AI system inspects astronauts’ gloves for damage in real-time

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HSE) are working with NASA scientists to develop an AI system for inspecting astronauts’ gloves.

Space is an unforgiving environment and equipment failures can be catastrophic. Gloves are particularly prone to wear and tear as they’re used for just about everything, including repairing equipment and installing new equipment.

Currently, astronauts will send back images of their gloves to Earth to be manually examined by NASA...

Microsoft’s new AI auto-captions images for the visually impaired

A new AI from Microsoft aims to automatically caption images in documents and emails so that software for visual impairments can read it out.

Researchers from Microsoft explained their machine learning model in a paper on preprint repository arXiv.

The model uses VIsual VOcabulary pre-training (VIVO) which leverages large amounts of paired image-tag data to learn a visual vocabulary.

A second dataset of properly captioned images is then used to help teach the...