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AI2 NEWSLETTER | February 2020

AI2 receives the AAAI 2020 Outstanding Paper Award

Researchers from AI2's MOSAIC team won this year's award for their paper WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale, introducing an important new dataset created in pursuit of generalizable NLP. Learn more about the challenges of building AI models that can truly understand human language:

AI still doesn’t have the common sense to understand human language | MIT Tech Review

Xnor.ai acquired by Apple

Seattle startup Xnor.ai, spun out of AI2 in 2017, specializes in low-power, edge-based artificial intelligence tools. Learn more about their recent acquisition:

Apple buys edge-based AI startup Xnor.ai for a reported $200M | TechCrunch
Apple acquires Xnor.ai, edge AI spin-out from Paul Allen’s AI2, for price in $200M range | GeekWire

2020 RoboTHOR Challenge starts now!

AI2 is excited to announce the 2020 RoboTHOR Challenge, exploring how well models trained in simulated environments perform in the real world. Join us for our first embodied-AI competition, culminating in a live demonstration of the best models at the CVPR 2020 conference in Seattle in June. Learn more:

An ever-changing room of Ikea furniture could help AI navigate the world | MIT Tech Review
AI2 throws down the challenge for robotic scavenger hunt in virtual and real rooms | GeekWire

The AI2 Incubator expands with a new $10M fund

World-class investors have committed $10 million to the AI2 Incubator, providing early-stage entrepreneurs with more backing to push the frontiers of AI in real-world applications. Learn more:

Allen Institute for AI’s Incubator expands with $10M fund from high-profile VCs | TechCrunch
VCs double down on hot Seattle startup scene with $10 million Allen Institute AI Incubator investment | VentureBeat

UW President Ana Mari Cauce joins the AI2 Board of Directors

UW President Ana Mari Cauce has joined the AI2 Board of Directors along with Corporate VP of Microsoft Healthcare Peter Lee – helping AI2 build a successful, enduring research organization. Learn more:

Univ. of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce joins AI2’s board to build on Paul Allen’s legacy | GeekWire

Featured AI2er: Jesse Dodge

Meet Jesse Dodge, a recent AI2 intern on the AllenNLP team and one of the authors of our Green AI paper and blog post – learn about his favorite projects at AI2 and advice for aspiring interns.

New NLU Benchmark: Break

Introducing Break, a new natural language understanding benchmark designed to test the ability of models to break down a question into required steps for computing the answer (accepted for TACL 2020 ).
Learn more:
Break: Mapping Natural Language Questions to their Meaning Representation

Green AI

Read AI2's take on what we're calling "Green AI" and how we believe a new approach could both save energy and benefit researchers.

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