed what it believes is a machine learning model that can simultaneously scan hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia citations to check their accuracy. While the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, already uses bots, Meta’s proposal would be more extensive than anything currently deployed. Trained using a dataset of 4 million Wikipedia citations, the new Meta AI tool analyzes the linked references, verifying corroboration. With more than 17,000 new Wikipedia articles added each month, this is no small feat. Continue reading Meta Developing a Neural Network to Turbocharge Wikipedia

In a major reversal, Australia’s highest court found Google not liable for defamatory content linked through search results, ruling that the Alphabet subsidiary “was not a publisher” of the objectionable content. Google was sued for defamation for a 2004 article appearing in its search engine results, and both the trial court and a circuit court of appeals held Google responsible as a “publisher” because it was instrumental in circulating the contents of the offending article. The lower courts rejected Google’s reliance on the statutory and common law defenses of innocent dissemination and qualified privilege. Continue reading Australia’s Highest Court Rules Google Links Not Defamatory

Stability AI is in the first stage of release of Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generator similar in functionality to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, with one important distinction: this open-source newcomer lacks the filters that prevent the earlier system from creating images of public figures or content deemed excessively toxic. Last week the Stable Diffusion code was made available to just over a thousand researchers and the Los Altos-based startup anticipates a public release in the coming weeks. The unfettered unleashing of a powerful imaging system has stirred controversy in the AI community, raising ethical questions. Continue reading Stability AI Releases Stable Diffusion Text-to-Image Generator

Amazon’s AWS cloud division has launched a new service designed to help companies deploy their own 5G networks. AWS Private 5G is initially available to AWS customers in select U.S. regions, including Ohio, Virginia and Oregon, but the company has plans to expand, including internationally, “in the near future.” Another early launch limitation is that despite its name, the service only currently supports 4G LTE, but plans to support 5G in the future, and either one will “give you a consistent, predictable level of throughput with ultra low latency,” AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post. Continue reading AWS Private 5G Lets Firms Build Their Own Mobile Networks

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang shared his vision for a computer graphics industry transformed by AI, the metaverse and digital humans. “The combination of AI and computer graphics will power the metaverse, the next evolution of the Internet,” Huang told attendees at SIGGRAPH 2022 in Vancouver. To support this transformation, Nvidia unveiled the Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) and discussed plans to build out the Universal Scene Description (USD) industry standard, which Huang called “the language of the metaverse.” New extensions for Omniverse and graphics workflow optimizations using machine learning were also part of the mix.
Continue reading Nvidia Unveils New Tools for AI, the Metaverse at SIGGRAPH

On Wednesday, August 17, 2022 from 1:30-4:30pm (PT) the Entertainment Technology Center at USC produced a Zoom-only webinar; Towards Virtual Beings – an ETC@USC Digital Town Square. The event addressed ‘creating a more emotive and relatable personality, and improving the image, sound, and body language of the virtual character.’

The videos of each speaker’s 25-minute presentation along with their biography is below this event agenda which lists the order of the speakers and the topics that they addressed:

Speaker Bios

Guy Gadney, Charisma Entertainment

Topics Guy Gadney will cover:

• How to create an emotive engine to power and manage digital characters
• A map of character and narrative design for relatable characters
• The importance of a cast of multiple virtual characters in immersive narratives

Bio: Guy Gadney runs Charisma Entertainment, which powers  NPCs and digital humans in games, metaverses and interactive narrative experiences using tailor-made Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, enabling writers, producers and directors to generate complex interactive stories in an AI-accelerated no-code interface.

Charisma.ai is being used by major game developers, publishers and Metaverse companies to power the future of sentient digital actors.

Guy’s background is in Emmy and BAFTA recognized interactive entertainment productions such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, before more recently diving into creative AI for studios such as NBCU, Warner Bros, Sky Studios, and the BBC with Charisma.ai. He recently co-wrote the Universal Character Model white paper with the ETC, as well as papers on Unconscious Bias in AI data sets, and the impact of AI on storytelling and creativity.

Lauren Kunze, Pandorabots

Topics Lauren Kunze will cover:

• An introduction to Kuki: the virtual being with 25M human fans built by the team whose earlier work inspired the movie HER
• What a day in the life interacting with virtual beings looks like in 2032
• The 5 components that go into creating a virtual being, and how you shape a virtual being’s personality
• The challenges of implementing a virtual being today, including understanding the mediums for engaging with a virtual being, and whether they should be photorealistic or abstract

Bio: Lauren Kunze is currently the CEO of Pandorabots, the world’s leading chatbot platform that powers conversational AI software for hundreds of thousands of developers and top global brands. Lauren is also co-founder of ICONIQ, a Pandorabots spinout working on a humanlike AI operating system for the Metaverse.  Lauren built her first chatbot at age 15 and is an expert on state-of-the-art hard AI problems like natural language understanding with respect to the larger AI ecosystem. Lauren has authored four novels published by HarperCollins, and holds degrees from Harvard in Literature and Language, and Neuroscience.

Mark Sagar, Soul Machines

Topic Mark Sagar will cover:

• The goal of BabyX – making a truly autonomous digital human/being
• Building a virtual being as a presence that learns by experiencing the world around it
• Creating the framework for cognitive development and then seeing how it evolves with sensory input and real world feedback

Bio: Mark Sagar and his team are bringing technology to life, pioneering the creation of autonomously animated virtual humans with virtual brains and nervous systems, capable of highly expressive face to face interaction and real-time learning and emotional response, to create the next generation of human interaction with artificial intelligence.

Mark has a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Auckland, and was a post-doctoral fellow at M.I.T. He previously worked as the Special Projects Supervisor at Weta Digital and Sony Pictures Imageworks and developed technology for the digital characters in blockbusters such Avatar, King Kong, and Spiderman 2. His pioneering work in computer-generated faces was recognized with two consecutive Scientific and Engineering Oscars in 2010 and 2011.

Mark was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2019, and named the 2022 New Zealand Innovator of the Year.

Raphaël Millière, Columbia University

Topics Raphaël Millière will cover:

• The recent paradigm shift in AI research towards the use of large pre-trained models across different domains
• The way in which these models enact a form of artificial mimicry
• The path to generalist AI that goes beyond mimicry

Bio: Raphaël Millière is the Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He previously completed his DPhil (PhD) in philosophy at the University of Oxford.

He is currently leading an effort to understand the philosophical implications of the recent progress of generative models in computer science. Generative modelling has made great progress in recent years, spurred by the use of deep neural networks as an alternative to traditional symbolic algorithms. State-of-the-art generative algorithms, including text generation and image generation models, show impressive performance on a wide range of tasks and benchmarks; yet experts are divided about whether this reflects a genuine understanding of language and visual concepts. He seeks to shed light on this issue by combining a technically-informed account of neural language models with a philosophical analysis of language and visual understanding. He is also more broadly interested in establishing fair and meaningful comparisons between humans and machines in various domains, and teasing out the implications of recent progress in deep learning for models of human cognition.

Recent articles by Dr. Millière;

Welcome to the Next Level of Bullshit; The language algorithm GPT-3 continues our descent into a post-truth world

Moving Beyond Mimicry in Artificial Intelligence; What makes pre-trained AI models so impressive—and potentially harmful

Matthias Wittmann, Digital Domain

Topics Matthias Wittmann will cover:

• How to approach designing an AVH ?
• Body behavior  vs  cognitive intelligence
• How to deal with your AVH’s emotions ?
• How to capture the essence of a character for mapping onto an autonomous character
• Challenges of moving an AVH from its 2D screen into a 3D world (VR, AR, MR, Holograms, …)
• The deep questions: Would it be possible to capture and store personality?

Bio: Matthias Wittmann has worked as an innovator, animator and supervisor on groundbreaking digital humans for features, experiential and special projects at Digital Domain and elsewhere since 2004.  Matthias specializes in developing interactive virtual humans in real-time engines.   He is currently the VFX supervisor in Digital Domain’s Digital Human Group and New Media department where he worked to develop the studio’s interactive autonomous humans, Douglas and Zoey, running in Unreal Engine.  He also supervises projects involving interactive virtual humans and oversees facial capture and scanning for features, episodic and more.   Matthias has received a Visual Effects Society award for “Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture” for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a Grand Clio for “Virtual 2Pac – Coachella,” and a VES nomination for the character Thistlewit in “Maleficent.”

Interest in natural language processing (NLP) as an AI training tool is exploding, with analysts predicting a bumper crop of new startups. One such startup, Humanloop, is already gaining attention, having just pulled in $2.6 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures with participation by Y Combinator, LocalGlobe and AlbionVC. Founded in 2020 by computer scientists from the University of Cambridge with alumni from Google and Amazon, the company says its technology makes it “significantly” easier for companies to leverage NLP that helps humans “teach” AI algorithms. Continue reading Humanloop Raises $2.6 Million as Interest in NLP Tech Grows

Dish Network posted a Q2 subscriber loss in both the satellite TV sector and among customers of its virtual multichannel video programming distributor Sling TV. Sling shed 257,000 traditional satellite video subs while Dish lost 202,000 net satellite subscribers. Regarding Sling TV, the vMVPD lost subscribers for the third consecutive quarter, down 55,000 in Q2, a marked improvement over Sling’s Q1 net loss of 234,000 subs. Dish ended Q2 with 7.79 million satellite TV subscribers, while Sling closed the April through June period with about 2.19 million customers. Meanwhile, Dish announced its Boost Infinite postpaid wireless service will launch later this year. Continue reading Dish Loses Subscribers in Q2, Preps Launch of Boost Infinite

A federal court upheld Federal Aviation Administration rules ensuring drones use Remote Identification technology to transmit a “digital license plate” with unique identifiers while in flight. The rule was challenged by Tyler Brennan, owner of the drone e-tailer RaceDayQuads, who argued the FAA’s Remote ID rules amount to “constant, warrantless governmental surveillance,” in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The rules are widely supported by the drone industry, which sees them as a path to expanded drone use by addressing concerns about safety and security. Continue reading FAA Rule Upheld: Most Drones Will Be Remote ID Compliant

The Entertainment Technology Center@USC will host its 6th vETC virtual conference at SIGGRAPH 2022 in Vancouver, British Columbia, August 9-11. During this year’s vETC at the Amazon Web Services booth (1039), speakers will present concepts, workflows, business models and case studies as they apply to virtual production. Many of the companies that worked on ETC’s latest R&D film project, “Fathead” will discuss their discoveries in sessions that will be recorded and posted on ETC’s YouTube channel. The 3-day program with list of speakers and gear to be demonstrated is available on the ETC site. Continue reading vETC to Discuss Virtual Production During SIGGRAPH

Intellectual property protection is leveraging the power of AI using search. MarqVision is a firm built around monitoring e-commerce and general content platforms policing IP rights, with particular attention to blockchain and NFTs. The Los Angeles-based startup has raised $20 million in Series A funding to further its goal of detecting counterfeits and having them removed from points of online distribution and sale. Originally incubated at Y Combinator, MarqVision has put together a client base that spans from luxury brands LVMH, Ralph Lauren and Baccarat to the more populist Pokémon. Continue reading MarqVision Raises $20 Million to Help Monitor and Protect IP

Google is delaying plans to phase out third-party ad tracking cookies on its Chrome browser until late 2024. The move will have broad ramifications as to how ads are targeted on websites. The Alphabet unit has been working under its Privacy Sandbox initiative since 2019 to find less intrusive alternatives to cookie-tracking technology. Google has been working with developers, publishers, marketers, regulators and advertisers to test its cookie alternative, and says feedback indicates more time is needed to test and evaluate the Privacy Sandbox before it’s phased-in to Chrome worldwide. Continue reading Google Delays Alternative to Cookies for Its Chrome Browser

Meta Platforms’ revenue dropped 1 percent in the second quarter, totaling $28.8 billion, just missing Wall Street’s expectation. It was the first year-over-year revenue drop since the company went public 10 years ago. Meta logged $6.69 billion in Q2 profit, down 36 percent over the same period in 2021. Costs increased by 22 percent, largely due to ongoing heavy investment in the metaverse, where the company’s ambitions took a hit Wednesday when the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit to prevent Meta from buying Los Angeles-based virtual reality firm Within. Continue reading Profits Down as FTC Sues Meta to Block Purchase of Within

Meta Platforms is adjusting Facebook’s algorithms to offer more discovery and personalization features, according to the company. Users will now automatically land on a Home tab instead of the old News Feed. A revamped Feed will emphasize videos, photos and algorithmically curated posts. While observers have been quick to label the change yet another attempt to chase TikTok’s addictive, influencer-driven feed, Meta assures users this doesn’t mean goodbye to friends and family. “You can curate a Favorites list of the friends and Pages you care about most and filter their content in this new tab,” the company says. Continue reading New Facebook and Instagram Updates Mimic TikTok’s Model