What’s happened in AI: April 8th-14th

By | April 16, 2018
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Another busy week per usual. Highlights include SenseTime’s insane $600mm Series C round. They’re now the world’s most valuable AI startup.

Company developments:

Veteran Global AI Leader Dongyan Wang Joins DeepBrain Chain as Chief AI Officer, Executive VP of Silicon Valley Research Center – Apr. 13, 2018 (satPRnews)

  • DeepBrain Chain (www.deepbrainchain.org), the world’s first Artificial Intelligence computing platform powered by blockchain has announced today that it has proudly recruited Dr. Dongyan Wang, a well-known veteran global AI leader in Silicon Valley as Chief AI Officer of DeepBrain Chain Inc., Chief AI Officer of DeepBrain Chain Organization, and Executive VP of DeepBrain Chain Silicon Valley AI + Blockchain Research Center
  • Dr. Wang has almost 20 years of silicon valley experience in artificial intelligence, business intelligence and data science, leading world class, industry award winning, global high tech organizations as senior executive for Global Fortune 500 enterprises (Cisco, NetApp, Midea Group, Samsung) and a successful startup. He has extensive experience in AI platform, AI products, AI business applications, advanced analytics, data science, big data, and a great variety of cloud and on premise enterprise applications
  • Prior to joining DeepBrain Chain, Dr. Wang was the global AI leader and VP, GM of Midea Emerging Technology Center (Silicon Valley) and AI Research Institute (Shenzhen, China) in Midea Group, a Fortune global 500 enterprise and #2 largest consumer electronics company in the world. He is responsible for the overall AI vision, strategy, architecture, roadmap & execution of AI technology and business solutions for Midea’s AI products in Smart home, intelligent manufacturing, robotics and business applications

Philips China Creates an AI Lab to Propel Digital Transformation Strategy – Apr. 12, 2018 (Business Insider)

  • Philips China announced today that it has established an AI lab in Shanghai. Affiliated to Philips China Innovation Hub, the newly opened AI lab will be dedicated to driving the deep integration of AI technologies with a wide spectrum of areas including medical imaging, image-guided therapies, patient monitoring, health informatics, home care, and personal health
  • The new AI Department will mainly work on research projects including natural language processing, big data mining and analytics, structured data generating, combining AI and medical imaging to build auxiliary diagnostic models to help physicians make precise diagnoses and provide personalized treatments, and using AI to connect hospital and home, to enhance the management of chronic diseases, and to create conditions for people to manage their own health

Waymo reportedly applies to put autonomous cars on California roads with no safety drivers – Apr. 12, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Waymo has become the second company to apply for the newly-available permit to deploy autonomous vehicles without safety drivers on some California roads, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. It would be putting its cars — well, minivans — on streets around Mountain View, where it already has an abundance of data
  • Assuming the permit is granted, Waymo’s vehicles will be limited to the Mountain View area, which makes sense — the company has been operating there essentially since its genesis as a research project within Google. So there should be no shortage of detail in the data, and the local authorities will be familiar with the people necessary for handling any issues like accidents, permit problems, and so on

Uber still believes autonomous vehicles have a future, says CEO – Apr. 11, 2018 (Reuters)

  • Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said on Wednesday that the ride-sharing company still believes in the prospects for autonomous transport after one of its self-driving vehicles was involved in a fatal crash in Arizona last month
  • Khosrowshahi declined to say when the company might resume testing or what might have gone wrong. He said the company was cooperating with federal investigators and dealing with the incident “very seriously.”
  • “We believe in it,” he said, adding that Uber considered autonomous vehicles “part of the solution” and in the long-term key to eliminating individual car ownership

HERE Technologies launches Boulder R&D site – Apr. 11, 2018 (The Daily Camera)

  • HERE Technologies, an Amsterdam-based global provider of mapping for autonomous vehicles, has opened a new research and development facility in Boulder
  • “The site brings together experts in geospatial engineering, machine learning and data science to work on cutting-edge processes that enable HERE’s HD Live Map to ‘self-heal,'” according to a company news release. That is a process by which “crowdsourced data from live car sensors are used to validate and update the high-definition map, keeping it constantly fresh and accurate.”
  • “We are thrilled to open our new Boulder office and tap into Colorado’s base of talented geo-spatial engineers,” Ralf Herrtwich, HERE’s head of automotive, said in a statement. “HERE Technologies is the place to be for those wanting to tackle exciting engineering projects that will help shape the future of transportation and mobility.”

Mark Zuckerberg just gave a timeline for AI to take over detecting internet hate speech – Apr. 10, 2018 (Quartz)

  • Mark Zuckerberg said today (April 10) in his testimony before the US Congress that he could see AI taking a primary role in automatically detecting hate speech on Facebook in five to 10 years
  • The technology isn’t ready to deploy yet, the Facebook CEO says, because of the limitations to artificial intelligence. Hate speech detection remains a reactive process, and users need to flag it to the social media platform for it to be manually deleted, Zuckerberg said. It’s particularly difficult to find because it’s communicated in many different languages
  • As Quartz has reported, modern artificial intelligence has proven useful in detecting patterns—whether that be in images for facial recognition or audio for speech regulation. But language is fluid, and as Zuckerberg notes, hate speech can be heavily dependent on the context around the hateful words. Some terms found in hate speech are slang—not part of the common vernacular used to train AI.

Google launches an improved speech-to-text service for developers – Apr. 9, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Only a few weeks after launching a major overhaul of its Cloud Text-to-Speech API, Google today also announced an update to that service’s Speech-to-Text voice recognition service. The new and improved Cloud Speech-to-Text API promises significantly improved voice recognition performance. The new API promises a reduction in word errors around 54 percent across all of Google’s tests, but in some areas the results are actually far better than that
  • Part of this improvement is a major new feature in the Speech-to-Text API that now allows developers to select between different machine learning models based on this use case
  • In addition to these new speech recognition models, Google is also updating the service with a new punctuation model. As the Google team admits, its transcriptions have long suffered from rather unorthodox punctuation

HSBC applies AI to track financial crime – Apr. 9, 2018 (Finextra)

  • The deployment of the technology from big data startup Quantexa follows a pilot of the software with HSBC in 2017 which helped the bank to spot potential money laundering activity
  • HSBC had to pay a $1.9bn (£1.4bn) fine in 2012 for helping drug cartels launder money in Mexico and for contravening sanctions to do business with Iran. Alongside the payout, HSBC agreed a five-year deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) under which it promised to take action to correct compliance failings
  • The global lender has since spent more than $1bn tightening up its compliance procedures, including participation in a $3.3 million funding round in Quantexa in March 2017

M&A:

Cruise, GM’s self-driving car unit, brings on Zippy team – Apr. 11, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Cruise recently brought on seven team members from Zippy.ai, which develops robots for last-mile grocery and package delivery, for an undisclosed amount of money
  • The deal did not include any of Zippy’s product or intellectual property. Instead, it seems Cruise was more interested in the skillsets of the co-founders, Gabe Sibley, Alex Flint and Chris Broaddus, and their team
  • “Their expertise in machine learning, computer vision, and simulation is among the best in the industry,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt wrote in a Medium post. “But perhaps more importantly, their commitment to working on a team — and doing things the right way — strengthens our ability to safely test, validate, and deploy our self-driving technology at scale.”

Fundraising / investment:

PullRequest pulls in $8M Series A just months after scoring seed round – Apr. 13, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Today the company announced an $8 million Series A led by seed investor Google Gradient Ventures, who also led the seed round. Today’s investment includes from participation from other seed investors too including Y Combinator, Fika Ventures, Lynett Capital and Defy Partners. That brings the total raised to $10.3 million in just a few months
  • PullRequest is working to solve a big developer pain point. As development cycles speed up, the part of the process that tends to suffer is code quality assurance (QA). As company founder and CEO Lyal Avery told TechCrunch last August, it’s using on demand reviewers to solve the problem
  • Anna Patterson, managing director at lead investor Gradient Ventures, sees a powerful combination in on-demand and code review. “PullRequest is working at the intersection of better code and the future of work – leveraging AI to make code reviews more accessible, so that enterprises, of all scales, can adopt this methodology,” she said in a statement

Cybersecurity startup empow raises $10 million in Series B funding round – Apr. 12, 2018 (Cyber Scoop)

  • The company, which has offices in Boston and Tel Aviv, Israel, provides a security information and event management (SIEM) platform, meaning it monitors data from across an organization’s network infrastructure in search of threats. The company says its platform is unique in that it determines the intent of a attack using artificial intelligence and machine learning
  • Along with the funding announcement, empow is bringing on Peter George, who has in the past been the CEO of Crossbeam Systems and Fidelis Security Systems, as its new CEO
  • “NLP allows us to determine what the intent of the threat is based on cause and effect,” George said. “By predicting that we can quickly put together a defense campaign or defense strategy to prevent compromise.”

Dating service East Meet East raises $4M to develop AI matching and expand into Asia – Apr. 12, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • East Meet East, a New York-based matchmaking service focused on connecting Asian people in the U.S., is expanding its focus to go after dating opportunities in Asia after it raised a $4 million Series A funding round
  • The money comes from existing backer 500 Startups and new investors Asahi Medialab Ventures, DG Lab Fund (a joint effort from Japan’s Digital Garage and Daiwa Securities), Mobile Internet Capital, internet ad firm Septeni. The startup previously raised $1 million in November 2016
  • East Meet Eat CEO Mariko Tokioka told TechCrunch in an interview that the company is testing a service in the Philippines with a view to expanding across other Southeast Asian markets, which could potentially include Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. The immediate next step would be a fuller launch in the Philippines — which was selected due to its close following of U.S. culture — with the potential for local offices to open in the region further down the line

Element wants to give identity to the whole world, raising $12M Series A – Apr. 11, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Element is announcing a $12 million Series A round, led by PTB Ventures and GDP Ventures, with David Fields of PTB and On Lee of GDP joining the company’s board of directors. Earlier investors of the company included Pandu Sjahrir, Scott Belsky, Box Group, and Recruit Strategic Partners
  • Element wants to completely change the way banks, hospitals, and other service providers work with their customers by providing a platform for decentralized biometric identity. The company’s software runs on any mobile device, and using the device’s camera, it can identify a user’s face, palm, and fingerprints to create a verified match. Users have options on which modality they want to use
  • Biometric identification is a tough machine learning application, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Element, which was formed in 2012, was co-founded by Adam Perold, a Stanford-educated product designer, and Yann LeCun, a famed machine learning researcher. LeCun was the progenitor of convolution neural nets, which today form one of the foundational theories for deep learning AI. He is now chief science advisor for the company, having taken a role as Director of AI Research at Facebook in New York while continuing his professorship at NYU.

Comma.ai raises $5 million – Apr. 9, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • George Hotz, the founder of Comma.ai, started the company in an attempt to take on Tesla. Initially, Hotz was working on a self-driving car kit called Comma One. The Comma One was an add-on that would’ve enabled certain cars to have Tesla Autopilot-like driving assistance capabilities
  • Last July, Hotz launched an $88 universal car interface called Panda. Panda plugs into your car’s OBD port to collect and record your driving data. At the time, Holtz described it to TC’s Sarah Buhr as a Fitbit for your car

Juror grabs $2M to take the hassle out of contracts – Apr. 9, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • UK startup Juro, which is applying a “design centric approach” and machine learning tech to help businesses speed up the authoring and management of sales contracts, has closed $2m in seed funding led by Point Nine Capital
  • Prior investor Seedcamp also contributed to the round. Juro is announcing Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise’s co-founder) as an investor now too, as well as Michael Pennington (Gumtree co-founder) and the family office of Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed.com)
  • Juro’s SaaS product is an integrated contracts workflow that combines contract creation, e-signing and commenting capabilities with AI-powered contract analytics

China Now Has the Most Valuable AI Startup in the World – Apr. 8, 2018 (Bloomberg)

  • SenseTime Group Ltd. has raised $600 million from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and other investors at a valuation of more than $3 billion, becoming the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup
  • The company, which specializes in systems that analyze faces and images on an enormous scale, said it closed a Series C round in recent months in which Singaporean state investment firm Temasek Holdings Pte and retailer Suning.com Co. also participated. SenseTime didn’t outline individual investments, but Alibaba was said to have sought the biggest stake in the three-year-old startup
  • The latest financing will bankroll investments in parallel fields such as autonomous driving and augmented reality, cover the growing cost of AI talent and shore up its computing power. It’s developing a service code-named “Viper” to parse data from thousands of live camera feeds — a platform it hopes will prove invaluable in mass surveillance. And it’s already in talks to raise another round of funds and targeting a valuation of more than $4.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter

Governments / policy:

Pentagon, Intel Agencies Set Up New AI Joint Office – Apr. 13, 2018 (Breaking Defense)

  • The Pentagon will submit a report to Congress this summer outlining plans for a new office to lead the military and intel agencies’ work developing and acquiring artificial intelligence tools, a high priority for the national security wing of the federal government alarmed at the huge leaps China is making in the field
  • Michael Griffin, the Pentagon’s research and engineering chief, told a crowd at the Hudson Institute on Friday that his office is still hammering out the details, but the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) will tie together the military’s efforts with those of the Intelligence Community, allowing them to combine efforts in a breakneck push to move government’s AI initiatives forward
  • Many in Silicon Valley are balking at working with the government on military weapons or surveillance systems that they say could be used to kill people or intrude on personal privacy. That’s a problem the Chinese simply don’t have, as research institutes and universities are compelled to work with the authoritarian government when asked

Singapore to test facial recognition on lampposts, stoking privacy fears – Apr. 13, 2018 (Reuters)

  • The plan to install the cameras, which will be linked to facial recognition software, is raising privacy fears among security experts and rights groups. The government said the system would allow it to “perform crowd analytics” and support anti-terror operations
  • GovTech, the Singapore government agency in charge of a “Lamppost-as-a-Platform” pilot project scheduled to begin next year, has given companies until May to register their interest in providing technology for the network
  • “As part of the LaaP trial, we are testing out various kinds of sensors on the lampposts, including cameras that can support backend facial recognition capabilities,” a GovTech spokesman said in an emailed statement to Reuters

China issues nationwide guidelines for road-testing of autonomous vehicles – Apr. 13, 2018 (Open Gov Asia)

  • According to a report in China Daily, China released national regulations on road tests for self-driving or autonomous vehicles on 12 April. This is part of a broader drive to accelerate the development of the technology and develop an advantage in the commercialization of autonomous driving technology
  • The guidelines were jointly issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Transport. The first draft of these guidelines were released in January 2018
  • The guidelines allow local authorities to evaluate local conditions and arrange road tests for autonomous vehicles. The guidelines state that the test vehicles should be passenger or commercial automobiles, not low-speed vehicles or motorcycles

China has become a ‘technological powerhouse’ in artificial intelligence, says Global Robo CEO – Apr. 12, 2018 (CNBC)

  • U.S.-China tensions are rising about Beijing’s treatment of foreign firms’ intellectual property, but China already recognizes the need to protect its own technologies, according to one CEO
  • Speaking with CNBC on Wednesday, Bill Studebaker of Robo Global said China has been a “chronic abuser” of intellectual property in the technology space, but “it sort of recognizes that they need to come to the table and protect their own IP.”
  • In the field of artificial intelligence, Studebaker said, China is already “clearly kind of a superpower”

Facial recognition used to catch fugitive among 60,000 concert-goers in China – Apr. 12, 2018 (The Telegraph)

  • “The suspect was shocked that he was found among tens of thousands of people, “ said Li Jin, a local police officer, according to the China Daily.
  • Police wore ‘facial recognition glasses’ at a train station last month which resulted in 33 people being detained for crimes including kidnapping, hit-and-run and using false IDs

Twenty-four EU countries sign artificial intelligence pact in bid to compete with US & China – Apr. 10, 2018 (Euractiv)

  • Twenty-four EU countries pledged to band together to form a “European approach” to artificial intelligence in a bid to compete with American and Asian tech giants. All EU member states except for Cyprus, Romania, Croatia and Greece signed the pledge
  • The EU’s investment in AI lags behind the US and China, and the bloc’s new initiative could still be hampered by competition between member states, or by their differing positions on regulation
  • EU Digital Commissioner Mariya Gabriel will publish a strategy paper on AI on 25 April that she said will outline legal issues that the technology is likely to create, and also address fears about robots replacing jobs. She will not propose binding legislation focused on AI this month, but has not ruled out regulating the technology at a later point

AI Experts Want Government Algorithms to Be Studied Like Environmental Hazards – Apr. 10, 2018 (NextGov)

  • AI Now, a nonprofit founded to study the societal impacts of AI, said an algorithmic impact assessment (AIA) would assure that the public and governments understand the scope, capability, and secondary impacts an algorithm could have, and people could voice concerns if an algorithm was behaving in a biased or unfair way
  • “If governments deploy systems on human populations without frameworks for accountability, they risk losing touch with how decisions have been made, thus rendering them unable to know or respond to bias, errors, or other problems,” the report said. “The public will have less insight into how agencies function, and have less power to question or appeal decisions.”
  • An AIA would first define the automated system a government wants to use, the researchers said. Such a definition shouldn’t be too broad, unless the government wants to spend its time disclosing every time they use a spell-check on a word document, but not so narrow that it leaves out important details. The AIA should disclose not only how an algorithm works mathematically, but what kind of data it needs to train, as well as who will be influencing and interpreting its outputs

The UAE adopts artificial intelligence in infrastructure sector for safety and sustainable development – Apr. 9, 2018 (Open Gov Asia)

  • UAE Minister of Infrastructure Development Dr Abdullah Al Nuaimi and Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Omar Bin Sultan Al Olama announced that the UAE is adopting AI technology in the federal roads projects
  • According to the press release by the UAE Government, the Ministry of Infrastructure Development is keen to adopt latest technologies of infrastructure development according to the highest standards while renovating its roads construction standards. A number of projects enabled by AI have been developed in cooperation with the private sector, which is in line with the UAE’s vision and its strategy of AI that was recently announced
  • In general, the initiatives by the Ministry of Infrastructure Development are in line with the UAE artificial strategy of 2031 which aims to make the UAE a leading country in the adoption of artificial intelligence. The technology is expected to result in huge economic returns with an expected growth rate of 26%, and economic savings of at least 335 billion dirhams

Studies:

Artificial intelligence accelerates discovery of metallic glass – Apr. 13, 2018 (Physics.org)

  • Now a group led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Northwestern University has reported a shortcut for discovering and improving metallic glass—and, by extension, other elusive materials—at a fraction of the time and cost
  • The research group took advantage of a system at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) that combines machine learning—a form of artificial intelligence where computer algorithms glean knowledge from enormous amounts of data—with experiments that quickly make and screen hundreds of sample materials at a time. This allowed the team to discover three new blends of ingredients that form metallic glass, and to do this 200 times faster than it could be done before, they reported today in Science Advances
  • “It typically takes a decade or two to get a material from discovery to commercial use,” said Northwestern Professor Chris Wolverton, an early pioneer in using computation and AI to predict new materials and a co-author of the paper. “This is a big step in trying to squeeze that time down. You could start out with nothing more than a list of properties you want in a material and, using AI, quickly narrow the huge field of potential materials to a few good candidates.”

Researchers use machine learning to quickly detect video face swaps – Apr. 11, 2018 (Engadget)

  • The team, led by Andreas Rossler at the Technical University of Munich, developed machine learning that is able to automatically detect when videos are face swapped. They trained the algorithm using a large set of face swaps that they made themselves, creating the largest database of these kind of images available. They then trained the algorithm, called XceptionNet, to detect the face swaps
  • XceptionNet clearly outperforms its rival techniques in detecting this kind of fake video, but it also actually improves the quality of the forgeries. Rossler’s team can use the biggest hallmarks of a face swap to make the manipulation more seamless. It doesn’t fool XceptionNet, but in the long run, it could make it harder for other methods to detect faked videos

AAA survey looks at autonomous vehicles – Apr. 11, 2018 (CBS News)

  • According to a new consumer survey from AAA Mid-Atlantic, nearly seven out of ten Virginia drivers said the safety and reliability of such autonomous vehicles are overwhelming concerns
  • “It is difficult to say whether the incident in Arizona might have affected the way people answered questions about the introduction of autonomous vehicle technology, but it may have been on their minds,” said Martha Mitchell Meade, AAA’s manager of public and government affairs. “Any crash involving an autonomous vehicle, especially involving death or injury, will receive heightened scrutiny.”
  • The survey also asked about how driverless vehicles may impact how people use their vehicles, to which 64 percent said they would likely use the driverless vehicle less than their own, 18 percent would use the driverless vehicle to transport them about the same as they do their personal vehicle, and ten percent said they would use the driverless vehicle more

New O’Reilly Survey Results Shed Light on Artificial Intelligence Skills Gap – Apr. 10, 2018 (Business Wire)

  • O’Reilly, the premier source for insight-driven learning on technology and business, today announced the results of its 2018 Artificial Intelligence (AI) survey, “How Companies Are Putting AI to Work Through Deep Learning.” Focused on deep learning, a technique used primarily for supervised machine learning, the survey explores the adoption of tools and techniques to build AI applications and the barriers that hinder business adoption
  • Findings suggest that the democratization of AI and deep learning applications will continue, as development tools and libraries improve. However, the shortage of AI-trained engineers and developers will persist. For example, while 54% of respondents indicated AI will play a big role (35%) or essential role (19%) in their organization’s future projects, lack of skilled people was the number one bottleneck reported
  • “Despite some claims that AI is over-hyped, these results show that we can expect more companies to use deep learning to improve their own products and services in the coming year,” said Ben Lorica, O’Reilly chief data scientist and AI Conference chair. “With that will come a tremendous emphasis on training at every level – from college degree programs to professional trainers – as businesses seek to develop the deep learning skills of their own staff.”

Events:

The 5th AI NEXTCon Silicon Valley – Four Day AI Machine Learning Event – Apr. 8, 2018 (Virtual Strategy)

  • The 5th AI NEXTCon is taking place in Santa Clara, CA on 4/10-13. The four day conference brings together top technical engineers (speakers from Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, LinkedIn and more), practitioners, influential technologists and data scientists to share solutions and practical experiences in machine/deep learning, computer vision, speech recognition and NLP
  • The conference features a blend of hands-on workshops, inspirational keynotes, deep dive tech talks, and networking opportunity with like-minded colleagues. It’s a 4 day conference with 6 keynotes, 50+ tech lead speakers, 50+ tech talks, and 6 workshop/code labs. The NEXTCon has become one of the premium tech events for tech engineers and has attracted more than 500 tech speakers, with more than 5,000 tech engineers attending