What’s happened in AI: May 21st-27th

By | May 28, 2018
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Recapping the week of May 21st-27th. This week’s post to follow soon.

Big highlights from last week include Sensetime’s partnership to invest in AI startups in Hong Kong, Microsoft developing a tool to “detect biased algorithms” and congress diving into recent use cases of facial recognition.

Company developments:

Mobvoi Releases 4 New AI-Powered Wearable & Smart Home Devices – May 26, 2018 (Pandaily)

  • Mobvoi, a chinese AI startup, released the flagship smart watch TicWatch Pro, the children-friendly smart speaker TicKasa Fox, a more fashionable version of a previously released smart speaker TicKasa Nano and the single ear earphone TicPod Solo. It has also launched China’s first mass-produced AI voice chip module – Wenxin Mobvoi A1 for the enterprise market

Mobileye’s Autonomous Vehicle Runs Red Light in Demonstration – May 26, 2018 (Future Car)

  • Mobileye hosted a press event recently where one of its autonomous vehicles that was fitted with television cameras blew through a red light only a quarter of a mile away from the company’s headquarters, reports the outlet. Thankfully, no one was injured. Interestingly, Mobileye had a safety driver that was monitoring the car, but allowed it to continue to run the light
  • According to Bloomberg, Mobileye’s Chief Executive Officer Amnon Shashua, the television crew’s wireless transmitters created electromagnetic interference that disrupted signals from a transponder on the traffic light. The self-driving vehicle’s cameras correctly identified the red light, but the vehicle ignored the information and continued on its way because of signals it received from the transponder. The mistake has since been corrected
  • “It was a very unique situation,” said Shashua. “We’d never anticipated something like this.” In terms of changes to ensure something like this never happens again, Mobileye has modified its hardware that’s in charge of shielding the vehicle’s computers from electromagnetic interference. This should hopefully prevent any incidents in the future. Despite the incident, Mobileye has continued to run its fleet of driverless cars in Jerusalem and claims that it hasn’t received any complaints

Microsoft is creating an oracle for catching biased AI algorithms – May 25, 2018 (MIT News)

  • Microsoft is building a tool to automatically identify bias in a range of different AI algorithms. It is the boldest effort yet to automate the detection of unfairness that may creep into machine learning—and it could help businesses make use of AI without inadvertently discriminating against certain people
  • “Things like transparency, intelligibility, and explanation are new enough to the field that few of us have sufficient experience to know everything we should look for and all the ways that bias might lurk in our models,” says Rich Caruna, a senior researcher at Microsoft who is working on the bias-detection dashboard
  • Caruna says Microsoft’s bias-catching product will help AI researchers catch more instances of unfairness, although not all. “Of course, we can’t expect perfection—there’s always going to be some bias undetected or that can’t be eliminated—the goal is to do as well as we can,” he says

Intel unveils Nervana Neural Net L-1000 for accelerated AI training – May 23, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Intel today announced plans to release Nervana Neural Net L-1000, code named Spring Crest, to make it easier for developers to test and deploy AI models. Intel first introduced the Neural Network Processor (NNP) family of chips last fall. Spring Crest will be 3-4 times faster than Lake Crest, its first NNP chip, said Intel VP and general manager of the AI product group Naveen Rao
  • The Nervana Neural Net L-1000 will be Intel’s first commercial NNP chip and will be made broadly available in late 2019. The news was announced today at Intel’s first-ever AI Dev Con being held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco
  • “We also will support bfloat16, a numerical format being adopted industrywide for neural networks, in the Intel Nervana NNP-L1000. Over time, Intel will be extending bfloat16 support across our AI product lines, including Intel Xeon processors and Intel FPGAs. This is part of a cohesive and comprehensive strategy to bring leading AI training capabilities to our silicon portfolio,” Rao said in a statement

Salesforce: Sales teams are increasingly bullish on AI – May 23, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Salesforce released its third annual State of Sales report today, a compendium of insights, trends, and surveys from over 2,900 sales professionals worldwide. It’s chock full of interesting facts and figures, but one of the biggest takeaways is that artificial intelligence — specifically as it relates to opportunity insights, lead prioritization, and guided selling — is gaining slow but steady ground in the sales industry, and sales teams expect it to become pervasive by 2020
  • The industry is bullish on AI’s ability to close sales and boost the bottom line. Nearly half of all salespeople surveyed said that AI has a role to play in guided selling capabilities, like opportunity rankings (i.e., highlighting customers with high sales potential) and suggested next steps (tips and ideas to help clinch a deal). Of the “high-performing” salespeople surveyed, that number was 62 percent
  • Salesforce says that 76 percent of teams using AI have increased the size of their staff since 2015. That’s compared to sales teams that aren’t using AI and don’t plan to use AI in the near future, only 48 percent of which saw staffing levels rise

IBM plans to hire 1,800 people in France for blockchain and AI – May 23, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • The company plans to hire 1,800 new people in France over the next couple of years. While this isn’t really groundbreaking as IBM has 380,000 employees around the world, it’s interesting to see the focus of these hires

More Lyft riders will get picked up by driverless cars this year, strategy chief says – May 23, 2018 (CNBC)

  • Driverless ride-hailing services are available across the U.S., and consumers will see those services grow throughout this year, Lyft Chief Strategy Officer Raj Kapoor said
  • Lyft already has self-driving partnerships with seven companies, including Ford, Waymo and General Motors
  • Lyft ranks as No. 5 on CNBC’s sixth annual Disruptor 50 list

Apple, spurned by BMW and Mercedes, signs deal with Volkswagen for driverless cars – May 23, 2018 (CNBC)

  • Apple has signed a deal with Volkswagen to turn some of the carmaker’s new T6 Transporter vans into Apple’s self-driving shuttles for employees — a project that is behind schedule and consuming nearly all of the Apple car team’s attention, said three people familiar with the project
  • The project has suffered from repeated changes in direction that have hurt morale and led to hundreds of departures from its peak of more than 1,000 members two years ago, five former Apple employees said. They added that the team was now mostly consumed with developing the self-driving shuttle but the project lacks a clear plan beyond the vans
  • For the past several years, Apple sought partnerships with the luxury carmakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz to develop an all-electric self-driving car, according to five people familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. But on-again, off-again talks with those companies have ended after each rebuffed Apple’s requirements to hand over control of the data and design, some of the people said

Uber shutters its driverless-car operations in Arizona – May 23, 2018 (Roadshow)

  • The ride-hailing company said Wednesday that it will pull out of the state and that all its nearly 300 test drivers there will be terminated. The news was first reported by Arizona Republic. The move comes after one of Uber’s driverless cars killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March while in full autonomous mode
  • Aside from ending operations in Arizona, Uber has temporarily halted its self-driving operations in all cities where it’s been testing its vehicles, including Tempe, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto

HeartFlow’s AI coronary test outperforms conventional alternatives – May 22, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Coronary artery disease is notoriously tricky to diagnose, which is one of the reasons it accounts for 801,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone, according to the American Heart Association. (That’s more than all forms of cancer and Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease combined.) It’s also expensive — the cost of treating cardiovascular diseases is projected to pass $1.04 trillion globally by 2030, up from $863 billion in 2010
  • That’s why HeartFlow, a Redwood City, California-based health startup founded by Stanford University alums Charles Taylor and Christopher Zarins, has spent the better part of 11 years commercializing an alternative to traditional screening. Their solution, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-cleared FFRct (fractional flow reserve) Analysis, uses deep learning algorithms to build a personalized, three-dimensional model of the heart and highlight potential problem areas for clinicians. Today, at the EuroPCR Conference in Paris, HeartFlow announced data from a clinical study showing that its solution outperformed other commonly used (and in some cases more expensive) tests
  • The first trial (PACIFIC), which included 208 patients who underwent HeartFlow Analysis, CTA, SPECT, and PET scans and a three-vessel invasive fractional flow reserve (a procedure that measures heart circulation using a catheter and pressure-sensitive guidewire) shows that HealthFlow’s solution obtained routinely superior results on a per-vessel basis. The FFRct Analysis achieved a diagnostic performance score of 0.94, compared to the PET (0.87), coronary CTA (0.83), the SPECT (0.70). (Higher is better.)

Samsung AI centre to be based at Cambridge – May 22, 2018 (BBC News)

  • The company is to open an AI research lab in Cambridge, in a move that has been welcomed by the prime minister. The lab will join other Samsung centres dedicated to the topic, based in Moscow and Toronto. The technology is now seen as key to competing in many industries
  • Samsung says the lab will focus on health and communication. Theresa May said the announcement was “a vote of confidence in the UK as a world leader in artificial intelligence” and would create high-skilled highly paid jobs
  • The new centre could recruit as many as 150 scientists – although Samsung is being quite vague about its precise plans. It will be led by Prof Andrew Blake, an AI pioneer who previously ran Microsoft’s research lab in the same city

Health Navigator Natural Language Processing Engine Now Available on Epic App Orchard – May 22, 2018 (PR Web)

  • Health Navigator, a company that delivers evidence-based clinical content for digital health, telemedicine and eHealth, announced today that its Natural Language Processing (NLP) application is available in the Epic App Orchard
  • Health Navigator works to improve the digital health experience through integrated clinical content that simplifies and streamlines the care process,” said Eric McLean, director of information technology, Health Navigator. “Our NLP helps facilitate the first step of any medical encounter, which increases workflow efficiencies. Doing this well is important for patient safety and quality care. Being a part of the App Orchard extends our reach and builds awareness for our clinical content capabilities.”
  • Health Navigator’s NLP application is currently available through the App Orchard, while customers must license the engine directly through Health Navigator. The integration allows Epic customers to embed the NLP application into Hyperspace or use the NLP engine as a standalone web application. After they license Health Navigator’s NLP content, customers can record patient chief complaints and reason for visit information, and prioritize patients based on their symptoms

Baidu spins out its global ad business to sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence – May 22, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Baidu, the Chinese search giant, is spinning out its business unit responsible for utility apps and its mobile ad business to sharpen its focus on artificial intelligence
  • As part of the spin-out, Baidu is selling a large chunk of its equity in the ‘Global DU’ business to as-yet-undisclosed investors. The plan is to sell “a majority equity stake” in order to take Global DU independent. Once the deal is completed — it is targeted at a Q3 2018 timeframe — Baidu’s share of the business will drop to around 34 percent. Further, the business is likely to raise additional capital for growth
  • It will also allow Baidu to focus more keenly on artificial intelligence. The firm said it will set up a new global business unit around its AI-powered services, including recommendation engine PopIn, keyboard app Simeji and other services in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. The plan is to allow these services to work more closely with Baidu’s AI labs, which include locations in Silicon Valley and Seattle

Cloudera Accelerates Enterprise Machine Learning from Research to Production – May 22, 2018 (PR Newswire)

  • Cloudera, Inc. (NYSE: CLDR), the modern platform for machine learning and analytics optimized for the cloud, today announced new innovations to help businesses operationalize data insights faster by making data scientists and data engineers more productive
  • New machine learning capabilities make it easier for data scientists to quickly train and deploy models with higher confidence and lower risk. Massive increases in performance, scale and capacity of Cloudera’s modern data platform help organizations keep pace with the explosive growth and diversity of data in their business. These new capabilities enable data teams to collaborate more effectively and deliver models to production faster, enabling secure access to enterprise-scale, high-performance data and compute, both on-premises and across public clouds

Microsoft to share data, tools to speed Chinese AI development – May 22, 2018 (Business Times)

  • Microsoft Corp will set up an open platform with four of China’s most prestigious universities to share its data and tools on artificial intelligence (AI), quickening efforts to try and wrest clients away from local giants
  • The company demonstrated its AI chip system, Project Brainwave, in Beijing on Monday. It showed off how “XiaoIce”, its Chinese digital assistant for chats, can emulate people’s voices, converse with humans over the phone and even compose poetry, echoing Google’s now-infamous demo to convince developers to adopt it as the chatbot of choice
  • The displays encapsulate Microsoft’s efforts to use AI tools to win customers from more entrenched global rivals, including Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc. Among cloud vendors, AI services are regarded as effective at winning new business. And where Google’s services are blocked in China, Microsoft’s Brainwave and Azure cloud computing service is permitted thanks to its partnership with a local player. The Chinese market however remains dominated by the likes of Baidu Inc, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd

M&A

Stella Announces Minority Ownership of Talix, Inc. – May 24, 2018 (PR Newswire)

  • Stella today announced that its business development group has acquired a minority ownership stake in Talix, Inc., the premier provider of natural language processing (NLP)-enabled healthcare risk adjustment and quality analytics solutions for payers and providers
  • Talix provides risk adjustment and quality solutions that help providers, payers and accountable care organizations take on financial risk and succeed in value-based healthcare. Its applications transform complex data into actionable intelligence that drives improved coding efficiency and accuracy — leading to better patient outcomes, more accurate reimbursements and reduced costs
  • Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (Blue Cross), a Stella company, initially leveraged the Talix Coding InSight work flow tool and NLP technology in late 2017 to increase coding accuracy and efficiency and to minimize risk adjustment data validation (RADV) risk. Talix was chosen as a solution because of its cost-effective and highly advanced technology

Fundraising / investment:

Riminder raises $2.3 million for its AI recruitment service – May 25, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • French startup Riminder recently raised a $2.3 million funding round from various business angels, such as Xavier Niel, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, Romain Niccoli, Franck Le Ouay, Dominique Vidal, Thibaud Elzière and Fred Potter. The company has been building a deep learning-powered tool to sort applications and resumes so you don’t have to. Riminder participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield
  • Riminder won’t replace your HR department altogether, but it can help you save a ton of time when you’re a popular company. Let’s say you are looking for a mobile designer and you usually get hundreds or thousands of applications. You can then integrate Riminder with your various channels to collect resumes from various sources. The startup then uses optical character recognition to turn PDFs, images, Word documents and more into text. Riminder then tries to understand all your job positions and turn raw text into useful data. Finally, the service will rank the applications based on public data and internal data. The company has scraped the web to understand usual career paths
  • Existing HR solutions can integrate with Riminder using an API. This way, you could potentially use the same HR platform, but with Riminder’s smart filtering features

Realeyes, which uses AI and a front-facing camera to read viewers’ emotions, raises $16.2M – May 22, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Realeyes, a London-based startup that uses computer vision to read a person’s emotional responses when they are watching a video as short as six seconds long, and then using predictive analytics to help map that reading to the video to provide feedback on its effectiveness, has raised $16.2 million in funding, money that it plans to use to expand in engineering and business development
  • The rise of “smart” and connected hardware that picks up data as much as produces it is the opportunity that Realeyes is tapping. “We are surrounded by devices with cameras and microphones in them,” CEO and founder Mihkel Jäätma said in an interview
  • The Series A round comes after a strong run of growth at the company. It says that revenues have shot up 932 percent in the last four years, and it has added customers like Coca Cola, Mars, Publicis, Turner and Oath (which also owns TechCrunch) to its books

Emergence Capital raises $435 million fund for enterprise AI investments – May 21, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Emergence Capital today announced it has raised a $435 million fund to invest in companies that use machine learning to help people increase productivity at work
  • The fund will focus especially on companies that provide coaching powered by data and conversational AI to help people perform their jobs better. Emergence has previously made a number of similar investments, including in call center analysis company Chorus.ai; recruiter chatbot Mya; and Textio, which is using conversational AI to make better recruitment messages for companies that are hiring
  • This is Emergence Capital’s fifth fund. In 2015, Emergence raised a $335 million fund for investments in enterprise startups centered around SaaS, mobile tech, and cloud infrastructure. Emergence Capital has been an early investor in companies like Salesforce, Box, Zoom, and and Service Box

Partnerships:

India, China launch first joint projects in Big Data, AI – May 27, 2018 (India Times)

  • An AI-focused IT corridor was on Saturday launched by both countries in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian, while on Sunday, a big data-focused IT cooperation platform was opened in the southwestern city of Guiyang
  • The two projects, backed by the Chinese government and India’s National Association for Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), are aimed at boosting cooperation between Indian software companies and Chinese firms in high-tech manufacturing in big data and Internet of Things projects
  • To connect Indian and Chinese companies, both sides have launched a joint IT “matchmaking” initiative called the Sino Indian Digital Collaborative Opportunities Plaza (SIDCOP) platform, an AI-powered platform which will be run by Zeta-V Technology Solutions, an Indian start-up which is already based in China, in cooperation with CASICloud, a Guizhou based cloud computing firm. The bilingual platform will help better link Indian and Chinese firms in AI, Internet of Things, and Big Data projects

Microsoft and Publicis unveil Marcel, an AI-based productivity platform for the ad giant – May 24, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella has refocussed to double down on enterprise, artificial intelligence and cloud services, and today the company took the wraps a new project for advertising giant Publicis that shows how it is leveraging all three to expand its business. At an event in Paris, the CEOs of the two companies unveiled Marcel, a new platform comprised of multiple apps using AI, social networking mechanics, voice recognition, predictive analytics and more aimed at getting Publicis’ 80,000 employees to be more productive and work together better
  • The first three apps on Marcel — named after Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, the founder of Publicis who had an interesting second career as a fighter in the French Resistance — will be Daily Six, Expert Match and Open Brief, with plans to add more apps over time, CEO and chairman Arthur Sadoun said in an interview this week. They’ve been trialled so far with 100 employees and will be rolling out more widely from today, with an aim of having its whole staff connected in 18 months
  • In keeping with the norm in the ad world, Publicis has been built up by way of acquisitions, and operates essentially as a holding company for all of them to largely continue working in their silos. While that might have been a useful model when the organization was smaller, at 80,000 employees it runs the risk of being inefficient, and could easily lead to many missed business opportunities for Publicis

AI Decentralized Alliance launches with plan to fund 100 blockchain-powered projects – May 22, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • SingularityNET and AI Decentralized today announced the Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA), an open industry alliance trying to foster the development of decentralized AI technologies
  • SingularityNET is best known for powering Sophia, the Hanson Robotics robot. It is also building a decentralized marketplace for AI around the globe. AI Decentralized, meanwhile, aims to connect AI practitioners with blockchain practitioners
  • The initial DAIA plan involves an affiliated fund that will support 100 projects over the next two years, with funding allowances of $2 million for each of the first 50 projects

Hong Kong’s tech ambitions given major boost with AI lab funding – May 21, 2018 (South China Morning Post)

  • Hong Kong received a major boost to its technology ambitions on Monday with the launch of an AI lab jointly funded by SenseTime, which specialises in large scale facial recognition systems, and the Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund
  • The lab, with an investment of “tens of millions of [HK] dollars”, will be fitted out with supercomputers and technology developed by Alibaba’s DAMO Academy research institute. It will collaborate with the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) to roll out a six-month accelerator programme starting September to nurture AI start-ups in the city
  • The establishment of the AI Lab comes as Hong Kong’s government looks to step up innovation in technology areas like AI, biotechnology and financial technology to prevent the city from falling behind. The government’s budget for this year included HK$40 billion for HKSTP to support innovation and technology building. A separate amount of HK$10 billion was earmarked to establish two technology research clusters focusing on health care technology and AI

Research / studies:

Salesforce data scientist surveys the state of AI-assisted photography – May 24, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • During Re-Work‘s Deep Learning Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, Michael Sollami, a senior data scientist at Salesforce, presented a survey outlining the most significant computer graphics, digital photography, and computer vision developments in recent months, and the exciting new research on the horizon

AI to add $182b to UAE economy by 2035 – May 21, 2018 (Gulf Today)

  • The report by Accenture looked at 15 industries in the UAE and 13 in Saudi Arabia to determine the potential sector-specific impact of AI on the economies of the Middle East. The research found that in the UAE, AI will have the greatest impact on the financial services, healthcare, and transport and storage industries, with increases of US$37 billion, US$22 billion and US$19 billion, respectively, in their annual gross value added (GVA), which measures the output value of all goods and services in a sector
  • Even the labour-intensive sectors of education and construction will see increases of US$6 billion and US$8 billion, respectively, in their GVA over the same period, with AI enabling people to be more productive, thus leading to gains in profitability
  • “The level of growth that AI stands to bring to the UAE’s economy is unparalleled,” said Amr El Saadani, Managing Director of Accenture’s Financial Services practice in the Middle East and Turkey. “The nation’s leaders already understand the impact of this powerful technology, evidenced by the appointment of the first Minister of AI last year

Government / policy:

Senators investigate safety procedures for autonomous cars – May 25, 2018 (Engadget)

  • Just a day after the NTSB released its preliminary findings on the Uber crash in Arizona, senators Edward J. Markey and Richard Blumenthal began an investigation into safety protocols for driverless car testing. In a letter sent to major auto manufacturers involved in autonomous driving systems, the senators asked several specific questions to find out what kind of procedures the companies have to ensure the safety of others during testing
  • The senators want to know where testing is occurring, how companies determined if the self-driving tech was safe for public roads and whether the technology relies on internal sensors or external inputs and more. Copies of the letter were sent to the US offices of BMW, Daimler Trucks, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo, Amazon, Apple, Intel, Lyft, NVIDIA Corporation, Uber and Waymo
  • “This latest fatality has raised many questions about the processes companies have in place to guard public safety when testing this type of technology on public roads,” the senators wrote in the letter sent to Uber. “Although we understand that Uber and several other AV companies have temporarily halted vehicle testing, we would like to know more about your company’s protocols for test-driving AVs on public roads and how they will be adjusted in light of the recent tragedy.”

Congress wants answers from Amazon on facial-recognition technology – May 25, 2018 (Engadget)

  • Amazon’s controversial face-recognition technology is being tested and used by the Orlando police department, and apparently Congress isn’t happy about that. Two members of the House of Representatives, Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), have sent Jeff Bezos a letter demanding he explain exactly how the tech, called Rekognition, is being used by law enforcement
  • The Intercept was provided a copy of the letter before was publicly released. You can read it for yourself here. In it, they ask Bezos what law enforcement agencies are using the software, who Amazon has offered Rekognition to, information about error rates and bias and how Amazon is making sure its software isn’t used to further systems that disproportionately impact protected groups. The letter requests answers by June 20th
  • There’s a lot of concern about the use of this kind of tech by law enforcement officers. Specifically, who and what governs how it is used? Could it be used to track people based on race, or to unlawfully follow immigrants? This is what privacy groups are concerned about, and likely why House Democrats are asking Bezos for answers

China is exporting facial recognition software to Africa, expanding its vast database – May 25, 2018 (Quartz)

  • In March, the Zimbabwean government signed a strategic partnership with the Gunagzhou-based startup CloudWalk Technology to begin a large-scale facial recognition program throughout the country. The agreement, backed by the Chinese government’s Belt and Road initiative, will see the technology primarily used in security and law enforcement and will likely be expanded to other public programs
  • “The Zimbabwean government did not come to Guangzhou purely for AI or facial ID technology, rather it had a comprehensive package plan for such areas as infrastructure, technology and biology,” CloudWalk CEO Yao Zhiqiang told China’s Global Times
  • The public-private partnership between the Zimbabwean government and CloudWalk is not the only database China’s AI engineers will have access to. Last year, the little-known Transsion became the dominant player in Africa’s mobile market, overtaking Samsung. Its main strategy has been to target its Itel, Tecno and Infinix phones to users who can’t afford Apple, Samsung and other smartphone brands. In April Transsion unveiled a new phone, the Tecno Camon X Pro, with facial recognition technology that will be on sale in Africa. This is a commercial entity collecting the data of millions of customers, without the oversight that companies like Apple have faced

China sees potential in AI, self-driving, digitalization cooperation with Germany – May 24, 2018 (New York Times)

  • China’s commerce ministry said it sees good potential in cooperation with Germany in sectors such as digitalization, new energy cars, artificial intelligence and driverless cars
  • The comments were made by ministry spokesman Gao Feng at a regular briefing in Beijing

Police are using Amazon’s facial recognition tool and the ACLU says it could pose a ‘grave threat’ to communities – May 22, 2018 (CNBC)

  • The ACLU says law enforcement agencies could use Amazon’s facial recognition technology to “easily build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone.”
  • The tool, called Rekognition, is already being used by at least one agency to check photographs of unidentified suspects against a database of mug shots from the county jail
  • Privacy advocates have been concerned about expanding the use of facial recognition, with potentially dire consequences for minorities who are already arrested at disproportionate rates, immigrants who may be in the country illegally or political protesters

Beijing support facial recognition at metro – May 21, 2018 (Technode)

  • One day after Beijing metro realized citywide support for QR-code payment, the city is looking to power its metro system with face recognition. A representative from the Beijing Transportation Committee told local media that the capital is going to test out its face recognition system by the end of this year (in Chinese)
  • In recent years, facial recognition is widely applied as a major verification method in China. Alibaba is among the earliest companies that are integrating the technology into payment process. In addition, it is being applied in several physical deployments from verifying visitor’s identities in Chinese tourist spot of Wuzhen, facilitating checking in and boarding processes for travelers, and even spotting fugitives

India now wants artificial intelligence-based weapon systems – May 21, 2018 (Times of India)

  • The country’s defence establishment is now working towards harnessing the expertise of the information technology industry and academia in this arena, taking a cue from countries like the US and China that are focusing on AI and MI (machine learning) to develop lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS)
  • The critical need to be prepared for this new revolution in military affairs was even stressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the DefExpo in Chennai last month. “New and emerging technologies like AI and Robotics will perhaps be the most important determinants of defensive and offensive capabilities for any defence force in the future. + India, with its leadership in information technology domain, would strive to use this technology tilt to its advantage,” he said
  • The 17-member taskforce, which is headed by Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran and includes national cyber security coordinator Gulshan Rai, IIT and IISc professors as well as two and three-star generals and representatives from ISRO, DRDO and Atomic Energy Commission, is working on the roadmap with several goals in mind. They range from “establishing tactical deterrence in the region and visualizing potential transformative weaponry” to “developing intelligent, autonomous robotic systems and bolstering cyber defence”

Events

Linguamatics iScite 2.0 Wins Bio-IT World’s Best of Show Judges’ Prize – May 23, 2018 (PR Newswire)

  • Linguamatics, the leading natural language processing (NLP) text analytics provider, today announced that Bio-IT World has awarded Linguamatics the Best of Show Judges’ Prize for Linguamatics iScite 2.0, a software-as-a-service AI scientific search application that puts the power of text analytics directly into the hands of researchers and clinicians. iScite was one of 46 products considered for this prestigious award at last week’s Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston
  • Bio-IT World’s Best of Show Awards Program recognizes the most innovative product solutions for the life science industry, as judged by a panel of experts from academia, industry, pharma and biotech. During the May 16 awards ceremony, iScite was applauded as a product that had “blown away” the judges, by putting “big pharma power into the hands of the small guy.” Judges also recognized iScite for “the natural language processing power it delivers at a very affordable price point” and issued a challenge to the Bio-IT community to embrace the tool to “see what a whole community of really smart people can accomplish with it

3D Object Recognition Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup won US-China Investment Forum award – May 22, 2018 (PR Newswire)

  • Z Advanced Computing, Inc. (ZAC), the 3D (three-dimensional) Object Recognition General-AI (General-Artificial Intelligence) software startup, was invited by US-China Innovation Alliance to participate in the 2018 InnoStars Competition, among more than 120 startup companies, in Houston, Texas, on May 14-15, 2018, where ZAC won the “Judge’s Choice Award” in Artificial Intelligence (AI) category
  • InnoStars Competition, an innovation and investment forum, was attended by a few hundred leading investors and industry executives of major corporations from China. During the conference, ZAC was invited by US-China Innovation Alliance, as well as a research institute and a major corporation in China, for 3 separate (all-expenses paid) trips to China to visit major companies and major investors for ZAC’s next round of funding
  • Dr. Bijan Tadayon (CEO of ZAC) has also been invited to chair and deliver the Keynote Speech at the “AI & Smart Cities” session at the 5th Annual Global Congress of Knowledge Economy (GCKE) 2018, in Qingdao, China (September 7-9, 2018). The conference’s theme is “Seeking Sustainable Future in a Smart World”