Lots of great healthcare developments stemming from AI this week. Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC) published data on a novel machine-learning framework they developed that distinguishes between low- and high-risk prostate cancer with more precision than ever before.
On the fundraising side, KenSci raised $22mm to progress their AI-driven prediction platform that helps practitioners cut costs intelligently by identifying contributing clinical and financial factors and by analyzing data across various sources like electronic medical records, public records, demographics, claims data, and devices.
Company developments:
Landing.ai hires Amazon director of computer vision Gopi Prashanth – Feb. 6, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Enterprise automation company Landing.ai has hired Amazon director of artificial intelligence and computer vision Gopi Prashanth to act as its new VP of engineering. Prashanth led a team that created the AI system behind Amazon Go, and previously worked as a development manager at Microsoft
- “I think Gopi is one of the unsung heroes of AI,” Ng said. “I think Amazon Go is one of the most amazing technologies to land in the AI world in the modern era, so Gopi kind of built the core AI technology that made Amazon Go possible. He built AI for one of the most amazing products in our generation. Before that he led Project Catapult at Microsoft which wound up helping transform how Microsoft uses FPGAs in its cloud GPU.”
Utilities Can Now Manage Diverse, Distributed Energy Resources with Oracle – Feb. 5, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- “Utilities today are facing a perfect storm of evolving distributed energy resources across their networks, a barrage of data, and ever-savvy customers who are looking to their utility to be a trusted advisor in this changing energy journey,” said Dan Byrnes, SVP of product development, Oracle Utilities
- “As such, resources can no longer be managed in isolation. With the latest innovations in NMS, utilities can improve long-term business planning around infrastructure investments and maintenance schedules, launch new revenue-generating customer-focused energy services, and proactively optimize operational performance.”
M&A:
Facebook just bought a start-up that helps you shop for furniture using AI – Feb. 8, 2019 (CNBC)
- Facebook on Friday announced its acquisition of GrokStyle, a San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence technology to help users shop for furniture
- On the Ikea mobile app, users can snap a photo of a piece of furniture and use GrokStyle’s technology to receive matches for similar products
Fundraising / investment:
Castle raises $9.2 million for AI that protects consumer apps from account takeovers – Feb. 8, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Castle, a San Francisco-based startup that wants to help businesses keep their customers’ online accounts safe from fraud, has raised $9.2 million in a series A round of funding from Index Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, First Round Capital, F-Prime Capital Partners, and a host of individual angel investors
- Founded in 2015, Castle works with web and app developers looking to offer greater security inside their consumer-facing apps. Castle’s technology helps prevent all manner of account takeover (ATO) efforts, whether through manual attempts or automated methods, including credential stuffing
Athenascope nabs $2.5M seed led by First Round to bring gamers AI-edited highlight reels – Feb. 8, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Athenascope is a small startup aiming to tap computer vision intelligence to record, review and recap what more novice gamers were able to pull off in their latest battle royale with a short, shareable highlight reel. The team is led by Chris Kirmse, who previously founded Xfire, a game messaging client that Viacom bought in 2006 for north of $100 million
- The company announced this week that they’ve closed a $2.5 million seed round led by First Round Capital to grow its tools and its team. They’re also rolling out their AI highlight reel tool for gamers. The tool is pretty customized for individual titles; they’re launching with support for Fortnite, Rocket League and PUBG, but Kirmse hopes to expand that list significantly in the future
Amazon just invested in self-driving car company Aurora – Feb. 7, 2019 (CNBC)
- Self-driving car start-up Aurora announced Thursday that it has raised more than $530 million in funding, from investors including Amazon, Sequoia and the investment arm of energy giant Shell
- The company’s CEO and co-founder, Chris Urmson, is the former CTO of self-driving cars at Alphabet, which owns the autonomous vehicle firm Waymo. Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson led the design and launch of the Tesla Model X, according to Aurora’s website. Drew Bagnell, Aurora’s chief technology officer and co-founder, helped found Uber’s Advanced Technology Center
KenSci raises $22 million for AI that cuts health care costs – Feb. 7, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- KenSci’s mission is to reduce those costs with artificial intelligence (AI). The Seattle-based startup, which has offices in Singapore and Hyderabad, was founded in 2014 by a team of researchers at the University of Washington Tacoma and incubated at the college’s Center for Data Science
- KenSci’s AI-driven prediction platform helps practitioners cut costs intelligently by identifying contributing clinical and financial factors and by analyzing data across sources like electronic medical records, public records, demographics, claims data, and devices
A London tech start-up just got VC funding in aim to disrupt the archaic commodity trading world – Feb. 7, 2019 (Business Insider)
- AI start up Vortexa utilizes swathes of satellite and shipping data to analyse trends in energy trading which could fundamentally change an opaque industry. The company has secured $5 million in Series A funding from VC firms Notion Capital and Mosaic Ventures
- “It’s a shift in an opaque industry because of a space revolution which allows smaller satellites to be launched at lower cost, which wouldn’t have been possible before 2015,” Vortexa founder Fabio Kuhn, formerly head of trading technology and analytics at BP, said in an interview with Business Insider
IBM: $2B expansion in NY to focus on artificial intelligence – Feb. 7, 2019 (ABC News)
- IBM is announcing plans for a $2 billion expansion in New York state focusing on artificial intelligence hardware. The Westchester County-based company says that as part of the investment, it will create a center for AI computer chip research and development at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s campus in Albany
- To support the expansion, New York has agreed to contribute $300 million for the purchase and installation of equipment for the work. In addition, IBM and the state will together invest $55 million to fund artificial intelligence research across the State University of New York system
DataSine raises $5.2M led by Pentech and Propel for its AI content-marketing platform – Feb. 7, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- DataSine has now raised $5.2 million in a Series A round led by U.K.-based VC Pentech Ventures and Propel Venture Partners. Other investors include C.Entrepreneurs/Cathay Innovation, Twin Ventures and Sistema_VC. Customers include BNP Paribas and the Tinkoff bank. DataSine claims it has helped achieve uplifts of up to 80 percent in engagement and 71 percent in sales
- DataSine’s content-personalization platform is called Pomegranate. The company says it provides an AI-powered content-editing platform to guide marketers in tailoring a range of content elements, including words and images. The idea is that it will personalize everything from emails and landing pages to call center scripts. Pomegranate will launch in March, and it integrates with CRMs like HubSpot and email platforms like MailChimp
AI-assisted CRM co Gong.io raises $40m – Feb. 7, 2019 (Globes)
- Gong.io, which provides AI solutions for improving sales and service calls, has raised $40 million in Series B funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $68 million
- The latest round was led by Battery Ventures and Battery general partner Dharmesh Thakker. Thakker will join Gong’s board of directors. Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Shlomo Kramer, Wing Venture Capital, NextWorld Capital, and Cisco Investments also participated in the round
Musiio raises $1M to let digital music services use AI for curation – Feb. 6, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Musiio, a Singapore-based startup that uses AI to help digital music companies with discovery and creation, has pulled in a $1 million seed round. The capital comes from Singapore’s Wavemaker Partners, U.S. investor Exponential Creativity Ventures and undisclosed angels. The deal represents the first outside round for Musiio, which was founded at the Entrepreneur First program in Singapore where CEO Hazel Savage, a former streaming exec, met CTO Aron Pettersson
- It also makes Musiio the first venture capital-backed music AI startup in Southeast Asia and one of the most notable EF graduates from its Asian cohorts
Databricks raises $250 million for its data processing and AI platforms – Feb. 5, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Data processing company Databricks today announced the close of a $250 million funding round that raises its valuation to $2.75 billion. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Microsoft, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Battery Ventures, and Geodesic
- Databricks was founded by the creators of Apache Spark, an open source framework for distributed computation across multiple machines used in many deep learning projects today. The group of data and machine learning researchers first met at UC Berkeley
Crayon Invests Heavily in World-leading Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Practice – Feb. 4, 2019 (PR Newswire)
- Crayon, the global leader in Software and Cloud Analytics, cloud and volume licensing, and associated consulting services announced its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center of Excellence, which includes AI and Machine Learning as well as Blockchain emerging technology solutions
- With a presence in 24 markets worldwide, Crayon’s AI advisors are projected to expand to 500 over the next two to three years. The recent hire of Elin Hauge will help to demystify artificial intelligence to assist enterprises in implementing AI solutions
Partnerships:
Renault-Nissan to work with Waymo on driverless cars – Feb. 6, 2019 (Khaleej Times)
- The three-way alliance of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors is planning a deal to work with Google’s Waymo to jointly develop self-driving taxis, Japan’s Nikkei said on Tuesday. The three automakers are finalising tie-up negotiations with Waymo, a Google-affiliated developer of self-driving car technology, the business daily said on its website
- In September last year, the alliance decided to use a Google operating system for their cars’ information systems, and the tech giant has already forged similar deals with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Jaguar Land Rover. The report comes as the alliance reels from the arrest of Carlos Ghosn, the auto tycoon who forged and led the partnership before his shock November 19 detention. His arrest and subsequent indictment on three charges has exposed rifts between Nissan and Renault, which, together with Mitsubishi, make up the world’s top-selling auto manufacturing group
UC Berkeley researchers partner with Twitter to improve machine learning usage – Feb. 4, 2019 (Daily Californian)
- Twitter staff machine learning engineer Naz Erkan and Senior Director of software engineering Sandeep Pandey announced in a blog post Jan. 29 that the company is partnering up with researchers from UC Berkeley to improve the use of machine learning
- The new research initiative focuses on improving the performance of machine learning in social networks, according to Erkan and Pandey in the blog post. The study is being led by two professors, Moritz Hardt and Benjamin Recht, from the campus department of electrical engineering and computer sciences, or EECS
Research / studies:
UGA researchers use machine learning to identify source of Salmonella outbreaks – Feb. 10, 2019 (Online Athens)
- In the research, published in the January 2019 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, Xiangyu Deng and his colleagues used more than 1,000 genomes to predict the animal sources, especially livestock, of Salmonella Typhimurium
- Deng, an assistant professor of food microbiology at the center, and Shaokang Zhang, a postdoctoral associate with the center, led the project, which also included experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Minnesota Department of Health and the Translational Genomics Research Institute
‘Air traffic control’ for driverless cars could speed up deployment – Feb. 7, 2019 (Univ. of Michigan)
- That’s the goal of a new project that relies on a technique called instantaneous crowdsourcing to provide a cost-effective, real-time remote backup for onboard autonomous systems without the need for a human to be physically in the driver’s seat. The research is taking place at the U-M Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI)
- Instantaneous crowdsourcing differs from earlier efforts at remote human backup in that it can provide human responses in just a few milliseconds—potentially fast enough to help dodge a swerving vehicle or maneuver around a piece of roadway debris. It utilizes connected vehicle technology and a remotely located control center
Prostate Cancer Prediction Looks to Machine Learning for Accuracy Boost – Feb. 7, 2019 (GEN)
- A team of researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC) have just published data on a novel machine-learning framework they developed that distinguishes between low- and high-risk prostate cancer with more precision than ever before
- Findings from the new study—published today in Scientific Reports through an article titled “Objective risk stratification of prostate cancer using machine learning and radiomics applied to multiparametric magnetic resonance images”—provide a framework intended to help physicians—in particular, radiologists—more accurately identify treatment options for PCa patients, lessening the chance of unnecessary clinical intervention
An AI is playing Pictionary to figure out how the world works – Feb. 5, 2019 (MIT News)
- Researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) believe that Pictionary could push machine intelligence beyond its current limits. To that end, they have devised an online version of the game that pairs a human player with an AI program
- In total there are 1,200 icons, 75,000 possible phrases, and a vocabulary of 20,000 words. And there are two modes: easy and hard. The plan is to create a leaderboard to bring out people’s competitive spirit—and help accelerate the AI’s learning.
Government / policy:
Trump to lay out an AI plan – Feb. 11, 2019 (Axios)
- In a move aimed squarely at China’s swift rise in artificial intelligence, President Trump plans to sign an executive order Monday to stengthen the U.S.’s global position in AI competition
- Among the goals of the initiative are boosting investment in AI research, setting standards for AI systems developed in and out of government, training an AI-competent workforce, and involving allies in new strategies
Measure creating task force to study autonomous vehicles clears full assembly – Feb. 4, 2019 (NJ Biz)
- Legislation sponsored by New Jersey Assembly Democrats Daniel Benson, 14th District; Andrew Zwicker, 16th District; and Pamela Lampitt, 6th District, to establish a task force to evaluate autonomous vehicles was approved on Thursday by the full Assembly
- The measure, Assembly Joint Resolution 164, would create the New Jersey Advanced Autonomous Vehicle Task Force, comprised of eight members. The group would be responsible for conducting a study of autonomous vehicles and recommending laws, rules, and regulations the state may enact to safely integrate these vehicles on the roads