What’s happened in AI: September 17th-23rd

By | September 24, 2018
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Big event this week was the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018 held in Shanghai. We saw numerous announcements from countries, tech firms, and individuals throughout the event. Highlights include a new partnership on AI between Japan and China, and Amazon’s new research center in Shanghai.

Company developments:

Amazon launches Scout, a machine learning-powered visual shopping tool – Sept. 21, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Amazon is experimenting with a new tool called Scout designed to help shoppers better figure out what they want to buy in a more visual fashion, according to a report from CNBC, which first spotted Scout live on Amazon’s site. Using a combination of imagery, a thumbs up and down voting mechanism, and machine learning technology, Scout offers an almost Pinterest-like way of browsing Amazon products, then refining recommendations through user input
  • Scout aims to help customers narrow down their choices more quickly. Specifically, it focuses on solving two dilemmas, an Amazon spokesperson said: “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it” and “I know what I want, but I don’t know what it’s called.”

ZF plans $14 billion autonomous vehicle push, concept van – Sept. 19, 2018 (Automotive News)

  • ZF plans to invest 12 billion euros ($14 billion) over the next five years on electric and autonomous vehicle technology. The spending of about 2.4 billion euros annually outpaces the 2.2 billion euros ZF spent in overall research and development last year. The project includes developing a battery-powered delivery van that can drive on its own, the company said Wednesday
  • ZF ranks among the world’s biggest car-parts manufacturers after the $12.9 billion takeover of TRW Automotive Holdings Corp. three years ago. The privately-held company plans to test the vehicle in its hometown of Friedrichshafen in a move that will see it go head-to-head with Volkswagen’s Crafter or Ford’s Transit van

IBM launches tool aimed at detecting AI bias – Sept. 19, 2018 (BBC)

  • The IBM cloud-based software will be open-source, and will work with a variety of commonly used frameworks for building algorithms. Customers will be able to see, via a visual dashboard, how their algorithms are making decisions and which factors are being used in making the final recommendations

Sapho announces AI tools that surface prejudicial decision-making – Sept. 19, 2018 (Venture Beat)

  • Sapho Assistant integrates with Microsoft Azure’s Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) to enable users to ask questions using natural language. (For example: “What is the status of the ACME deal?”) Recommended Cards monitors how groups of employees interact with Sapho’s feed (such as how long they linger on a card) and, leveraging that behavioral data, surfaces timely insights. Lastly, Unconscious Bias Detection tracks decisions made through services connected to Sapho (such as paid time off requests) and informs managers if there might be a pattern of prejudicial decision-making

Microsoft launches new AI applications for customer service and sales – Sept. 18, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Like virtually every other major tech company, Microsoft is currently on a mission to bring machine learning to all of its applications. It’s no surprise then that it’s also bringing ‘AI’ to its highly profitable Dynamics 365 CRM products. A year ago, the company introduced its first Dynamics 365 AI solutions and today it’s expanding this portfolio with the launch of three new products: Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, Customer Service and Market Insights
  • “Many people, when they talk about CRM, or ERP of old, they referred to them as systems of oppression, they captured data,” said Alysa Taylor, Microsoft corporate VP for business applications and industry. “But they didn’t provide any value back to the end user — and what that end user really needs is a system of empowerment, not oppression.”

Google launches new AI initiatives in Japan – Sept. 18, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • These announcements include a couple of basic updates like translating its Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform Coursera specialization, its Associate Cloud Engineer certification and fifty of its hands-on Qwiklabs into Japanese
  • In addition, Google is also launching an Advanced Solutions Lab in Tokyo as well. Previously Google opened similar labs in Dublin, Ireland, as well as Sunnyvale and New York. These labs offer a wide range of machine learning-centric training options, collaborative workspaces for teams that are part of the company’s four-week machine learning training program, and access to Google experts

Microsoft’s ML.Net framework adds TensorFlow scoring – Sept. 17, 2018 (InfoWorld)

  • Microsoft has refreshed its ML.Net open source machine learning framework, fitting its beta Version 0.5 with TensorFlow model scoring as a transform to ML.Net. This capability enables use of an existing model from Google’s TensorFlow deep learning and machine learning toolkit in an ML.Net experiment
  • Version 0.5 begins adding support for deep learning, with the TensorFlow Transform class, which can take an existing TensorFlow model and get scores from that model into ML.Net. Users of this TensorFlow scoring capability do not need a working knowledge of TensorFlow internal details. The transform is based on code from the TensorFlowSharp .Net bindings

Fundraising / investment:

Fresh out of Y Combinator, Leena AI scores $2M seed round – Sept. 21, 2018 (TechCrunch)

  • Leena AI, a recent Y Combinator graduate focusing on HR chatbots to help employees answer questions like how much vacation time they have left, announced a $2 million seed round today from a variety of investors including Elad Gil and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal
  • Jain pointed out that most HR policies are defined in policy documents, but employees don’t always know where they are. They felt a chatbot would be a good way to solve this problem and save a lot of time searching or calling for answers that should be easily found. What’s more, they learned that the vast majority of questions are fairly common and therefore easier for a system to learn

New investment in driverless cars at Oxford firm Oxbotica – Sept. 20, 2018 (Oxford Mail)

  • A £14m investment in Oxford company Oxbotica will speed up the development of driverless cars in the UK according to staff. The Summertown-based firm is the UK’s leading autonomous vehicle software developer. Oxbotica staff are hoping their vehicles will be used on roads, farms and even on Mars and its technology has already been trialled with Ocado, at Heathrow Airport, and on some city streets
  • The investment follows a successful commercial roll-out in the world’s largest markets, including North America, Europe and Asia. The lead investor is IP Group plc, alongside Parkwalk Advisors and long-term commercial partner AXA XL

Tamr raises $10 million for AI-powered data analytics – Sept. 18, 2018 (Venture Beat)

  • Big data analytics might not be the most exciting application of artificial intelligence (AI), but there’s a lot of money in it — as much as $42 billion, according to Statista. So it’s not exactly surprising that startups like Tamr, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company that leverages AI to speed up analytics workflows, continue to rake in the capital
  • Tamr announced today that it has closed a $10 million round with participation from Pear Tree Partners and Granite Hill Capital Partners. It also announced the appointment of new board observers: John McClellan, a partner at Pear Tree Partners; Masataka Otomo at SBI Investment; and Mona Vernon, chief technology officer of Thomson Reuters Labs

Knight Foundation devotes $5.25 million to studying last-mile autonomous car service – Sept. 18, 2018 (Venture Beat)

  • When self-driving vehicles hit the road en masse, what socioeconomic changes might they bring? That’s the question the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation aims to answer with a $5.25 million program — the largest yet under its Smart Cities umbrella — that’ll foster community-driven roadmaps in five U.S. cities: Detroit, Long Beach, Miami, San Jose, and Pittsburgh
  • “Knight believes that a true Smart City puts people first,” said Sam Gill, Knight Foundation vice president for communities and impact. “Self-driving cars have the potential to remake the face of cities. We want to work with city leaders to ensure those changes respond to residents — instead of putting residents at the whims of technology.”

Base10 Partners launches $137 million early-stage AI startup fund – Sept. 17, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • Base10 Partners today announced the launch of a $137 million fund to invest in early-stage startups that will use AI to change industries by empowering workers instead of automating them out of jobs
  • The prime directive of the debut fund will be to back companies in industries like real estate, construction, waste management, and logistics — what managing partner Adeyemi Ajao calls “automation for the real economy” and “solving problems for 99 percent of people.”

Partnerships:

Wovenware is making AI to track disease-carrying mosquitoes in Puerto Rico – Sept. 21, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • The Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust — a San Juan-based nonprofit organization that aims to foster growth in the island’s tech sector — in 2016 won a $50 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to combat the spread of mosquitos on the island, with the goal of learning why a number of species have developed immunities to FDA-approved adulticides and larvicides
  • In early August, Wovenware partnered with the Research Trust to develop a machine learning system that can automate the classification of Aedes aegypti, a specious known to carry infectious diseases. Its small team of data scientists are putting together a dataset of mosquitoes images and labels that will be used to train a computer vision algorithm

Foam Studio, Ikea Explore Autonomous Vehicles – Sept. 17, 2018 (MediaPost)

  • The project, called Spaces on Wheels, challenges the traditional idea of the car, leveraging design and augmented reality to showcase how self-driving vehicles could support the activities we spend the most time on along with moving us from point A to B
  • The seven designs aim to trigger conversations and reflect the potential future ecosystem of flexible, purpose-built spaces for vehicles in the categories of office, cafe, healthcare, farm, play, hotel and shop — with clean lines, rounded edges and modern forms that draw the eye, according to a release

Mindtree Partners With IIT Madras to Establish an Endowed Faculty Fellow Position in Data Science and AI – Sept. 17, 2018 (Business Insider)

  • Mindtree, a global technology services and digital transformation company, has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to set up a dedicated Faculty Fellow position in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. This endowment empowers the renowned academic institution, which has been at the forefront of developing the next-generation Digital Technology and Talent, with industry specific knowledge and resources to help create solutions to accelerate the growth and adoption of Data Science and AI globally

Research / studies:

Glider Uses Machine Learning to Soar to Nearly 2,300 Feet – Sept. 20, 2018 (ECN)

  • An autonomous glider, created by University of California San Diego researchers, uses machine learning to glide through the sky via atmospheric thermal plumes. The research was documented in a paper
  • “This paper is an important step toward artificial intelligence—how to autonomously soar in constantly shifting thermals like a bird. I was surprised that relatively little learning was needed to achieve expert performance,” says Terry Sejnowski, member of the research team from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences

International Tech Giants to Establish AI Centers in Shanghai – Sept. 18, 2018 (Chinese Academy of Sciences)

  • Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, and several other international tech giants announced to establish AI-related innovation centers and research institutes in Shanghai at the on-going World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2018
  • Chinese tech companies including Alibaba and Baidu also announced plans to establish AI innovation centers in Shanghai. Baidu will establish its Shanghai innovation center, developing over 110 AI projects. Sense Time Group, a Chinese AI company, is developing its new supercomputing center in Shanghai, which will have a computation power of more than 500 petaflops (a petaflop is 1,000 trillion) per second

NYU applies open source Google AI to diagnose lung cancer – Sept. 17, 2018 (VentureBeat)

  • If recent research is any indication, artificial intelligence (AI) has a bright future in medicine. Nvidia developed an AI system that can generate synthetic scans of brain cancer. Google subsidiary DeepMind has demonstrated a machine learning algorithm that can recommend treatment for more than 50 eye diseases with 94 percent accuracy. And in newly published research, New York University (NYU) showed how AI might aid in lung cancer diagnosis
  • A paper today published in the journal Nature Medicine (“Classification and mutation prediction from non-small cell lung cancer histopathology images using deep learning”) describes how a team of NYU researchers retrained Google’s Inception v3, an open source convolutional neural network architected for object identification, to detect certain forms of lung cancers with 97 percent accuracy

Government / policy:

Japan, China eye ‘innovation dialogue’ to discuss driverless cars, AI – Sept. 23, 2018 (The Mainichi)

  • Japan and China will pursue cooperation in developing advanced technologies in areas such as self-driving cars and artificial intelligence, sources close to the matter said Sunday, in another sign of improving bilateral relations
  • The two countries are planning to launch an “innovation dialogue” involving officials and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is expected to reach an agreement when he visits China next month, the sources said. The dialogue would help to enhance Asia’s largest economies, both facing the threat of higher U.S. trade tariffs

Over 2,000 European AI experts join hands to challenge US, China in artificial intelligence – Sept. 21, 2018 (South China Morning Post)

  • The alliance urges the European Commission to implement an AI strategy for the EU as a whole along the lines of the US National AI Research and Development Plan that was released in late 2016, and China’s Next Generation AI Development Plan that was issued the following year
  • Some 2,100 AI researchers from 29 countries across the continent have already signed up, according to Philipp Slusallek, scientific director of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and one of Claire’s three initiators

How China is using AI to push back against its physician shortage – Sept. 21, 2018 (Health IT & CIO Report)

  • With less than 12 million health workers for a population of 1.4 billion, China is facing an unprecedented physician shortage, — but it may have found a solution in technology, France 24 reports
  • Tech firms in China are turning to big data and artificial intelligence to develop new devices that can take some work off physicians’ plates. One of these companies, Ping An Good Doctor, offers an automated pulse-taking machine that spits back results to a wearer’s mobile phone. That device — which acts as a digital “receptionist” that sends information to a real-life physician — is part of Ping An’s AI-assisted medical consultation system that patients use to conduct quick preliminary check-ups and get prescriptions without having to go to the hospital

Former Head of Google China Foresees an AI Crisis—and Proposes a Solution – Sept. 20, 2018 (IEEE Spectrum)

  • Kai-Fu Lee’s new book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is something of a bait and switch. The first half explores the diverging AI capabilities of China and the United States and frames the discussion as a battle for global dominance. Then, he boldly declares that we shouldn’t waste time worrying about who will win and says the “real AI crisis” will come from automation that wipes out whole job sectors, reshaping economies and societies in both nations
  • “Lurking beneath this social and economic turmoil will be a psychological struggle,” he writes. “As more and more people see themselves displaced by machines, they will be forced to answer a far deeper question: In an age of intelligent machines, what does it mean to be human?” In a wide-ranging Q&A with IEEE Spectrum, Lee not only explored this question further, he also gave his answer

A.I. has a bias problem that needs to be fixed: World Economic Forum – Sept. 18, 2018 (CNBC)

  • As artificial intelligence becomes more ubiquitous, ethical considerations around privacy, bias, transparency and accountability need to be taken into account, according to Kay Firth-Butterfield, head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum
  • The spotlight is now on ethical issues around AI because there have been “obvious problems” with some of the algorithms, she said
  • Experts have said that biases sometimes creep in on programs because human bias influenced those algorithms when they were being written.

China Calls for Borderless Research to Promote AI Development – Sept. 17, 2018 (Bloomberg)

  • Chinese leaders, including Vice Premier Liu He, joined business mogul Jack Ma and executives from Google at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai to support a borderless approach to AI research. Liu called for foreign investment in the country and pledged to foster “an environment of free thinking” to support development
  • “We’re hoping that all countries, as members of the global village, will be inclusive and support each other so that we can respond to the double-edged sword effect of new technologies,” Liu told attendees through a translator. “AI represents a new era. Cross-national and cross-discipline cooperation is inevitable.”