General Intelligence
An Amazon Alexa Exec Moves Into the Body Cam Business
Plus, an A.I. learns to test video games, and other news from this week
Welcome to General Intelligence, your weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters.
The Covid-19 pandemic is all-encompassing. Artificial intelligence researchers are adapting algorithms to detect Covid-19 in CT scans, determining mortality from available data, and even analyzing cough audio — you can read about this in last week’s installment of General Intelligence.
This week, we’re turning our attention to developments outside of the pandemic. First, one of the most important law enforcement technology companies in the United States, Axon, just poached a new head of artificial intelligence from Amazon.
Yasser Ibrahim, Axon’s new A.I. head, led Amazon’s distributed machine learning team at Alexa A.I., and also worked on the computer vision technology behind the Amazon Go store.
Axon used to be called Taser, and started out making “nonlethal” weapons that use electric charges in lieu of bullets. It then became the country’s largest body camera manufacturer, and changed its name to Axon in 2017 after acquiring two A.I. companies.
