AI milestones in 2016
8 documented milestones from 2016.
Caffe2Go: Facebook's On-Device Neural Style Transfer for Mobile Video
In November 2016, researchers at Facebook AI Research published Caffe2Go, a compressed deep-learning framework that ran neural style-transfer models entirely on iOS and Android devices without sending video frames to a server, enabling real-time artistic video effects on mobile hardware.
WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio, by DeepMind
In September 2016, researchers at Google DeepMind published WaveNet, a deep generative model that synthesises raw audio waveforms sample-by-sample using dilated causal convolutions. In evaluations on English and Mandarin speech, WaveNet reduced the gap between human speech and machine synthesis by more than 50 per cent compared with the best previous text-to-speech systems.
Octobot: First Autonomous Soft Robot Using Microfluidic Logic
On 24 August 2016, researchers at Harvard University published the design of Octobot, the first autonomous, entirely soft robot. Powered by a chemical reaction and controlled by microfluidic logic, it required no electronics, batteries, or rigid components.
Nanorobotic drug delivery using flagellated bacteria by team from Polytechnique Montréal
In August 2016, a team led by Sylvain Martel at Polytechnique Montréal published research in Nature Nanotechnology demonstrating that swarms of approximately 100 million flagellated bacteria, each carrying a magnetosome acting as a compass, could transport and release an anticancer drug payload preferentially within the hypoxic regions of a tumour in a mouse model.
OpenAI Released OpenAI Gym, a Toolkit for Reinforcement Learning Research
In April 2016, OpenAI publicly released OpenAI Gym, an open-source toolkit providing a standardised collection of environments for developing and benchmarking reinforcement learning algorithms, lowering the barrier to reproducible RL research.
Ekso Bionics Receives FDA Clearance for EksoGT Powered Exoskeleton
Ekso Bionics developed a powered lower-limb exoskeleton enabling individuals with spinal cord injuries and stroke-related paralysis to stand and walk in clinical rehabilitation settings, receiving FDA clearance for its EksoGT device in 2016 after earlier clearances beginning in 2014.
DeepMind Publishes AlphaGo, a Deep Reinforcement Learning System That Defeated Professional Go Players
In January 2016, researchers at Google DeepMind published a paper in Nature describing AlphaGo, a system combining deep convolutional neural networks with Monte Carlo tree search and reinforcement learning that defeated the European Go champion Fan Hui 5–0, marking the first time a computer program had beaten a professional Go player at full-board Go.
Facebook Deploys AI-Based Photo and Video Integrity Systems to Detect Nudity and Graphic Violence at Scale
From at least 2016, Facebook applied convolutional neural network-based computer vision systems to automatically detect nudity and graphic violence across photos and videos uploaded to its platform, processing billions of pieces of content as part of its scaled content integrity infrastructure.