Highlights this week are dominated by new developments in the autonomous vehicle world. Baidu continues to add new partners with the separate additions of Ford and Volvo this week. Waymo also had a big win this week becoming the first company to receive a permit from the California DMV that allows for fully autonomous vehicle testing without a safety driver.
Meanwhile, Uber must be feeling the pressure of falling behind as they’re pushing to resume their autonomous vehicle testing program. It’s been eight months since their vehicle killed a pedestrian in Arizona. To an outsider it may not seem long, but in the world of AI it’s quite significant.
Company developments:
Uber wants to resume self-driving car tests on public roads – Nov. 2, 2018 (Chicago Sun-Times)
- Nearly eight months after one of its autonomous test vehicles hit and killed an Arizona pedestrian, Uber wants to resume testing on public roads. The company has filed an application with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to test in Pittsburgh, and it has issued a lengthy safety report pledging to put two human backup drivers in each vehicle and take a raft of other precautions to make the vehicles safe
Currant Smart Outlet uses AI to cut down on energy consumption – Nov. 1, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Hasty Granbery, former director of software engineering at PayPal, founded Currant in 2015, a Palo Alto startup devoted to creating smart home devices that reduce energy consumption. It today debuted its first AI-powered product — the Currant Smart Outlet — and announced a $7 million seed funding round led by Uncork Capital and K9 Ventures, with participation from UP2398, Precursor Ventures, and other undisclosed investors
- The Smart Outlet is certainly a looker. Bould Design — the team behind the Nest thermostat — spearheaded the design, which features a reflective surface, two independently controlled outlets, and a plate that can switch directions to keep cords out of the way. It has the highest safety ratings of any smart outlet, according to Currant, and each unit is calibrated using high-precision test equipment
Mary Barra Says G.M. Is ‘on Track’ to Roll Out Autonomous Vehicles Next Year – Nov. 1, 2018 (NY Times)
- Mary T. Barra, the chief executive of General Motors, said the company is “on track” to roll out a ride-sharing service in 2019 that would rely on autonomous vehicles, a development that would advance the already-heated race to bring a self-driving car to market
- “We’re on track, with our rate of learning, to be able to do that next year,” Ms. Barra said at DealBook’s Playing for the Long Term conference. She added that the company had a strategy to show how its vehicles are safer than human drivers. The vehicles can currently run safely at speeds of up to about 30 miles per hour, and the service will be limited to a small geographical area, Ms. Barra said
China’s commercial aircraft developer to integrate AI into planes – Oct. 30, 2018 (XinhuaNet)
- The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) has established an innovation center for artificial intelligence (AI), the company said Tuesday. The AI innovation center aims to facilitate the in-depth application of AI technologies in the development of China’s commercial aircraft and to strengthen the company’s innovation capacity, said COMAC
Google launches AdaNet for combining algorithms with AutoML – Oct. 30, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Google today introduced AdaNet, an open source tool for combining machine learning algorithms to achieve better predictive insights. AdaNet is available today on the Tensor GitHub repository
- “AdaNet builds on our recent reinforcement learning and evolutionary-based AutoML efforts to be fast and flexible while providing learning guarantees,” Google AI software engineer Charles Weill said in a blog post. “Importantly, AdaNet provides a general framework for not only learning a neural network architecture, but also for learning to ensemble to obtain even better models.”
M&A:
Doc.ai acquires Crestle.ai to help physicians join the AI revolution – Nov. 2, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Doc.ai, a company that wants to use cryptocurrency to pay people for sharing their medical data with data scientists making predictive AI models, has acquired Crestle.ai, a platform for quick AI deployment. Doc.ai plans to pair Crestle with training for people in health care so that more physicians and medical practitioners can make predictive AI based on submitted data
- Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Doc.ai raised $10 million in the fall of 2017 through a token sale supported in part by Ethereum cofounder Anthony Di Iorio and has since launched an app and digital wallet for users to receive Ethereum-based tokens. Doc.ai is currently awaiting information on compliance from federal regulators and hopes to begin giving token rewards to users, COO Sam De Brouwer told
Fundraising / investment:
AppZen nabs $35M for AI that audits expenses in real time for non-compliance and fraud – Oct. 30, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- The march to add more artificial intelligence-powered tools into the enterprise stack continues apace, and today another startup has raised a growth round to position itself as one of the leaders in is particular niche. AppZen, which has developed an AI platform that analyses employees’ expenses to sniff out when someone is either violating company policy, or actively committing expense fraud, has raised $35 million in a Series B round of funding
- Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation also from previous investors Redpoint Ventures and Resolute Ventures — the funding was made at a $140 million pre-money valuation, according to PitchBook, putting the valuation at around $175 million for the six year-old startup. AppZen has raised just over $52 million to date
Conversica, which uses AI to replicate sales agents, raises $31M, now valued around $300M – Oct. 30, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- This week, one of the bigger companies working in this area, Conversica, is announcing a growth round of $31 million — to help it continue its own conversation with customers, so to speak. It will be using the funding to expand to new markets and add more features to its platform
- The Series C round is being led by existing investor Providence Strategic Growth Capital Partners L.L.C. (an affiliate of Providence Equity Partners), which also led a $34 million round in the company two years ago. Existing investors Toba Capital and Kennet Partners and new investors CIBC and Savano Capital also participated
Sentieo raises $19M to be the AI-powered Bloomberg Terminal – Oct. 30, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- Sentieo is an investment research software suite that uses AI to scan financial documents, analyze alternative data sets and create visualizations. The fintech SAAS startup now has 700 customers, including top hedge funds plus mutual funds, Fortune 500s and investment banks that pay around $500 to $1,000 per month per license. That’s a lot cheaper than a $21,000 yearly Bloomberg Terminal subscription. [Correction: Sentieo charges $500 to $1000 per month, not per year.]
- Now Sentieo is ready to crank up its name recognition with a sales and marketing blitz fueled by a new $19 million Series A round led by Centana, a $250 million growth equity firm focused on fintech SAAS. Now with $30 million in total funding, the 160-person startup plans to “Educate [traders] that ‘hey, this product is built by people who sat in your seats,’” says CEO Alap Shah
Google seeks to grant $25 million to AI for ‘good’ projects – Oct. 29, 2018 (Reuters)
- Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google announced on Monday that it would grant about $25 million globally next year to humanitarian and environmental projects seeking to use artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up and grow their efforts
- At a media event on Monday, Google showcased existing projects similar to those it wants to inspire. In one, Google’s computers recently learned to detect the singing of humpback whales with 90 percent precision from 170,000 hours of underwater audio recordings gathered by the U.S. government. The audio previously required manual analysis, meaning “this is the first time this dataset has been looked at in a comprehensive way,” said Ann Allen, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ecologist
Data startup H1 raises $6 million to develop AI tools for searching disease research – Oct. 29, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- H1’s platform, at its core, is driven by machine learning. As Katz explained, it’s able to find data from any public clinical and scholarly database in the world, drawing on curated data from “hundreds of thousands” of website profiles and conference presentations. The numbers speak for themselves: H1’s tools search across more than 250,000 academic researchers, 250,000 clinical trials, 50 million journal articles, and 750,000 clinicians and physicians
- Ada provides institution and expert profiles, mapping names and leads to records of work and interest. Users can drill down by therapeutic area, clinical trial, drug, or disease, and find every health care professional and life science researcher in the U.S
Partnerships:
Intel and Tencent debut AI-powered camera systems for retail – Nov. 1, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Tencent and Intel are teaming up to launch a pair of artificially intelligent (AI) products for retail, the two announced today during Tencent’s Global Partner conference in China. Both products were developed by Tencent’s YouTu Lab — its computer vision research division — and have Intel’s Movidius Myriad chips inside
- The first is DeepGaze, an AI-powered camera for brick-and-mortar stores that keeps tabs on shoppers’ movements. It can track the number of customers near a given shelf display at various times throughout the day and perform hybrid object detection — some on-device and the rest in Tencent’s Intel Xeon Scalable processor-based cloud
IBM, Harvard develop tool to tackle black box problem in AI translation – Nov. 1, 2018 (VentureBeat)
- Researchers at IBM and Harvard University have developed a new debugging tool to address this issue. Presented at the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology in Berlin last week, the tool lets creators of deep learning applications visualize the decision-making an AI makes when translating a sequence of words from one language to another
- Called Seq2Seq-Vis, the tool is one of the several efforts that aim to interpret decisions made by deep neural networks. Widely known as the “black box problem,” the opacity of neural networks has become one of the serious challenges of the AI industry, especially as deep learning finds its way into more critical domains
Volvo in Pact With Baidu to Develop Autonomous Cars for China – Nov. 1, 2018 (Bloomberg)
- Volvo Cars and Baidu Inc. are joining forces to develop robotaxis in China, set to become the world’s top market for driverless vehicles. Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, is aiming to match Alphabet Inc.’s push into the technology through Waymo and has signed a number of deals for self-driving cars with collaborators. In July, Baidu unveiled Apollo 3.0, the latest iteration of its open-source platform that counts more than 100 partners from chipmakers to car manufacturers
- The partners will aim to manufacture Level 4 robotaxi’s in China after 2020, although commercial agreements haven’t yet been signed. Level 4 means the vehicles will be fully autonomous within a mapped-out area. Volvo, owned by China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co Ltd., already aims to offer driverless models by 2021 using software developed by Zenuity, a joint venture with Sweden’s Veoneer AB. It’s also working with Uber Technologies Inc. to develop autonomous systems for XC90 sport utility vehicles
Ford and Baidu team up to test self-driving vehicles in China – Oct. 31, 2018 (CNBC)
- Ford and Baidu will collaborate on the development and testing of driverless vehicles for two years. Ford’s autonomous vehicles have already been fitted with Baidu’s autonomous driving system Apollo. On-road testing is slated to start by the end of this year
- The initiative will see the two companies collaborate on the development and testing of driverless vehicles that meet the Level 4 standard set by U.S. industry organization SAE International. This means that autonomous vehicles developed by the two will not require intervention from a human driver
Mayo Clinic, Eko to develop machine-learning based algorithm to detect heart diseases – Oct. 29, 2018 (AI in Healthcare)
- The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and healthcare device company Eko plan to develop technology that uses machine-learning to help physicians better detect easily-missed heart diseases in patients
- Through the collaboration, the companies hope to create and commercialize a machine-learning based algorithm, which along with a smart digital stethoscope, will be used to screen patients for a weak heart pump. The condition is typically measured by imaging techniques, like an echocardiography, according to a companies
Research / studies:
Risk Assessment Tools Biased Against Hispanics: Study – Nov. 1, 2018 (The Crime Report)
- One of the popular software applications widely used by correctional institutions to predict an inmate’s likelihood of re-offending tends to exaggerate the risks for Hispanics, according to a forthcoming research study in the American Criminal Law Review
- The COMPAS algorithms produce outcomes as decile scores of 1-10 with higher deciles representing greater predicted risk. Hamilton—using multiple definitions of algorithmic unfairness—found that COMPAS was not well-calibrated for Hispanics
With machine learning, researchers get new clues in the hunt for the source of mysterious viruses – Nov. 1, 2018 (STAT)
- On Thursday, researchers unveiled a new system, based on machine learning models, that identifies patterns in the genomes of viruses to offer a hypothesis about their hosts and vectors
- The system, which was described in a paper published in Science, remains fairly crude for now; it can tell you that a virus likely resides in bats, for example, but not which species. And it’s not entirely accurate: For known viruses, it was able to identify the general type of vector 90.8 percent of the time and host reservoir type 71.9 percent of the time. But its designers say they hope it can steer disease detectives in the right direction as they race to respond to enigmatic viruses
Government / policy:
Germany needs to commit billions to artificial intelligence: SPD – Nov. 2, 2018 (Reuters)
- Germany must commit billions of euros to back a planned strategy to develop artificial intelligence or risk falling further behind the United States and China, a senior government lawmaker said on Friday
- Klingbeil, whose party is Merkel’s junior partner in government, faulted Germany for taking its eye off the ball and getting caught up in the “hysteria” around a three-year-old immigration crisis while other countries were investing in AI research
U.S. Department of Education Funds WPI to Help Address Anticipated Shortage in Artificial Intelligence Professionals – Nov. 1, 2018 (WPI)
- In an effort to build the nation’s strength in artificial intelligence research and teaching, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) $895,500 through its Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) program. With the funds, WPI will provide six needs-based fellowships to U.S. citizens pursuing a PhD in fields deemed to be “areas of national need,” specifically artificial intelligence in such areas as deep learning, natural language processing, machine learning, healthcare analytics, data science, and learning sciences. To be eligible, candidates must plan to pursue a career in teaching or research
Develop and control: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future – Oct. 31, 2018 (South China Morning Post)
- Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday that China must develop, control and use artificial intelligence (AI) to secure the country’s future in the next technological and industrial revolution
- Xi made the comments at a Politburo “group study” session about AI, after the Communist Party’s 25-member policymaking body met to decide on a new game plan to handle an expected worsening in the economy from the trade war with the United States, according to the official Xinhua news agency
Waymo wins industry’s first approval to test driverless cars on public roads in California – Oct. 30, 2018 (CNBC)
- The California Department of Motor Vehicles has granted Waymo the state’s first permit to begin testing driverless vehicles on public streets and highways. Initially, the autonomous vehicles will be allowed to operate in parts of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto in northern California
- Waymo plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service in the metro Phoenix area before the end of the year
New York school district switches on controversial $4m facial recognition technology to identify potential shooters – Oct. 30, 2018 (Daily Mail)
- An Upstate New York school is using facial recognition technology to help it spot possible school shooters or escaped felons on campus. Lockport City School District has installed a surveillance system in a high school, middle school and several elementary schools that scans students’ faces to check for matches in its security database
- The district is using a system developed by SN Technologies Corp., the parent company of Aegis, according to Motherboard. Aegis has developed proprietary software that can be used to spot guns that might appear in video footage
Events:
Sogou Ranks First in MegaFace Million-Scale Face Recognition Challenge – Nov. 3, 2018 (Business Insider)
- MegaFace’s newest results show that Sogou’s face recognition algorithm achieved an accuracy rate of 99.939% when deployed on the MegaFace million-scale dataset and tested against one million distractors
- Xuefeng Su, Director of AI Research at Sogou, said, “Face recognition is a highly competitive field in AI. Our stellar performance in the MegaFace Challenge further demonstrates our leading R&D capabilities in computing algorithms and our ability to effectively allocate resources. To further advance our AI strategy, which centers on natural human-machine interaction and knowledge computing, we will accelerate and diversify the commercial applications of our face recognition technology, such as to our image search function as well as to other services.”
California: JP Morgan Merges AI Frontiers Conference as a Diamond Sponsor – Nov. 1, 2018 (Market Research Newswire)
- At the impending AI Frontiers Conference in San Jose, California, JP Morgan just became a Diamond Sponsor. The annual forum is a premier industrial AI Conference that gathers the most dominant voices of AI together. Former speakers comprise Jeff Dean, Head of Google AI, and Andrew Ng, the chief AI expert
- This year’s orators include Ilya Sutskever, Co-Founder & Director of OpenAI and an innovator in AI field; Quoc Le, the mastermind behind Google’s AutoML; Matt Feiszli, head of video research of Facebook, among many top names. JP Morgan is contributing in the Conference’s “AI in Finance” panel, where Chief Investment Officer Yaz Romahi will share the challenge and opportunities of applying AI in finance, particularly in asset management and risk prediction