What’s happened in AI: January 14th-20th

By | January 22, 2019

The AI research capabilities of Microsoft continue to expand. This week they opened two separate AI labs in China.

The first will be located in Nanchang city and will focus on VR in addition to AI applications in established manufacturing companies. The second will be located in Shanghai and will focus on IoT in addition to AI. It’s clear Microsoft has gained favor with the Chinese government as these are two major developments with regards to their China strategy.

Company developments:

Microsoft opens AI and VR incubator in China – Jan. 17, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Despite its struggles in some countries, virtual reality has steadily grown in popularity throughout China over the last few years, so Microsoft — better known for its augmented reality headset HoloLens than its VR initiatives — is getting in on the action. As reported by China’s Xinhua news agency, the company today launched the Nanchang City AI+VR Innovation Center, a cloud and mobile technology incubator geared towards startups and established manufacturing companies
  • Though the center’s name suggests that Microsoft will focus equally on artificial intelligence and virtual reality initiatives, the incubator was apparently designed to cater to the VR industry in the Jiangxi province, which created a first-of-kind industrial base within China for VR technologies. The local government expects that Microsoft’s incubator will “lure dozens of AI, VR and other tech companies” into Nanchang City’s Honggutan New District, and expects it to be used to train and support local companies

Microsoft China Sets Up World’s Largest AI and IoT Lab in Shanghai – Jan. 16, 2019 (PanDaily)

  • Microsoft’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT lab in the world has settled in Zhangjiang, Shanghai. On the morning of Jan. 16,the district government of Pudong New Area and Microsoft (China) signed a strategic cooperation Memorandum of Understanding. During the same ceremony, Microsoft (China)’s AI and IoT Lab also entered a partnership with Zhang Jiang Group
  • The lab is a global R&D organization dedicated to the R&D and industrialization of AI and IoT solutions, as well as applications to assist IoT companies in developing their own products and solutions

Hoobox launches first wheelchair controlled by facial expressions – Jan. 15, 2019 (Dezeen)

  • Brazilian start-up Hoobox Robotics has collaborated with Intel to produce an adapter kit that allows almost any electric wheelchair to be controlled by the user’s facial expressions
  • The Wheelie 7 kit equips a wheelchair with artificial intelligence to detect the user’s expressions and process the data in real-time to direct the movement of the chair

China’s Waymo rival quietly launched an Uber-style app for driverless cars, making it one of the first to do so – Jan. 14, 2019 (CNBC)

  • Pony.ai, one of China’s most valuable driverless car start-ups, has launched an app that allows users to hail an autonomous taxi. The company is currently testing the service with a limited number of users in Nansha, part of Guangzhou in southern China
  • James Peng, CEO of Pony.ai, said the company has long-term ambitions to scale the service to more users

Self-driving car startup Zoox gets a new CEO – Jan. 14, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Self-driving car startup Zoox has selected its new CEO following the unexpected firing of co-founder and former CEO Tim Kentley-Klay in August. According to Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson, he and the board of directors believed “that to take the company through the next stage and to scale the company, we thought finding someone with executive and operational experience would be helpful to the company,” he told TechCrunch
  • “I’m thrilled to join Zoox and challenge the status quo with an autonomous mobility system built from the ground up,” Evans said in a press release. “Mobility is approaching a major inflection point, and Zoox has set itself apart from entrenched players as the only company creating a solution purpose-built to meet the needs of a fully autonomous future. I look forward to helping the company’s exceptionally talented team continue to grow as we unlock more technical and commercial milestones.”

Fundraising / investment:

Facebook backs Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence with $7.5 million – Jan. 20, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Facebook will donate $7.5 million for the creation of The Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, a research center being made to explore topics such as transparency and accountability in medical treatment and human rights in human-AI interaction
  • The announcement was made today during a speech by COO Sheryl Sandberg at the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich, Germany and is Facebook’s first investment in an independent center to study ethics in AI, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email

Zipwhip raises $51.5M for businesses to text customers from any kind of phone line – Jan. 18, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • A surge of audio services using AI are giving voice a boost in customer service, but when it comes to communications in the age of mobile, messaging continues to be a critical platform. Now, a startup called Zipwhip, which provides a platform for businesses to interact with customers by text messages from any business line — landline, VoIP, or toll-free — is announcing funding of $51.5 million to capitalise on that push to bring more text-based messaging into customer service
  • This round, a Series D, is being led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from previous investors OpenView, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) and Voyager Capital, and it brings the total raised by the startup to $92.5 million. John Lauer, co-founder and CEO of the Seattle-based company, said in an interview that it’s not disclosing valuation with this round but the figure is “absolutely higher than before.”

This AI learns from past matches to predict tennis shot placement – Jan. 17, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • You might have heard about AI that teaches four-legged robots to walk and autonomous systems that generate photorealistic images of butterflies, but what about models that forecast the shot location of tennis balls? In a newly published preprint paper on Arxiv.org (“Memory Augmented Deep Generative models for Forecasting the Next Shot Location in Tennis“), researchers from Queensland University of Technology describe an AI system that’s not only capable of anticipating a tennis opponent’s actions, but doing so with “player-level” behavioral patterns
  • The researchers used those biological insights to design what they dubbed Memory-augmented Semi Supervised Generative Adversarial Network (MSS-GAN), based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) — a two-part neural network consisting of generators that produce samples and discriminators that attempt to distinguish between the generated samples and real-world samples — whose memory networks loosely mimic those in the brain

Former Facebook engineer picks up $15M for AI platform Spell – Jan. 17, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Spell is a collaborative platform that lets anyone run machine learning experiments. The company connects clients with the best, newest hardware hosted by Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure and gives them the software interface they need to run, collaborate and build with AI
  • “We spent decades getting to a laptop powerful enough to develop a mobile app or a website, but we’re struggling with things we develop in AI that we haven’t struggled with since the 70s,” said Piantino. “Before PCs existed, the computers filled the whole room at a university or NASA and people used terminals to log into a single main frame. It’s why Unix was invented, and that’s kind of what AI needs right now.”

Fractal Analytics raises $200 million to boost enterprise efficiency with AI – Jan. 16, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Fractal Analytics, an analytics service provider, today revealed that it has received a $200 million investment from funds advised by Apax Partners. As the Mumbai and New Jersey company explained to VentureBeat, the investment is a two-parter, consisting of a primary infusion and a secondary acquisition of equity interests from a few existing investors, including the Malaysian government investment fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad, TA Associates, and others. It’ll give Apax a “significant” minority stake in Fractal
  • The financing rockets the startup toward the top of the list of the world’s most well-funded artificial intelligence (AI) providers, with $325 million raised to date, building on a $100 million private equity round in May 2016 and a $25 million venture round in June 2013. And it puts Fractal in a position of strength as it looks to make strategic mergers and acquisitions and expand its workforce of 1,200 employees across 16 offices

Clusterone raises $2 million for its DevOps for AI platform – Jan. 15, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Clusterone today announced the close of a $2 million funding round to help data scientists and businesses automate and optimize infrastructure management necessary to deploy AI systems and carry out machine learning workflows
  • Using the latest software and up-to-date containers and intelligent tracking of resource utilization and things like spot instances can help businesses significantly reduce their cloud computing costs, CEO and cofounder Mohsen Hejrati told VentureBeat in a phone interview

Partnerships:

IBM and Vodafone form cloud, 5G and AI business venture and ink $550M service deal – Jan. 17, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • IBM is announcing a new venture with mobile carrier Vodafone, in a deal that will comes in two parts. First, IBM will supply Vodafone’s B2B unit Vodafone Business with managed services in the areas of cloud and hosting. And second, the two will together work on building and delivering solutions in areas like AI, cloud, 5G, IoT and software defined networking to enterprise customers
  • The latter part of the deal appears to be a classic JV that will see both sides bringing something to the table — employees from both companies will be moving into a separate office together very soon that will essentially be “neutral” territory. The former part, meanwhile, will see Vodafone paying IBM some $550 million in an eight-year agreement

Facebook and Stanford researchers design a chatbot that learns from its mistakes – Jan. 17, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • In a paper published this week on the preprint paper Arxiv.org (“Learning from Dialogue after Deployment: Feed Yourself, Chatbot!“), scientists from Facebook’s AI Research and Stanford University describe a chatbot that can self-improve by extracting training data from conversations
  • “When the conversation appears to be going well, the user’s responses become new training examples to imitate,” the paper’s authors explained. “[And] when the agent believes it has made a mistake, it asks for feedback; learning to predict the feedback that will be given improves the chatbot’s dialogue abilities further … These new examples improve the agent’s dialogue abilities while using only natural responses from the user that do not require special structure, accompanying numerical feedback, or additional human intervention in order to be used.”

VW and Ford Are Joining Forces to Build Pickup Trucks and Vans – Jan. 15, 2019 (Bloomberg)

  • Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co. will join forces to build pickup trucks, delivery vans and possibly more, putting old rivalries aside to work together and confront a rapidly changing auto industry
  • The pair is set to start delivering the medium-size pickups and commercial vans from 2022, creating what VW Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess called “the strongest playear in this segment.” VW and Ford are also holding talks for joint work on electric cars, autonomous vehicles and digital services

Slalom Expands Business Intelligence Footprint with Automated Insights Partnership – Jan. 15, 2019 (PR Newswire)

  • Automated Insights, the leading natural language generation (NLG) provider, and Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation, today announced their strategic partnership to further empower customers by augmenting technology solutions with natural language generation
  • With the addition of Automated Insights’ NLG technology to Slalom’s analytical capabilities, together they’re transforming clients’ business intelligence strategies with greater data understanding

Research / studies:

Cognism Secures Innovative AI Patent to Enable B2B Organisations to Rapidly Identify New Revenue Opportunities – Jan. 15, 2019 (PR Newswire)

  • Cognism, the smart all-in-one B2B marketing and sales acceleration solution, has successfully secured a patent for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine to address the data challenges faced by sales and marketing teams in B2B organisations. The patent, referred to as the ‘System and method for computational disambiguation and prediction of dynamic datasets’, accelerates Cognism to the forefront of the B2B data industry

Government / policy:

China to press ahead with investments in 5G and Internet of Things, NDRC official says – Jan. 16, 2019 (South China Morning Post)

  • China will press ahead with investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G in 2019 as it competes with the US in the two key areas amid a technology race between the world’s two biggest economies
  • China’s state planner has singled out AI, the industrial internet, Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G as part of its investment priorities this year as part the country’s efforts to “construct a new form of infrastructure” and “speed up the commercialisation of 5G”, according to Lian Weiliang, deputy head of China’s National Development and Reform Commission

Coalition Pressures Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to Keep Facial Recognition Surveillance Away From Government – Jan. 16, 2019 (Fortune)

  • In its letters sent Jan. 15, the coalition—which comprises groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, National Lawyers Guild chapters, and Freedom of the Press Foundation—warned the companies that a decision to supply government with the technology “threatens the safety of community members and will also undermine public trust.” That’s because facial recognition software gives the government the power to target immigrants, religious minorities, and people of color, thereby exacerbating a historical bias, according to the coalition

Events:

Amazon expands on Bezos’ summer camp with new AI, robotics conference – Jan. 17, 2019 (Seattle Times)

  • Even with more than 610,000 employees, Amazon is increasingly reliant on technologies that augment or replace human labor, such as the robot trolleys moving goods around its fulfillment centers and the computer vision and sensor systems that enable its cashierless convenience stores
  • The conference, set for early June in Las Vegas, is modeled on the private MARS confab Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has held for the last three years. Last year he allowed some reporters to join the roughly 200 invitees at the March event in Palm Springs, California