Faster R-CNN

Amazon reported long-term success using machine learning to shrink its environmental footprint. The online retailer developed a system that fuses product descriptions, images, and structured data to decide how an item should be packed for shipping.

With the rise of AI-driven surveillance, anonymity is in fashion. Researchers are working on clothing that evades face recognition systems and designed a t-shirt that tricks a variety of object detection models into failing to spot people.

The transformer architecture that has shaken up natural language processing may replace recurrent layers in object detection networks. A Facebook team led by Nicolas Carion and Francisco Massa simplified object detection pipelines by using transformers, yielding Detection Transformer (DETR).

Facebook uses automated systems to block hate speech, but hateful posts can slip through when seemingly benign words and pictures combine to create a nasty message. The social network is tackling this problem by enhancing AI’s ability to recognize context.

An algorithm indexed photos, ads, and other images embedded in 170 years of American newspapers. Created by researchers at the University of Washington and U.S. Library of Congress, Newspaper Navigator uses object recognition to organize visual features of newspapers dating back to 1789.