Geek News

Pinterest is very committed to improving its search technology through AI -- so committed, in fact, that it just hired one of the foremost experts in the field. The social network has announced that it's recruiting Chuck Rosenberg, Google's AI vision research leader, to become its Head of Computer Vision. He spent just shy of 14 years at Google and was responsible for a number of major AI-related efforts, including the first large deployment of an image-focused deep learning network. The exact nature of what Rosenberg is doing is under wraps, to no one's surprise, but he's expected to guide engineers as they craft "large-scale" object detection algorithms. Before Google, he worked at HP Labs and was one of iRobot's earliest employees. While it might seem odd for Rosenberg to switch employers while Google is still pushing the boundaries of AI , it's easy to see why Pinterest would want to reel him in. He's joining right as the company's AI-...

Google likes to boast of its ability to shut down Android malware , and it apparently has good reason to brag about 2017. The company took down over 700,000 apps that violated Play Stores policies last year (a 70 percent increase over 2016), and it was considerably better at pulling rogue apps in time to avoid infections. Thanks to a slew of new machine learning techniques, it caught 99 percent of apps with "abusive contents" before anyone had installed them. It credits Google Play Protect for one of the biggest improvements: its ability to spot extremely harmful apps that commit fraud , steal info or allow hijacks. While there weren't many of them, the mechanism reduced the number of installations by an "order of magnitude" over 2016, Google said. It added that it took down over 250,000 copycat apps (those trying to piggyback off the success of popular apps) and "tens of thousands" of apps violating policies against apps that feature hate speech, ...