Grandparents killed in wrong-way crash on Hwy. 401 identified
A 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman killed in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 earlier this week have been identified by the Consulate General of India in Toronto.
A research team at the University of Southern California has developed a new artificial intelligence system that uses human-like abilities to imagine never-before-seen objects.
By using systems that extrapolate data, researchers were able to envision an object and change its attributes in a similar process to human imagination.
"We were inspired by human visual generalization capabilities to try to simulate human imagination in machines," Yunhao Ge, one of the researchers and a computer science PhD student at USC said in a statement.
"Humans can separate their learned knowledge by attributes -- for instance, shape, pose, position, color -- and then recombine them to imagine a new object. Our paper attempts to simulate this process using neural networks," Ge added.
Ge and his team members released their findings in a study published in the 2021 International Conference on Learning Representations on May 7.
Researchers explained that artificial intelligence systems have traditionally needed a series of sample images of an object -- a chair, for example -- before they’re able to generate new images of chairs. But that process doesn’t require the AI to look at the specific attributes of a chair from which it can generate fresh examples.
To overcome this limitation, researchers began to explore “disentanglement.” That means an AI can look at a few sample images of a chair, understand the basic attributes of those chairs, and use that knowledge to create new chairs. They call it “controllable novel image synthesis” or imagination.
Disentanglement is infamously used in creating deepfakes by disentangling human facial movements from a person’s identity.
"Deep learning has already demonstrated unsurpassed performance and promise in many domains, but all too often this has happened through shallow mimicry, and without a deeper understanding of the separate attributes that make each object unique," Laurent Itti, a professor of computer science, said in a statement.
"This new disentanglement approach, for the first time, truly unleashes a new sense of imagination in AI systems, bringing them closer to humans' understanding of the world."
To explain how the technology works, researchers pointed to the film series Transformers. Ge explained that the AI systems “can take the shape of a Megatron car, the colour and pose of a yellow Bumblebee car, and the background of New York's Times Square. The result will be a Bumblebee-coloured Megatron car driving in Times Square.”
Researchers say this framework is similar to how humans extrapolate information, and can be compatible with nearly any type of data or knowledge and widens the opportunity for other applications, like self-driving vehicles or synthesizing new medicine.
A 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman killed in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 earlier this week have been identified by the Consulate General of India in Toronto.
Three people have been arrested and charged in the killing of B.C. Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar – as authorities continue investigating potential connections to the Indian government.
Pius Suter scored with 1:39 left and the Vancouver Canucks advanced to the second round of the NHL playoffs with a 1-0 victory over the Nashville Predators on Friday night in Game 6.
TD Bank Group could be hit with more severe penalties than previously expected, says a banking analyst after a report that the investigation it faces in the U.S. is tied to laundering illicit fentanyl profits.
A Quebec man who pleaded guilty to threatening Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier François Legault has been sentenced to 20 months in jail.
RCMP say human remains found in a rural area in central Saskatchewan may have been there for a decade or more.
A source close to singer Britney Spears tells CNN that the pop star is 'home and safe' after she had a 'major fight' with her boyfriend on Wednesday night at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood.
As Wegovy becomes available to Canadians starting Monday, a medical expert is cautioning patients wanting to use the drug to lose weight that no medication is a ''magic bullet,' and the new medication is meant particularly for people who meet certain criteria related to obesity and weight.
Drew Carey took over as host of 'The Price Is Right' and hopes he’s there for life. 'I'm not going anywhere,' he told 'Entertainment Tonight' of the job he took over from longtime host Bob Barker in 2007.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.