Fundraising / investment
Woebot Secures $8 Million in Funding to Increase Access to Mental Health Care Worldwide – Mar. 1, 2018 (Nasdaq Global Newswire)
- Woebot Labs, Inc. announced an $8 million Series A funding round from leading venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Andrew Ng’s newly launched AI Fund
- The announcement comes on the heels of the company’s iOS app launch earlier this year, and in advance of the Woebot app release for Android, coming later this month. The company will use the investment to further develop the AI technology powering Woebot and expand the delivery of high-quality mental health care worldwide
- In the last quarter, Woebot has seen 50 percent month-over-month growth, receives more than two million messages a week, and is used in more than 130 countries around the world as a free, accessible tool to receive quality mental health care
Breakthroughs / studies
China’s AI-general practitioner system starts hospital trial – Mar. 5, 2018 (XINHUANET)
- An AI-general practitioner system developed by a Chinese tech firm has started its “internship” in a community hospital in east China’s Anhui Province. The system called “AI doctor assistant” can listen to doctors diagnosing inquiries with patients and automatically produce e-documents for patient case reports
- The system was developed by Shenzhen-listed iFlytek in partnership with Tsinghua University
- The company’s medical robot passed China’s national medical license examination with a high score in 2017. It was the world’s first robot to pass a national medical license examination
Driverless cars may soon see round corners using super-laser – Mar. 5, 2018 (The Telegraph)
- Driverless cars already have laser systems that sense the world around them, but the new development would allow them to literally see around corners
- The system works by shooting pulses of laser light onto a wall, which then bounce off onto objects hidden from view. Tiny amounts of light then reflect back from the hidden object, on to the wall, which in turn are picked up by a powerful photon detector
- The key lies in creating a computer programme which can untangle all the different light particles, and separate them from other ‘noise’ coming from elsewhere. The algorithm can send back an image in less than a second, and although it is not as sharp as a regular image, it can show whether there is an obstruction in the road
Almost 80% of Chinese concerned about AI threat to privacy, 32% already feel a threat to their work – Mar. 2, 2018 (TechNode)
- AI is a threat to privacy—this is how 76.3% of Chinese people feel about artificial intelligence technology according to a survey of 8,000 participants carried out by CCTV and Tencent Research
- Facial recognition was the usage of AI for which respondents had the highest awareness, and over half felt AI was already having an impact on their work and life
- Drilling down to individual applications of AI, the highest level of awareness was of facial recognition, at 68.8% of respondents. This was followed closely by language recognition at 63.1% and autonomous driving was third at 47.3%. In 6th place at 15.4% was personalized recommendations as popularized by Bytedance’s Toutiao news app
Partnerships
University of Warsaw Researchers and deepsense.ai Launch Reinforcement Learning Project Powered by Google’s TensorFlow Research Cloud – Mar. 6, 2018 (PR Newswire)
- The goal of the experiment is to end-to-end train an artificial intelligence to play video games fully inside a computation graph
- In the experiment, an artificial intelligence will be end-to-end trained to play video games fully inside a computation graph. Assuming that a game simulator would also be a part of the graph, this could make tasks such as training AI to play video games even faster than what deepsense.ai’s team achieved last year
- The main experiments are being run on Cloud TPUs via the TensorFlow Research Cloud program and supported by Google Warsaw’s Antonio Gulli, Ignacy Kowalczyk and Maciej Pytel, who are helping us to deploy our experiments on the Google Cloud Platform. TFRC provides ML researchers with access to second-generation Cloud TPUs, each of which provides 180 teraflops of machine learning acceleration
Chinese AI unicorn SenseTime teams up with MIT – Mar. 1, 2018 (ZD Net)
- SenseTime, a leading Chinese startup specialized in artificial intelligence (AI) research and development, has established an alliance with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to promote the further application of the technology widely utilized in facial recognition
- The Chinese AI researcher and developer, currently valued at around $3 billion, said the cooperation aims to explore new avenues across MIT in areas like computer vision, human-intelligence inspired algorithms, medical imaging, and robotics
- Founded in 2014, the Chinese startup is currently working with a number of well-known Chinese brands including China Mobile, UnionPay, Sina Weibo, as well as major smartphone companies in China to provide machine learning technology
Government / policy
UAE adopts formation of Council for Artificial Intelligence – Mar. 5, 2018 (Khaleej Times)
- The move aims to serve the UAE Government’s objectives, and improve the quality of life of citizens and residents in order to achieve the vision of the UAE 2021 and make the UAE one of the best countries in the world by 2071
- The formation of the council follows the appointment of a Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in the recent formation of the UAE Cabinet, the launch of the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence and the UAE Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
- In the next phase, the council will focus on the development and organisation of the tools of artificial intelligence technology to be an integral part of the governmental work in the UAE. This will contribute to achieving qualitative development at all levels such as transport, health, space, renewable energy, water, technology, education, the environment and the road traffic sector
Arizona no longer requires safety drivers in autonomous vehicles – Mar. 2, 2018 (Engadget)
- Arizona will now allow self-driving cars to operate in the state without a safety driver behind the wheel. Governor Doug Ducey signed an executive order this week making it legal for these vehicles to operate on their own as long as they abide by all federal and state safety standards
- Ducey’s order comes just days after California announced that fully driverless cars will be allowed on its roads starting in April. And both states have played host to a number of self-driving vehicles tests in recent years. In Arizona, Waymo, Intel, Uber and GM are among those testing their driverless tech
China has shot far ahead of the US on deep-learning patents – Mar. 2, 2018 (Quartz)
- The number of patents with the words “artificial intelligence” and “deep learning” published in China has grown faster than those published in the US, particularly in 2017, the firm found. Publication is a step that comes after applications are filed but before a patent is granted
- When it comes to deep learning—an advanced subset of machine learning, which uses algorithms to identify complex patterns in large amounts of data—China has six times more patent publications than the US, noted the report (pdf, p.7).
- One of China’s advantages come from its large digitally-connected population. They provide a huge amount of data, which machine learning and deep learning need to advance. Chinese social media giant Tencent’s messaging app WeChat, for example, counts on nearly a billion users
China issues first licenses to road test driverless vehicles – Mar. 1, 2018 (Reuters)
- Two licenses were offered to Shanghai-based SAIC Motor Corp Ltd, and the other went to electric vehicle start-up NIO, Xinhua reported
- The licenses were issued after Robin Li, the boss of China’s biggest search engine Baidu, tested his firm’s driverless car on Beijing’s roads in July, stirring controversy as there were no rules for such a test, the agency said
- Shanghai also issued regulations on road tests for such smart cars and said it would promote the application and commercialization of vehicles using artificial intelligence technology and Internet-linked functions, Xinhua reported
Company developments
Huawei To Launch AI-Powered HiAssistant In China – Mar. 6, 2018 (Android Headlines)
- Huawei is planning to launch its own artificial intelligence assistant in China and is likely to market it as the HiAssistant, XDA Developers reports, citing a teardown of the Android 8.1 Oreo-based EMI 8.1 firmware for the Chinese Mate 10 flagship models
- The addition of the HiAssistant should make the app much more versatile, with the service also being expected to be integrated into other first-party apps from Huawei, similar to how the Google Assistant and Bixby are natively supported by a number of other mobile tools from Google and Samsung, respectively
Toyota starts a new $2.8 billion company to develop self-driving software – Mar. 2, 2018 (The Verge)
- Toyota is expanding its pursuit of self-driving cars by starting a new company called Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development, or TRI-AD
- The Japanese automaker is starting the company in conjunction with automotive supplier Aisin Seiki and Denso, and together, they plan to invest $2.8 billion into TRI-AD in the coming years and hire around 1,000 employees in order to develop software systems that can power fully self-driving vehicles
- TRI-AD will be based in Tokyo, and its aim is to create a “fully-integrated, production-quality software for automated driving,” according to Toyota. It will then aim to “link” that software with what TRI has been developing, with the apparent goal of creating a completely self-driving vehicle that has been wholly created in-house
Midea launches One of the Largest Chinese Dish AI Datasets and High Precision AI Deep Learning Models for Chinese Dish Recognition – Mar. 2, 2018 (PR Newswire)
- Midea’s global artificial intelligence (AI) team formally launched its large-scale, Chinese dish AI dataset called “ChineseFoodNet”, which aims to facilitate AI image recognition of Chinese dish images. It contains over 180,000 food photos in 208 categories, with each category covering a large variety recipe and selfie images. ChineseFoodNet is one of the largest Chinese dish image datasets in the world
- The dataset is available for research and can be downloaded at https://sites.google.com/view/chinesefoodnet/. Since its official release in late 2017, this dataset has been downloaded by hundreds of research institutions and scientific researchers within just three months, and has received very positive feedback
- Midea’s global AI team includes the Emerging Technology Center in Silicon Valley, California and the AI Research Institute in Shenzhen, China. Within the short one and a half years after establishment, this global AI team has already successfully built a high efficiency, large scale heterogeneous Deep Learning GPU cluster, and leveraged its powerful computational capacity to successfully develop a variety of AI products and applications