Extremely busy week in the AI world, particularly because of the 2019 annual CES conference. Lots of companies announced new product developments, partnerships, and investment in their AI strategy.
One of the biggest CES developments came from Xiaomi, who announced a $1.5bn investment in AI and smart devices. The recently IPO’d tech company is looking to expand aggressively, likely driven in part from the Chinese stock market’s recent sell off. Other weekly news can be found below.
Company developments:
VW Steals Apple Executive To Develop Autonomous Cars – Jan. 12, 2019 (CarBuzz)
- The race towards an autonomous future is gearing up, and automakers are jostling to get ahold of the brightest minds in the field to give them a leg up for when autonomous vehicles become a fixture in our day-to-day travel. This has prompted Volkswagen to hire a former Apple executive, Alexander Hitzinger, to assist on its self-driving development team. He will also be working directly with the technical side of commercial vehicles, as well as heading up Volkswagen’s Mobility as a Service initiative, a program dedicated to a future with decreased car ownership and an emphasis on ride-sharing
China’s Xiaomi Places a $1.5 Billion Bet on AI and Smart Devices – Jan. 11, 2019 (Yahoo Finance)
- Xiaomi Corp. will invest at least 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) on artificial intelligence and smart devices over the next five years, as the smartphone maker navigates an industry downturn and economic uncertainty stemming from U.S.-Chinese tensions
- The investment is part of the Beijing-based company’s strategy of wringing more revenue from high-value services and the Internet of Things, billionaire co-founder Lei Jun said in a statement. The company is also focusing on pushing upmarket while expanding into Europe, Lei told Bloomberg Television Thursday. Xiaomi’s taking action against the backdrop of a brewing trade war that’s stoking global economic uncertainty, he added
World’s most valuable AI startup SenseTime unveils self-driving center in Japan – Jan. 10, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- The initiative follows its agreement with Japanese auto giant Honda in 2017 to jointly work on autonomous driving technology. SenseTime, which is backed by Alibaba and was last valued at more than $4.5 billion, is best known for object recognition technologies that have been deployed in China widely across retail, healthcare and public security. Bloomberg reported this week that the AI upstart is raising $2 billion in fresh funding
- Four-year-old SenseTime isn’t the only Chinese AI company finding opportunities in Japan. China’s biggest search engine provider, Baidu, is also bringing autonomous vehicles to its neighboring country, a move made possible through a partnership with SoftBank’s smart bus project SB Drive and Chinese automaker King Long
BasisAI, a Singapore startup from Bay Area returnees, comes out of stealth with impressive creds – Jan. 9, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Started by twin brothers Linus and Silvanus Lee and Liu Feng-Yuan — all Singapore nationals — the startup is, as the name suggests, focused on AI… but the exact scope of its business is not yet clear. In a phone interview with TechCrunch, the founders explained their goal is to work with enterprises to help scale data projects and give artificial intelligence and machine learning increased accountability
- The Lee brothers are both Singaporeans returning home from Silicon Valley, where they worked with major tech firms. Silvanus spent seven years in the Bay Area with Dropbox and then Uber, where he was a director of data science, and Linus spent six years at Twitter in California before relocating to Singapore in 2016 to lead the social media firm’s data science team in Asia Pacific
Baidu announces Apollo Enterprise, its new platform for mass-produced autonomous vehicles – Jan. 8, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Baidu made several big announcements about Apollo, its open-source autonomous vehicle technology platform, today at CES. The first is the launch of Apollo Enterprise for vehicles that will be put into mass production. The company claims that Apollo is already used by 130 partners around the world. One of its newest partners, Chinese electric vehicle startup WM Motors, plans to deploy level 3 autonomous vehicles by 2021
- Apollo Enterprise’s main product lines will include solutions for highway autonomous driving; autonomous valet parking; fully autonomous mini-buses; an intelligent map data service platform; and DuerOS (Baidu’s voice assistant) for cars
Google Home gets real-time interpretations for 27 languages – Jan. 8, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Real-time interpretation with Google Assistant is the latest conversational AI milestone from Google, following the release of Duplex and Call Screen for Pixel phones in late 2018. But just like the first response to Duplex, you should taper your expectations
- Initial demos by VentureBeat found Interpreter Mode to be quick in its response, but each exchange could last no more than 15 seconds, a limitation that makes Interpreter Mode helpful but not yet capable of handling the longer exchanges that often occur in a typical conversation. That length of time does seem helpful for interpretations in environments like hotel check-in or concierge desks
TuSimple, Leading Fully-autonomous Truck Company, Announces Business Expansion with New Self-driving Routes, Customer Growth and Partners – Jan. 7, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- TuSimple, a global self-driving truck company, today announced that in response to growing commercial demand from 12 contracted customers, including Fortune 100 and large international companies, the company currently has 11 trucks in the U.S. and will have 40 trucks in fully-autonomous operation by June, making TuSimple the largest self-driving truck solutions company worldwide
- The company now makes three to five fully-autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona. An additional route from Arizona to Texas will come online in early 2019. TuSimple is the only self-driving truck company running daily fully-autonomous commercial routes from depot-to-depot, which requires both highway and local street driving
Flir’s Automotive Development Kit taps thermal imaging to improve driverless cars – Jan. 7, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Lidar — sensors that measure the distance to objects by illuminating them with light and measuring the reflected pulses — are the cornerstone of autonomous car systems from Waymo, Uber, and dozens of others. But they’re susceptible to interference from inclement weather, darkness, fog, smoke, haze, and sun glare, which is why Wilsonville, Oregon-based Flir is advancing an alternative: thermal vision
- At the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, Flir announced its next-generation thermal vision Automotive Development Kit (ADK) for the development of self-driving cars. The IP67-rated, USB-and-ethernet-touting hardware pairs a wide-angle lens with the firm’s in-house Boson camera core, which captures 640 x 512-resolution data from the far infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thanks to proprietary machine learning algorithms, the ADK is able to detect objects up to 200 meters away, Flir says
Nvidia launches Drive AutoPilot with Xavier AI processors for commercial use – Jan. 7, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Nvidia announced that its Drive AutoPilot is the first automated driving system that meets standards for Level 2-plus autonomous cars. That means that the car can automatically handle steering, acceleration, and deceleration in the driver’s environment, as well as features like cruise control and lane centering. Nvidia introduced the system at CES 2019, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. This suggests we’re not that far away from self-driving cars hitting the market — and eventually the roads
China’s Baidu says its answer to Alexa is now on 200M devices – Jan. 7, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- A Chinese voice assistant has been rapidly gaining ground in recent months. DuerOS, Baidu’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa, reached over 200 million devices, China’s top search engine announced on its Weibo official account last Friday
- To put that number into context, more than 100 million devices pre-installed with Alexa have been sold, Amazon recently said. Google just announced it expected Assitant to be on 1 billion devices by the end of this month
M&A:
To automate bigger stores than Amazon, Standard Cognition buys Explorer.ai – Jan. 7, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- The $50 million-funded autonomous checkout startup is racing to equip bigger shops with scanless payment technology that lets customers walk out the door without ever stopping at a cashier. While Amazon Go opens its own 2,000 square foot boutiques, Standard Cognition is working on outfitting 20,000 square foot and larger drug stores and grocers. That led Standard Cognition to make its first acquisition, Explorer.ai
- Standard Cognition is only just over a year old, but with the backing of Y Combinator, Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, and a fast-moving team of seven co-founders, it believes it can outmaneuver Amazon. That means doing whatever it can to leap forward. Standard Cognition already had in-house mapping technology, but Explorer.ai’s team and tech could accelerate its quest to bring even 100,000 sq ft big box supercenters into the automated checkout age
Fundraising / investment:
CrowdAnalytix raises $40 million for crowdsourced AI algorithms – Jan. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Sunnyvale, California-based CrowdAnalytix, which describes itself as a “library” of data-extracting bots built through competition, is the latest to throw its hat in the ring. The six-year-old startup today announced that it has raised $40 million in a strategic investment from Macnica, a subsidiary of Tokyo electronics firm Macnica Fuji Electronics Holdings. The investment will be used to buy out shares from existing shareholders as well as infuse capital into CrowdAnalytix
- CrowdAnalytix CEO Divyabh Mishra said the capital will be used to expand the company’s reach into the broader Japanese market and new verticals where Macnica has a strong presence, like manufacturing and health care
Badi gets $30M for AI-aided room rentals – Jan. 10, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- The 2015-founded startup has now raised circa $45 million in total, while its platform has passed 12 million rental requests. Badi also tells us it passed one million registered users last November, up from around 700,000 in February 2018
- Badi CEO and founder Carlos Pierre points to estimates that by 2050 the total population living in cities will increase from 54 percent to 66 percent. “There will likely be a shortage of homes for people looking to live in cities and as a result, this will lead to an increase in smaller living units or rooms. This is where Badi comes in,” he suggests in a statement
Bowery Valuation raises $12 million more to automate the real estate appraisal process – Jan. 8, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Bowery Valuation, a New York-based company that we told you about last year, has raised $12 million in Series A funding for its tech-enabled real estate appraisal platform. The 3.5-year-old company raised the capital from Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, Navitas Capital, Fika Ventures and Builders
- Bowery caught our attention initially because, like a lot of real estate technology companies, it’s tackling some clunky processes that you might imagine would have been solved long ago. For example, its mobile app enables appraisers to tick off items, rather than write everything down. It automatically pulls in public record data so that appraisers needn’t surf the web to find what they need. It enables passive databasing, meaning that rental and sales comps that are often lost today can be found via a map-based search
Partnerships:
Effect.AI announces partnership with Decentralized Artificial Intelligence Alliance (DAIA) – Jan. 12, 2019 (Neon News)
- Effect.AI, a decentralized artificial intelligence platform, has announced a partnership with the Decentralized Artificial Intelligence Alliance (DAIA). The team states that DAIA consists of “an alliance of serious participants in the AI & blockchain related ecosystems, coming together to collectively solve common challenges and create an amazing future.” The alliance attempts to connect AI blockchain projects “in a democratic and decentralized way.”
- The core focus of DAIA is to foster cooperation on software and hardware projects, resulting in practical tools that can benefit members of the AI community in general. Additionally, the organization will define industry standards, organize events, and provide support on matters of “common importance” that affect its community
LG Elec teams up with Landing AI to strengthen AI power in electronics – Jan. 9, 2019 (Pulse)
- South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc. teamed up with Silicon Valley tech startup Landing AI on applications of artificial intelligence in manufacturing and consumer products
- “AI is particularly transformative in manufacturing contexts and this partnership demonstrates our ambition not only in building revolutionary AI-powered products but also in advancing our vision for an AI-powered future,” said Ng who had co-founded Google Brain, deep learning AI research team at Google Inc. He also had led the development of Baidu`s voice assistant software DuerOS as the Chinese firm’s CTO
China’s national AI champion Baidu to test driverless delivery vans in US heartland with Udelv for Walmart – Jan. 9, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- Baidu, operator of China’s largest search engine, has entered a partnership deal with California-based autonomous delivery start-up Udelv that will see self-driving vans powered by its software offer delivery services to American retailers such as Walmart from February
- The delivery services will operate alongside robo-taxis from Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, putting China’s champion up against one of its biggest autonomous driving rivals in the US market. Nasdaq-listed Baidu announced the tie-up with Udelv at a launch event for its latest open self-driving platform – Apollo 3.5 – on the sidelines of the 2019 CES tech fair in Las Vegas on Tuesday
CES 2019: Nvidia partners with Mercedes on artificial intelligence – Jan. 9, 2019 (ZDNet)
- Mercedes and Nvidia are aiming to develop a single system with self-driving capabilities and “smart cockpit” functions, rather than the current system involving multiple small processors known as electronic control units (ECUs), where each ECU controls separate parts of the car such as the windows, door locks, power steering, and braking
- Nvidia Drive will form the centre of the all-vehicle architecture, the companies said, “adding high-performance, energy efficient compute to handle AI software for advanced mobility technologies”
Intel and Facebook Teaming Up to Create New A.I. Chip – Jan. 8, 2019 (Fortune)
- The announcement came Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The chip will help with “inference,” or the process of putting A.I. to work. It could perform tasks such as automatically tagging friends in Facebook photos
- Intel has dominated the market for A.I. inference chips, but it is starting to face stiff competition. The semiconductor and software maker Nvidia recently announced it would bring a competing chip to market, and Amazon has developed a similar chip that it will put to use in its cloud services, depriving Intel of a major customer
Research / studies:
Nefarious AI creates images of delicious food that doesn’t exist – Jan. 11, 2019 (The Next Web)
- The Tel-Aviv team, consisting of researchers Ori Bar El, Ori Licht, and Netanel Yosephian created their AI using a modified version of a generative adversarial network (GAN) called StackGAN V2 and 52K image/recipe combinations from the gigantic recipe1M dataset
- A team of researchers from Tel-Aviv University developed a neural network capable of reading a recipe and generating an image of what the finished, cooked product would look like. As if DeepFakes weren’t bad enough, now we can’t be sure the delicious food we see online is real
AI deployed to prevent blindness in China – Jan. 10, 2019 (Xinhua.net)
- A Chinese hospital on Thursday launched free consultations featuring artificial-intelligence (AI) cameras to detect ocular fundus diseases, which are a major cause of blindness
- The instrument is capable of diagnosing three types of fundus disorders — diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and macular degeneration. It scans the eyes and generates a report in 10 seconds, all done without the need for an ophthalmologist to be present. With an accuracy rate of 94 percent, it has previously been piloted in hospitals in nine Chinese provinces, according to Baidu
Physics student develops machine-learning model for energy and environmental applications – Jan. 10, 2019 (Phys.org)
- A West Virginia University physics student has created a new machine-learning model that has the potential to make searching for energy and environmental materials more efficient
- “Machine learning recently came into the spotlight, and we wanted to do something linking machine learning with gold nanoparticles as catalysts. When I was thinking about a research area, I found that predicting adsorption energies of this particle property is very hard, and the knowledge on adsorption energies is important for catalytic applications in energy, environmental and even biomedical applications,” Panapitiya said. “I thought if I could use machine learning to predict these adsorption energies without much difficulty, that would enable researchers to easily find nanoparticles with desired properties for a given application.”
Scientists Develop Artificial Bug Eyes for Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles – Jan. 9, 2019 (R&D)
- Single lens eyes, like those in humans and many other animals, can create sharp images, but the compound eyes of insects and crustaceans have an edge when it comes to peripheral vision, light sensitivity and motion detection. That’s why scientists are developing artificial compound eyes to give sight to autonomous vehicles and robots, among other applications. Now, a report in ACS Nano describes the preparation of bioinspired artificial compound eyes using a simple low-cost approach
Mayo Clinic sees big success with AI detecting weak heart pumps via ECGs, could work with Apple Watch in the future – Jan. 9, 2019 (9to5Mac)
- In an interview with CNBC today, the Mayo Clinic’s chair of cardiovascular medicine, Dr. Paul Friedman shared that they have seen promising results using AI to detect an often symptom-less heart defect. It’s called asymptomatic left ventricular dysfunction, which means a weak heart pump. In Mayo Clinic’s studies, they are using AI to read ECGs and finding impressive results identifying weak heart pumps and even predicting individuals who will be at risk in the future
Government / policy:
The Chinese technology helping New York police keep a closer eye on the United States’ biggest city – Jan. 12, 2019 (NZ Herald)
- The surveillance tools are identical to those used in Sky Net in China, the largest video surveillance system on Earth, Chinese government research institutes and a company involved in the project said
- At a time when China and the United States are locked in a rivalry on several fronts including trade and technology, Hikvision – which is the world’s largest surveillance technology company and based in Hangzhou in eastern China – has supplied the equipment and software used by an American force that polices a population of about 8.6 million people
China’s top AI scientist drives development of ethical guidelines – Jan. 10, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- Chen Xiaoping – inventor of Jia Jia, the realistic humanoid “Robot Goddess”, and KeJia, an intelligent home service robot – is leading the committee, which held its first conference last year and is due to meet again in May
- Chen, professor and director of the Robotics Laboratory at the University of Science and Technology of China, said AI in China had developed to a point where ethical guidelines were now necessary to address potential risks in large-scale applications