It’s pretty clear autonomous vehicles are one of the most important areas within AI. This week we saw yet another Apple employee get in trouble with the FBI for stealing company secrets on its autonomous vehicle program. Bold move given someone has already been caught before, in addition to the publicity surrounding Anthony Levandowski’s exit from Waymo.
Other weekly news can be found below.
Company developments:
DeepSolar Project uses machine learning, satellite imagery to calculate US solar panels – Feb. 2, 2019 (Slash Gear)
- Created by a team of engineers and computer scientists, DeepSolar is designed to accurately identify the size, location, and number of solar panels in use across the US. It does this by using a machine learning framework that studies over a billion high-resolution satellite images, identifying all the visible panels positioned on rooftops and in other locations
- The scientists developed DeepSolar’s algorithm by teaching it how to identify the signs of an installation, including the color, size, and texture of solar panels. Once the machine learned these characteristics, it was able to achieve a 93% success rate in correctly identifying panels in an image, while only missing panels in an image around 10% of the time, making it more accurate than any previous system. It ended up taking DeepSolar just one month to analyze all the satellite images of the US, a task that would’ve taken humans years to finish
Baidu plans new AI cloud computing center in north China – Feb. 2, 2019 (CGTN)
- China’s artificial intelligence (AI) giant Baidu has decided to set up an AI cloud computing center in the northern Chinese city Baoding, Hebei Province, in its latest efforts to build more smart cities
- The AI cloud computing center is super-large in scale and will serve users in the Xiongan New Area and other places in north China by leveraging its mega pool of data and high-performance computing power, according to a strategic cooperation MOU inked Thursday by Baidu and the municipal government of Baoding
Google releases dataset to help AI systems spot fake audio recordings – Jan. 31, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- The Google News team and Google’s AI research division, Gai prinoogle AI, have teamed up to produce a corpus of speech containing “thousands” of phrases spoken by the Mountain View company’s text-to-speech models. Phrases drawn from English newspaper articles are spoken by 68 different synthetic voices, which cover a variety of regional accents
- “Over the last few years, there’s been an explosion of new research using neural networks to simulate a human voice. These models, including many developed at Google, can generate increasingly realistic, human-like speech,” Daisy Stanton, a software engineer at Google AI, wrote in a blog post. “While the progress is exciting, we’re keenly aware of the risks this technology can pose if used with the intent to cause harm. … [That’s why] we’re taking action
A second Apple self-driving car engineer is accused of stealing trade secrets – Jan. 30, 2019 (CNBC)
- A recently unsealed affidavit by an FBI agent alleges former Apple engineer Jizhong Chen took confidential and proprietary information about Apple’s self-driving project to his personal devices in an attempt to steal trade secrets. Another engineer was accused of similar crimes in July
- Chen claimed he was applying for jobs internally at Apple, but allegedly applied to two external roles, including one at a direct competitor to Apple’s self-driving car unit based in China
Argo AI acquires permit to test autonomous vehicles in California – Jan. 29, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Argo AI, the self-driving car startup that burst onto the scene in 2017 with $1 billion in backing from Ford, has obtained a permit to test its autonomous vehicles in California
- Argo AI does much of its testing in Pittsburgh, where it’s based. The company is also testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Miami, Detroit and soon Washington, D.C. as part of its relationship with Ford. Argo AI has had vehicles on DC’s streets for months now, mapping roads in the first step toward testing in autonomous mode. Ford said last year that the self-driving vehicles would begin testing on public roads in the first quarter of 2019
IBM releases Diversity in Faces, a dataset of over 1 million annotations to help reduce facial recognition bias – Jan. 29, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- The company today published a research paper and accompanying dataset — Diversity in Faces (DiF), annotations of 1 million human facial images sourced from the publicly available YFCC-100M Creative Commons dataset — that aims to reduce prejudicial predictions in AI face-detecting algorithms
- “Face recognition is a long-standing challenge in the field of artificial intelligence (AI),” the authors of the paper wrote. “The goal is to create systems that detect, recognize, verify, and understand characteristics of human faces. [F]ace recognition has achieved unprecedented accuracy … [but] while this is encouraging, a critical aspect limiting face recognition performance in practice is intrinsic facial diversity … We expect face recognition to work accurately for each of us. Performance should not vary for different individuals or different populations.”
Unity developed a video game designed to test AI players – Jan. 28, 2019 (The Verge)
- Unity, a leading maker of game development tools, announced today that it’s created a new, unprecedented type of video game that’s designed not to be played by humans, but by artificial intelligence
- The game is called Obstacle Tower, and it’s a piece of software that’s created to judge the level of sophistication of an AI agent by measuring how efficiently it can maneuver up to 100 levels that change and scale in difficulty in unpredictable ways. Each level is procedurally generated, so it changes every time the AI attempts it
Fundraising / investment:
Valued raises $1.7 million for Slack chatbot to combat workplace harassment – Feb. 1, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- “We specifically designed Valued to make the workplace an open, safe, and inclusive place for everyone — regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic background — so professionals can maximize their potential and be their best at work,” Atienza said. “As a female entrepreneur and software engineer, I’m … aware of the long-term damage workplace bullying can have on one’s performance, overall mental health, and ability to grow as a professional.”
Logical Buildings Closes $3.5 Million Series C-1 Offering as SmartKit™ AI Smart Building Software Platform Expands Nationally, Achieving 35% Growth in Adoption During Q4 2018 – Feb. 1, 2019 (Business Wire)
- The company’s SmartKit AI product growth is fueled by the convergence of energy grid decentralization, building systems’ digital transformation, and IoT device consumerization. The SmartKit AI mobile cloud platform synthesizes real-time smart meter utility and grid data with building mechanical and IoT sensor data to optimize building performance and improve property management decisions
- The new funding will also be used to expand partnerships with utilities, IoT platforms and telecommunications companies. Logical Buildings was recently selected as an innovation technology finalist to present SmartKit AI to a panel of utilities at DistribuTECH’s Initiate! program, which is designed to help utilities adopt innovative technologies
Insurtech Geared to Autonomous Vehicle Coverage Grabs $5 Million in Funding – Jan. 30, 2019 (Insurance Journal)
- A startup focused on rewarding drivers and fleet owners that use autonomous vehicles and semi-autonomous car safety features has raised $5 million in seed funding
- California-based Avinew’s technology uses artificial intelligence and telematics to gather driving data that can tell when a vehicle is in autopilot mode or is using advanced safety features. That data can then be used by insurers to offer coverage that rewards drivers and fleets using these vehicles and features
Foxconn-backed Carbon Relay raises $5 million to tackle datacenter cooling with AI – Jan. 29, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Carbon Relay is a Foxconn-backed Boston and Washington, D.C.-based company that aims to help datacenter operators cut carbon emissions while increasing energy efficiency. The startup’s artificially intelligent (AI) suite of tools connects to existing platforms and leverages data collected by thousands of sensors to make predictions about electrical usage — and more importantly, surface areas in need of improvement
- Carbon Relay formally launched today with $5 million in Series A funding, bringing its total capital raised to $6 million. This latest raise includes individual investors Dr. James I. Cash, Black Duck Software founder Douglas Levin, Dr. Karim Lakhani, and Evercore senior mergers and acquisitions advisor Paul Deninger. As part of the round, Cash and Lakhani joined Carbon Relay’s board
Kite raises $17 million for its AI-powered developer environment – Jan. 28, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Kite, which suggests code snippets for Python developers in real time, has raised $17 million in a series A round led by Trinity Ventures. The latest version of the free developer tool no longer relies on the cloud, meaning it runs locally, and it adds a nifty feature called Line-of-Code Completions
- GitHub CEO Nat Friedman also participated in this round, adding his name to a long list of notable angel investors, including PayPal founder Max Levchin, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, Dropbox founder Drew Houston, Cruise Automation cofounder Kyle Vogt, Gusto cofounder Joshua Reeves, and Twitch.tv founder Emmett Shear. Kite plans to use the new funding to expand its R&D team with a focus on accelerating developer productivity. Trinity Ventures general partner Dan Scholnick, who sits on the boards of Docker and New Relic, will join Kite’s board
Cinnamon AI raises $15 million to expand enterprise services to U.S. – Jan. 28, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Cinnamon today said that it has secured $15 million in a series B equity funding round to support expansion stateside, following a $8 million raise in July 2018 and a $2 million series A round in February 2014. Its total capital raised stands at $25 million
- The most recent cash infusion — which was supplied by Sony’s Innovation Fund, the Mirai Creation Fund, Sachio Semmoto, and about a half-dozen others — will be used to open Cinnamon’s first U.S. office in San Mateo, Miku Hirano, Cinnamon’s CEO, said, and to fuel development of its AI platform and products. As part of the round, Suntory Holdings CEO Takeshi Niinami will join Cinnamon as an advisor
Partnerships:
Coursera and the University of Toronto roll out autonomous cars specialization – Jan. 30, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Massive open online courses (MOOCs) students partial to machine learning, buckle up: The University of Toronto wants to inculcate you with driverless car engineering knowledge. Coursera, the online learning platform founded by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, today announced that it’s teaming up with the U of T to offer a Self-Driving Cars specialization, which it claims is the first of its kind
Research / studies:
‘Incentive to create havoc’: Self-driving cars set to turn streets into gridlocked hell – study – Feb. 3, 2019 (RT)
- Professor Adam Millard-Ball of UC Santa Cruz warns that we could face “robot-fuelled gridlock” with autonomous vehicles in the future. He has estimated that in a best case scenario, it would take just 2,000 self-driving cars to slow traffic in the city to less than 2mph
The world’s fastest supercomputer breaks an AI record – Jan. 31, 2019 (Wired)
- ALONG AMERICA’S WEST coast, the world’s most valuable companies are racing to make artificial intelligence smarter. Google and Facebook have boasted of experiments using billions of photos and thousands of high-powered processors. But late last year, a project in eastern Tennessee quietly exceeded the scale of any corporate AI lab. It was run by the US government
- The record-setting project involved the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit, at Oak Ridge National Lab. The machine captured that crown in June last year, reclaiming the title for the US after five years of China topping the list. As part of a climate research project, the giant computer booted up a machine-learning experiment that ran faster than any before
Atari master: New AI smashes Google DeepMind in video game challenge – Jan. 31, 2019 (Science Daily)
- In the new method developed at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, computers set up to autonomously play Montezuma’s Revenge learnt from mistakes and identified sub-goals 10 times faster than Google DeepMind to finish the game
- The method, developed in collaboration with RMIT’s Professor John Thangarajah and Michael Dann, combines “carrot-and-stick” reinforcement learning with an intrinsic motivation approach that rewards the AI for being curious and exploring its environment
Boston University researchers develop framework to improve AI fairness – Jan. 30, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- New research by scientists at Boston University shows just how hard it is to evaluate fairness in AI algorithms and tries to establish a framework for detecting and mitigating problematic behavior in automated decisions. Titled “From Soft Classifiers to Hard Decisions: How fair can we be?,” the research paper is being presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAT*)
Government / policy:
Singapore’s driverless vehicle ambitions reach next milestone with new national standards – Jan. 31, 2019 (Channel News Asia)
- Singapore’s ambition to be at the vanguard of those deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) got a shot in the arm on Thursday (Jan 31), after a set of provisional national standards to guide the industry was introduced
- The standards, known as Technical Reference 68 (TR 68), will promote the safe deployment of fully driverless vehicles in Singapore, according to a joint press release by Enterprise Singapore (ESG), Land Transport Authority (LTA), Standards Development Organisation and Singapore Standards Council (SSC)
Government launches new funding measures to target energy storage and AI innovations – Jan. 31, 2019 (Edie)
- The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has announced a range of new funding measures aimed at uncovering cost-competitive energy storage technologies and using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle food waste
- BEIS has announced it is providing £20m through a “Storage at Scale” competition, to help commercialise energy storage projects that would be able to compete with more established technologies. The department is hoping to test three demonstrator projects by 2021 under the competition
Texas forms task force to promote autonomous vehicles – Jan. 28, 2019 (Smart Cities Dive)
- The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has announced the creation of the Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) Task Force, a one-stop shop for information and coordination on all pilots and investments in the state
- The task force will coordinate work already being done through the Texas Technology Task Force and the Texas Innovation Alliance, and will host industry forums and reports to encourage greater collaboration for autonomous vehicles (AVs)
Events:
Green Button Alliance Members Set to Impart Expertise at Key Energy Industry Events – Feb. 1, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- The Green Button Alliance (GBA), which fosters the development, compliance, and adoption of the industry-standard Green Button energy and water data-access and –sharing protocol, today announced members of the Green Button Alliance—whom are comprised of energy industry thought-leaders—will participate in upcoming 2019 energy-industry events