Big week for Samsung as they announced an acquisition of Spanish AI company Zhilabs to bolster their 5G capabilities, and separately opened an AI research center in Montreal (their 4th AI center in North America).
Meanwhile on the partnership front, Baidu became the 1st major Chinese tech company to join the American-led Partnership for AI (PAI). Current members include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, who also collaborate with government entities like the UN and Human Rights Watch.
Company developments:
Waymo Releases Guidelines for Autonomous Vehicle Tech Crash Response – Oct. 20, 2018 (The Drive)
- Autonomous vehicle developer Waymo recently published a document titled “Waymo Fully Self-Driving Chrysler Pacifica Emergency Response Guide and Law Enforcement Interaction Protocol.” The 36-page guide provides rescue workers with information that may prove to be vital in the event of a crash involving one of the company’s modified Chrysler Pacifica Hybrids that are currently being used for development and testing in select areas across the United States
- The document first tells law enforcement about identifying information that sets a Waymo Pacifica apart from any other vehicle, the van’s roof-mounted sensors being a primary indicator. Each Waymo vehicle also has a unique serial number placed on the upper-right of its front and rear windows. The release then lays out the vehicle’s capabilities. The van has been rated by Waymo to have full self-driving tech for use on public roads at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour
Tesla stopped promoting the ‘Full Self-Driving’ option for its cars – Oct. 20, 2018 (The Verge)
- Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, said on Twitter that the option will be temporarily available “off menu,” much like Animal Style fries at an In-N-Out burger joint. It will quickly leave the secret menu, though, and won’t come back until the company is ready to roll it out. The Full Self-Driving option was “causing too much confusion” for customers to justify keeping it front and center, he said. The company declined to comment
- Three years ago, Musk claimed that Tesla’s vehicles would be ready and able to completely drive themselves without any human interaction by 2017. Two years ago, Musk announced every car made going forward would have the hardware necessary to facilitate this goal. Tesla has spent the years since advertising this impending breakthrough on its website as an easy add-on to the purchase of a new car, something that only required a few thousand dollars and a little bit of patience
The Pixel 3’s dual cameras are a tacit admission that AI can’t do everything (yet) – Oct. 19, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Google’s latest flagship smartphones — the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL — are finally shipping to customers, and the reviews are unanimous: The rear camera and dual selfie cams are best in class.
- “The notion of a software-defined camera or computational photography camera is a very promising direction and I think we’re just beginning to scratch the surface,” Google AI researcher Marc Levoy told The Verge in October 2016, shortly after the Pixel and Pixel XL’s debut. “I think the excitement is actually just starting in this area, as we move away from single-shot hardware-dominated photography to this new area of software-defined computational photography.”
Drive.ai’s self-driving car service opens to all in Arlington, Texas – Oct. 19, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Just under two months after it announced a partnership with the City of Arlington, Texas to pilot its driverless car tech, startup Drive.ai is broadening deployment to include every resident, employee, and visitor in the city. Starting today, anyone can hail a self-driving ride within one of several geofenced community office buildings, special event venues, hotels, public amenities, and retail and dining complexes in the city
- It’s the first launch of its kind in Texas, newly appointed CEO Bijit Halder told VentureBeat in a phone interview. And it follows on the heels of Drive.ai’s summer debut in Frisco, Texas, where it did 107 total rides in its first week of availability. Since then, Drive.ai has completed over 1 million simulated miles in the state
Redtail Injects AI Into Its CRM – Oct. 18, 2018 (Wealth Management)
- A machine-learning feature will be coming to Redtail Technology’s popular CRM program sometime this winter, according to company’s CEO Brian McLaughlin. He made the announcement at Riskalyze’s Fearless Investing Summit in San Antonio, Texas. Billed as artificial intelligence, the new feature will provide advisors with three specific, actionable feedback buckets: sentiment, keyphrases and entities, or tags, such as specific types of investment accounts
- The project, developed primarily from open source technology, has been in the works for nearly 18 months. When work began, the company looked to Amazon’s and Google’s natural language processing libraries, but found they were too general or not specific enough for the financial services industry. So Redtail developers decided it would be better to put its own spin on open source technology instead of paying big tech companies to provide customized toolkits
Fireflies.ai launches meeting transcription and automated task assignment service – Oct. 18, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Fireflies.ai today launched a conversational AI web app that transcribes meetings, highlights portions worthy of keeping in your notes, identifies call participants, and even automates assignments doled out in a meeting. Fireflies.ai had previously been available to a limited group of enterprise customers, but the launch today means anybody can use the service. For the announcement, Fireflies was named #1 product of the day today by Product Hunt
- The Fireflies service is integrated with a number of workplace communication apps including Slack, Skype for Business, Zoom, BlueJeans, and Google Hangouts Meet, and it can log notes in CRM systems like HubSpot and Salesforce. Fireflies can be invited to join your calendar to automatically record calls, but can also transcribe and offer insights from prerecorded audio
DeepMind open sources TRFL, a new library of reinforcement learning building blocks – Oct. 18, 2018 (Packt)
- The DeepMind team announced yesterday that they’re open sourcing a new library, named TRFL, that comprises useful building blocks for writing reinforcement learning (RL) agents in TensorFlow. The TRFL library was created by the research engineering team at DeepMind. TRFL library is a collection of key algorithmic components that are used for a large number of DeepMind’s agents such as DQN, DDPG, and the Importance Weighted Actor Learner Architecture
- TRFL library helps as it includes functions that help implement both classical RL algorithms as well as other cutting-edge techniques. The loss functions and other operations that come with TRFL, are implemented in pure TensorFlow. These RL algorithms are not complete algorithms instead they’re implementations of RL-Specific mathematical operations which are required when building fully-functional RL agents
Google-backed startup’s chat bots turn ads into conversations – Oct. 17, 2018 (Engadget)
- AdLingo, a marketing platform fresh out of Google’s Area 120 incubator program, is making advertisements “conversational” with the help of AI. AdLingo doesn’t build its own chatbots, but instead connects third-party chatbot tools with a company’s marketing department
- According to AdLingo, the idea for adding chatbot technology to marketing seemed like a logical next step in an increasingly AI-aided world. AdLingo co-founder and general manager Vic Fatnani told TechCrunch, “Everything is becoming more conversational, whether it’s through devices such as your phone, your speaker and eventually your car…We asked ourselves, ‘Hey if this shift is happening, why can’t marketing be more conversational?'”
Key former Google engineer says safety wasn’t his primary concern when developing self-driving cars – Oct. 16, 2018 (CNBC)
- Unnamed Google employees claimed in a New Yorker article that over a dozen accidents involving self-driving vehicles occurred in the early days of Google’s self-driving car project
- These incidents shed light on Alphabet’s highly scrutinized self-driving car division, which is now known as Waymo. The New Yorker report details internal division at Google over the person at the center of Waymo’s 2017 lawsuit against Uber that said Uber stole trade secrets
Google’s AI-powered Piano Genie lets anyone improvise perfectly by bashing buttons – Oct. 16, 2018 (The Verge)
- The team behind Piano Genie was inspired by Guitar Hero, a game that also simplifies how to play an instrument. They didn’t want users to just tap along to prewritten songs, but to make up pieces of melody on the fly instead. To enable this, they trained an AI program on a huge dataset of classical piano music, teaching it to predict what notes follow each other the same way your phone’s predictive text function guesses what you’ll write next. (You can also try out a web version for yourself here.)
IBM launches AI OpenScale and Multicloud Manager to simplify AI and cloud deployment – Oct. 15, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- AI OpenScale, which will launch later this year for IBM Cloud and Cloud Private customers, operates through online dashboards and supports AI models developed on a number of open source frameworks, including Google’s TensorFlow, Microsoft’s AzureML, SparkML, Keras, Seldon, and Amazon Web Services’ SageMaker. Additionally, it facilitates the deployment of those models in environments such as IBM’s Watson, Seldon, and other third-party platforms
- That’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI OpenScale offers a suite of autonomous bias detection and mitigation tools, including a logging system that records predictions made by machine learning models, along with the corresponding model version, the training data used, and the associated performance metrics. It continually monitors for prejudicial decision-making in AI applications and, through “de-biasing” technology, makes an effort to mitigate it while providing explanations for recommendations the AI algorithms give
M&A:
Samsung acquires Spanish AI-powered network analytics company Zhilabs to bolster 5G ambitions – Oct. 16, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Samsung announced it has acquired Zhilabs, a Spanish network analytics company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor carriers’ network performance and data traffic across myriad services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed
- Founded in 2008, Barcelona-based Zhilabs offers a flagship product called CustomAir, formerly known as FlowSight, that helps carriers drill down into the network performance experience at the individual subscriber level. It provides insights into messaging (SMS and MMS), data (connectivity, streaming, and apps), and roaming, among other facets of their service, and allows carriers to troubleshoot and prioritize issues based on the direct impact on their business. Crucially, this is all automated
Fundraising / investment:
Memory raises $5M to bring AI to time tracking – Oct. 17, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Memory, a startup out of Norway and maker of time tracking app Timely, has raised $5 million in further funding. Leading the round is Concentric, and Investinor, with participation from existing investor SNÖ Ventures. The company had previously raised $1 million in 2016 from 500 Startups, and SNÖ
- Founded by Mathias Mikkelsen, a designer by background and who I understand turned down a job offer at Facebook to try his hand at startup life, Memory is applying what it describes as AI and digital technology to create various tools to help solve “the abuses of time” that workers typically face in the modern workplace. The first of those abuses being tackled is the monotonous and time-consuming task of time tracking and filing time sheets — a meta problem if there ever was one
Cognata raises $18.5M as race to deploy autonomous vehicles quickens – Oct. 17, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Cognata has raised $18.5 million in a funding round led by Scale Venture Partners, fresh capital that the Israeli autonomous simulation startup will use to meet demand for technology that will help companies speed up the deployment of self-driving vehicles. Cognata founder and CEO Danny Atsmon told TechCrunch the company, which has 28 employees, will use the funds to double its staff and expand commercial operations. Cognata wants to increase its international presence, specifically into the U.S., Germany, China and Japan, he added
- Existing investors Emerge, Maniv Mobility and Airbus Ventures, as well as newcomer Global IoT Technology Ventures, also participated in the round. “All of the companies that are working on autonomous vehicles in the world identify simulation as a key technology to bring autonomous vehicles to market,” Atsmon told TechCrunch
Israeli startup VAYAVISION raises $8 million for its autonomous vehicle perception system – Oct. 16, 2018 (Tech.EU)
- Tel Aviv-based startup VAYAVISION that works on raw data fusion and perception systems for self-driving vehicles has landed an $8 million funding round led by Viola Ventures, Mizmaa Ventures, and OurCrowd with strategic investment from Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and LG Electronics. The company is planning to use the capital injection for marketing efforts and focus on building partnerships across the world
- VAYAVISION specialises in combining the environment data received by the self-driving car from different sources — such as LiDAR, radar, and camera — to create a comprehensive model of what’s going on around the vehicle. The approach is supposedly superior to what used to be done by the car manufacturers before
Paperspace scores $13M investment for AI-fueled application development platform – Oct. 16, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Paperspace wants to help developers build artificial intelligence and machine learning applications with a software/hardware development platform powered by GPUs and other powerful chips. Today, the Winter 2015 Y Combinator grads announced a $13 million Series A. Battery Ventures led the round with participation from SineWave Ventures, Intel Capital and Sorenson Ventures. Existing investor Initialized Capital also participated. Today’s investment brings the total amount to $19 million raised
- Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner with Battery Ventures sees Paperspace as being in the right place at the time. As AI and machine learning take off, developers need a set of tools and GPU-fueled hardware to process it all. “Major silicon, systems and Web-scale computing providers need a cloud-based solution and software ‘glue’ to make deep learning truly consumable by data-driven organizations, and Paperspace is helping to provide that,” Thakker said in a statement
MIT commits $1 billion to make AI part of every graduate’s education – Oct. 15, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced a $1 billion initiative to reshape how the college operates and make artificial intelligence a part of its curriculum for all students. The shakeup is being made, MIT president L. Rafael Reif said, to “prepare students of today for the world of the future” and represents the biggest change to curriculum at the school since the 1950s
- The effort will be spearheaded by a $350 million donation from from Blackstone investment firm CEO Stephen Schwarzman. An additional $300 million has been raised for the $1 billion project
Partnerships:
GHELIA Joins Forces with Cogitai, Inc. the U.S.-Based Reinforcement Learning Specialist – Oct. 18, 2018 (Business Wire)
- GHELIA Inc. and Cogitai, Inc. are pleased to announce a strategic business partnership. Cogitai was co-founded by Professor Peter Stone, Dr. Mark Ring, and Professor Satinder Singh, all experts in autonomous agents and reinforcement learning, and boasts a world-class team of research talent. The two companies plan to align their businesses closely. GHELIA and Cogitai will work to combine their expertise in deep and reinforcement learning to deliver cutting-edged solutions for a variety of business sectors including finance, construction, gaming, and more
- By partnering with Cogitai, GHELIA endeavors to deliver deep and reinforcement learning based algorithms to automate a variety of situations that previously would have required uniquely human skills in judgment and goal fulfillment
US consortium for safe AI development welcomes Baidu as first Chinese member – Oct. 17, 2018 (The Verge)
- An American-led tech consortium dedicated to safeguarding the development of artificial intelligence has welcomed its first Chinese member, internet search company Baidu. The Partnership on AI (PAI) was set up two years ago to generate best practices for AI technology. It’s funded by its members, which include companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, and also partners with government entities like the UN and Human Rights Watch. Membership does not necessitate any legally binding promises, but companies who join PAI must “believe in and endeavor to uphold” eight key tenets
- Lyons acknowledged that different nations will have different approaches to AI depending on “national needs and priorities,” and that it was important to recognize these. “We see potentially diverging perceptions about the development and use of AI as something to embrace and attempt to overcome through our work,” said Lyons, who stressed again that PAI cannot achieve its goals “unless we have insight from the other major AI actor on the global stage (China).”
Research / studies:
Samsung Electronics Opens Another AI Center in Montreal and Expands AI Research Presence in North America – Oct. 19, 2018 (Samsung)
- Samsung Electronics announced that it is establishing another artificial intelligence (AI) center in Montreal, the second biggest city in Canada and home to one of the world’s fastest growing AI communities. Today’s announcement complements earlier news of multiple AI centers launched in North America and continues Samsung’s efforts in AI that include the development of Samsung’s virtual assistant, Bixby. The center is the fourth Samsung AI Center to be established in North America following the centers launched in Silicon Valley, New York and Toronto
- The opening of the AI center in Montreal will allow Samsung to expand its outpost for industry collaboration and talent recruitment in a major AI hub in Canada, dedicated to research and development of core AI technologies that entail machine learning, language, vision and other multi-modal interactions
University of Central Florida’s AI finds early lung cancer with up to 97% sensitivity – Oct. 18, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among men and women worldwide, according to the American Cancer Society. Each year, more people — about 154,000 — die of lung cancer than from colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined, and the lifetime risk of developing lung cancer is as high as 1 in 15
- Successful patient outcomes depend on early detection — of the half of new patients diagnosed after lung cancer has spread, only 4 percent will live for five years. Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could make it easier for clinicians to spot signs of tumor growth more accurately than with eyes alone
More than 1.1M Canadian jobs at risk due to autonomous vehicles: documents – Oct. 15, 2018 (CTV News)
- Internal government documents say more than one million jobs could be lost to the coming boom in automated vehicles, with ripple effects far beyond the likeliest professions. A federal presentation predicts automation could kill some 500,000 transportation jobs — from truck drivers to subway operators to taxi drivers and even courier services
- The Employment and Social Development Canada document suggests over 600,000 more jobs were also at risk, including parking attendants, auto-body repair workers, and even police and emergency workers. The 2017 presentation, obtained by The Canadian Press through Access to Information, notes difficulties in retraining some of these workers, a problem the federal Liberals hope to overcome
Government / policy:
Iran to use artificial intelligence in legislation – Oct. 21, 2018 (Tehran Times)
- Yunes Adiani, an official at the research center of the parliament, has said that Iran will use artificial intelligence in legislation
- “It has been six months that we have started this project. In this project we follow the issues of human intelligence and legislation, artificial intelligence and legislation and artificial intelligence and legislation in the world to see what other countries have used by applying artificial intelligence,” Adiani stated
Orlando Extends Facial Recognition Pilot Program – Oct. 19, 2018 (US News)
- Orlando police officials say they will extend a pilot program for a facial recognition tool developed by a subsidiary of Amazon. The agreement between the city of Orlando and Amazon Web Services was finalized Thursday and extends the facial recognition pilot program another nine months. The first phase of the program went from December 2017 to this past June. Police officials say the parameters for the testing will remain the same
TSA outlines its plans for facial recognition on domestic flights – Oct. 15, 2018 (Engadget)
- The Transportation Security Administration is determined to make facial recognition and other biometrics a regular part of the airport experience, and it now has a roadmap for that expansion. The effort will start by teaming with Customs and Border Protection on biometric security for international travel, followed by putting the technology into use for TSA Precheck travelers to speed up their boarding process. After that, it would both devise an “opt-in” biometric system for ordinary domestic passengers and flesh out a deeper infrastructure
- While this will include technology like fingerprint readers (primarily for trusted passengers), face identification will remain the “primary means” of verifying identities, the TSA said. As such, you can expect facial recognition to play a major role
Man accused of murdering father arrested 19 years later using facial recognition software– Oct. 15, 2018 (South China Morning Post)
- Officers followed a lead from a Shaanxi province special task force who had spotted a man matching the suspect’s description using the software, the Luonan Guchengzhen police department said on its official Weibo account. The 44-year-old man was arrested in Heyang county, three hours away from his hometown
- The man is accused of murdering his father with a rock in 1999 after an argument, police said. He confessed to the crime, telling police he had been defending his mother from his abusive father, according to the statement. The man, who is being held by the Luonan Public Security Bureau, has been in hiding since then, changing his name three times after marrying three different women, local newspaper Huashang Daily reported on Sunday