"Mythbusters" host Grant Imahara, a roboticist, engineer, and animatronics designer, had died from a brain aneurysm at age 49, a spokesperson for Discovery has confirmed. Imahara starred with co-hosts Kari Byron and Tory Belleci on "Mythbusters" and later, Netflix's "White Rabbit Project." He appeared as a judge and contestant on "BattleBots" with his robot, Deadblow.

More:

• Imahara had a background in robotics before joining Lucasfilm's THX and later, the F.X. unit ILM, where he worked on films such as "Galaxy Quest," "Van Helsing," and Steven Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."
• A Reddit post today noted that Imahara was one of three people to operate R2-D2 robots in the "Star Wars" prequels.
• In 2018, Imahara talked about bringing AI-based robots into the home for a "Generation Robot" video.
• He published a book, "Kickin' Bot: An Illustrated Guide to Building Combat Robots."
• Co-host Adam Savage shared his condolences in a tweet yesterday:

Microsoft reportedly laid off more editorial team staff at MSN.com to use more AI editors, Geekwire reports. It remains unclear today how many employees were let go. Microsoft eliminated the positions of 50 contract journalists in early June to replace them with AI.

More:

• A source told Geekwire that the layoffs stem from Microsoft's business review for the fiscal year, which ended June 30. It's common for restructurings to occur at this time.
• Former MSN Money editor Bryan Joiner, who was laid off in June, wrote a recent Vice column arguing why algorithms can't replace his job.
• Last month, an AI editor from MSN.com mistakenly confused mixed-race members of the British pop group Little Mix. The automated program chose a story about Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall, but selected a photo of her mixed-race bandmate, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, instead.
• Microsoft has declined to comment publicly on the layoffs.

As more universities begin to offer undergraduate degrees in artificial intelligence and data science, Inside AI takes a look at the top programs for 2020-21.

• Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences – Data Science Program
• Carnegie Mellon University  – Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence
• University of Michigan – Undergraduate Program in Data Science...

Google and other U.S. companies and universities dominated this week's International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), according to an analysis by AI investor Gleb Chuvpilo. Chuvpilo, a managing partner at Thundermark Capital, calculated the Publication Index for companies and universities that had papers accepted at ICML 2020, which runs through Saturday.

Top 10 organizations represented at the conference:

1. Google (US) — 92.2 papers
2. Stanford University (US) — 39.2
3. MIT (US) — 38.5
4. University of California, Berkeley (US) — 34.2
5. Carnegie Mellon University (US) — 24.0
6. Microsoft (US) — 22.6
7. Facebook (US) — 17.1
8. Princeton University (US) — 17.0
9. University of Oxford (UK) — 16.3
10. UT Austin (US) — 14.3

More:

• The Index reflects the full paper equivalents, so Google’s Publication Index of 92.2 means Google published the equivalent of 92.2 full papers.
• At this year's ICML, 1,088 papers out of 4,990 submissions were accepted.
• Chuvpilo's Publication Index counts overseas labs towards the location of the firm's headquarters (country or region).
• A Reddit discussion explores the analysis in further detail.

A photographer has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to destroy all images of Canadians held by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which were obtained from Clearview AI's database. The plaintiff, Ha Vi Doan, is also seeking unspecified damages after Clearview said it would stop offering facial-recognition services in Canada.

More:

• The lawsuit would represent people whose images are in the Clearview database, people whose photos were searched for by the police, and people holding copyrights to the pictures.
• It seeks to bar Canada's federal and national police services from using the database moving forward.
• Canadian privacy officials said they'd continue to investigate Clearview's practices after the company announced it would cease all operations in Canada, its second-largest market after the U.S. The government opened the probe back in February.
• Earlier this month, the U.K. and Australia opened a joint investigation to look into Clearview's process of scraping the web and social media for people's public photos to build its database, which now has more than 3 billion images.
• Clearview AI's facial recognition technology is likely illegal in the European Union, according to the European Data Protection Board.
• Clearview also faces lawsuits from the ACLU and the attorney general of Vermont, among others.

Abacus.AI, formerly RealityEngines.AI, has made its autonomous cloud AI service generally available. The machine learning startup, co-founded by former AWS and Google executive Bindu Reddy, also disclosed a recent $13M fundraising round for its cloud AI platform.

More:

• Abacus.AI provides model training and AI services for businesses to incorporate deep learning into their customer and business offerings.
• San Francisco-based Abacus also is open-sourcing three novel techniques for debiasing datasets on trained algorithms, Forbes reports.
• The startup also introduced a new part of its website that allows users to share AI models with the community.
• Reddy co-founded Abacus last year with BigQuery co-creator Siddartha Naidu and former Uber engineer Arvind Sundararajan.
• The $13M series A round was led by Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, with participation from seed investors Eric Schmidt, Jerry Yang, and Ram Shriram. Volpi and Shriram will join the Abacus.AI board.

Goldman Sachs is advising SoftBank to either sell or initiate a public offering of chip designer Arm Holdings, which launched two new AI chips earlier this year. The move would come as part of SoftBank's sale of more than $40b in assets to buy back its own shares and head off changes from investment firm Elliott Management Corp.

More: 

• Arm Holdings produces chips for use in smartphones. Apple announced in late June it would move from Intel's microprocessors to its own chips based on Arm's technology.
• Business reporters have been discussing on Twitter which company could be a potential buyer for Arm. CRN reporter Dylan Martin suggested Nvidia, but analyst Lee Ratliff thinks Arm could have a tough time finding a buyer, with a private equity firm most likely to express interest.
• SoftBank's Vision Fund, which owns a 25% stake in Arm, took an estimated $17b loss over the previous fiscal year.

A version of this story first appeared in Inside Business.

New job postings in AI/ML:

Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Kinaxis | Toronto, Canada

Senior Machine Learning Engineer
ConcertAI | Boston, Mass.

AI Researcher/Engineer - CV
Samsung Research America | Mountain View, Calif.

QUICK HITS

• More than half of businesses adopting AI spent more than $20M on technology and talent in the past year, according to a Deloitte AI survey.
• A new preprint paper describes DeepSinger, an AI that can generate new singing voices in many languages based on website data.
• A discussion on Reddit's r/MachineLearning delves into how small AI companies can make a difference in an industry dominated by tech giants.
• The number of deepfake videos online doubled to nearly 50,000 between January and June 2020, according to Deep Trace Lab.
• The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) sent out its desk rejections for submitted papers.
• CEOs and CFOs talk the winners and losers of the office of the future.

*This is sponsored content.