What’s happened in AI: March 4th-10th

By | March 12, 2019

Another week with many developments in the autonomous vehicle world. In particular, Uber will not be held criminally liable for the pedestrian killed from one of its autonomous vehicles, Waymo is selling its Lidar sensors, and a recent report has highlighted the risks associated with a hacked autonomous vehicle in New York. More weekly news can be found below.

Company developments:

Gboard’s new handwriting recognition AI makes up to 40% fewer mistakes – Mar. 7, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Google has improving handwriting recognition in Gboard, its virtual keyboard for iOS and Android devices, with a faster AI system that makes between 20 to 40 percent fewer mistakes than the machine learning models it replaces. That’s according to researchers at Google AI, who describe their work in a blog post published this afternoon
  • “Progress in machine learning has enabled new model architectures and training methodologies, allowing us to revise our initial approach [and] instead build a single … model that operates on the whole input,” senior software engineers Sandro Feuz and Pedro Gonnet wrote. “We launched those new models for all Latin-script based languages in Gboard at the beginning of the year.”

Waymo is selling lidar sensors for robotics, security, and agriculture – Mar. 6, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Waymo, Google parent company Alphabet’s self-driving car division, today announced that it will begin selling the custom-designed lidar sensors it uses on its driverless cars to other companies
  • “Our custom lidars have been instrumental in making Waymo the first company in the world to put fully self-driving cars on public roads,” Waymo wrote in a Medium post. “Now, we are making these sensors available to companies outside of self-driving … so they can achieve their own technological breakthroughs. Today, we’re announcing that one of our 3D lidar sensors, which we call Laser Bear Honeycomb, is available to select partners.”

Uber won’t be held criminally liable for death in autonomous car crash – Mar. 6, 2019 (CNET)

  • “After a very thorough review of all the evidence presented, this Office has determined that there is no basis for criminal liability for the Uber corporation arising from this matter,” Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Sullivan Polk said in a letter
  • Polk called for further investigation into a dashcam video of the collision and of what the backup driver, who could face vehicular manslaughter charges, would’ve been able to see during the accident. Polk wasn’t immediately available for comment

M&A:

Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together – Mar. 10, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Appen just announced that it’s acquiring Figure Eight in an all-cash deal that sees Appen paying $175 million upfront, with an additional payment of up to $125 million based on Figure Eight’s performance this year
  • Both companies focus on using crowdsourced labor pools to annotate data, which in turn is used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning — for example, Figure Eight (formerly known as CrowdFlower and Dolores Labs) says its technology has been for everything from mapping to stock photography to scanning receipts for expense reports

Fundraising / investment:

Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures Invests in Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Software Provider Earth Science Analytics – Mar. 8, 2019 (AP News)

  • Earth Science Analytics AS, a Norwegian Artificial Intelligence petroleum geoscience software provider, has raised a series A funding from Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), the corporate venturing subsidiary of the world’s leading integrated energy and chemicals company, Saudi Aramco
  • Earth Science Analytics is spearheading the development of the next generation petroleum geoscience software based on artificial intelligence. The goal with the cloud based software platform, EarthNET, is to enable faster, cheaper and more accurate prediction of rock and fluid properties in the subsurface, and thus allow oil and gas exploration and production to be done with greater profitability and higher success rates than what can be achieved with traditional software and workflows

PolyAI scores $12M Series A to put its ‘conversational AI agents’ in contact centres – Mar. 8, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • PolyAI, a London startup founded by experts in the field of “conversational AI” — including CEO Nikola Mrkšić, who was previously the first engineer at Apple-acquired VocalIQ — has raised $12 million in Series A funding to deploy its tech in customer support contact centres
  • The round was led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Sands Capital Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First (EF). PolyAI’s founders are graduates of EF, although they didn’t meet during the company building program but already knew each other from their time at Cambridge’s Dialog Systems Group, part of the Machine Intelligence Lab at the University of Cambridge

Brodmann17 nabs $11M for its automotive computer vision tech that runs on any CPU – Mar. 6, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Efficient computer vision systems are a critical component of autonomous and assisted driving vehicles, and now a startup that has developed a way to deliver computer vision technology without relying on costly and bulky hardware — by building deep learning software that can run even on low-end processors — has secured a round of funding as it gears up for its first services later this year
  • Brodmann17 — named after the primary visual cortex in the human brain — has raised $11 million in a Series A round of funding led by OurCrowd, with participation also from Maniv Mobility, AI Alliance, UL Ventures, Samsung NEXT, and the Sony Innovation Fund

Functionize raises $16 million to automate software testing with AI – Mar. 5, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Functionize, a San Jose, California-based startup developing a cloud-based platform that autonomously susses out software bugs, today announced that it has raised $16 million in series A financing contributed by Canvas Ventures. The capital infusion — which comes after a $2.5 million seed round in February 2018 and brings the company’s total raised to $18.2 million, according to Crunchbase — will be used to “accelerate adoption” of its platform, said CEO and founder Tamas Cser
  • “Software testing has endured what I term a ‘QA winter,’” Cser, who cofounded Functionize with Ray Grieselhuber in 2015, said. “This means developers and testers still maintain tests the same way as they did in the early ages of the internet. [Functionize’s solution] allows testing to just work — empowering testers to dramatically speed up product delivery.”

Energy AI Startup ENERZAi Attracts Investment from Springcamp – Mar. 5, 2019 (Business Korea)

  • ENERZAi is a team comprised of engineers from Seoul National University’s Department of Electrical/Computer Engineering and Energy Resources Engineering. The co-founding members gathered up to solve problems of the oil and gas Industry, including exploration, drilling and production, with solutions based on AI technology
  • Especially, they are currently focusing on inefficiency problems during the drilling process, where safety and cost issues are significant despite oil and gas players’ astronomical scale spending in drilling. In fact, cost for drilling a single well could cost from millions of dollars to up to a billion dollars, and fatal incidents involving casualties could occur anytime since drilling sites involve large machinery. The autonomous drilling system which ENERZAi is developing is expected to solve these inefficiency and safety problems of the industry

Matterport raises $48M to ramp up its 3D imaging platform – Mar. 5, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Matterport — which started out making cameras but has since diversified into a wider platform to capture, create, search and utilise 3D imagery of interior and enclosed spaces in immersive real estate, design, insurance and other B2C and B2B applications — has raised $48 million. Sources tell us the money came at a pre-money valuation of around $325 million, although the company is not commenting on that
  • Matterport had raised just under $63 million prior to this and had been valued at around $207 million, according to PitchBook estimates.This current round is coming from existing backers, which include Lux Capital, DCM, Qualcomm Ventures and more

Shift Technology raises $60 million to detect insurance fraud – Mar. 4, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Paris-based Shift Technology has raised another $60 million funding round. Bessemer Venture Partners is leading the round and existing investors Accel, General Catalyst, Iris Capital and Elaia Partners are also participating
  • Shift Technology is all about detecting fraudulent insurance claims. There are 70 insurance companies around the world relying on its product, such as MACIF in France, Axa in Spain, and CNA and HyreCar in the U.S. And given the size of those companies, it means that Shift Technology is processing a ton of claims every day

Moka raises $27M led by Hillhouse to make hiring more data-driven in China – Mar. 4, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Moka, a startup that wants to make talent acquisition a little more data-driven for China-based companies that range from smartphone giant Xiaomi to Burger King’s local business, announced Monday that it has raised a 180 million yuan ($27 million) Series B round of funding
  • The deal was led by Hillhouse Capital, an investor in top Chinese technology companies such as Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Pinduoduo — just to name a few. Other investors that took part include Xianghe Capital, an investment firm founded by two former Baidu executives, Chinese private equity firm GSR Ventures and GGV Capital

Partnerships:

Udacity and Deeplearning.ai launch TensorFlow 2.0 online training courses – Mar. 6, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • The latest version of TensorFlow prioritizes use of Eager execution and comes with a number of upgrades, including the elimination of several APIs in exchange for reliance on APIs from the Keras deep learning library, starting with Keras Sequential API
  • Dr. Laurence Moroney will teach the Deeplearning.ai course. Moroney worked with Coursera cofounder and Deeplearning.ai cofounder Andrew Ng to develop the coursework and syllabus designed to help developers train, understand, and improve their neural nets

AI player eVolution joins Mitsui and GCL-Poly in grid optimisation JV – Mar. 4, 2019 (Energy Storage)

  • Artificial intelligence company eVolution Networks has joined a grid optimisation joint venture (JV) formed by one of Japan’s biggest trading conglomerates, Mitsui, and major Chinese PV company GCL-Poly
  • Initially launched with US$50 million invested 50-50 by the two partners, a release issued this morning said that along with eVolution Energy Limited, the three have formed a further JV, Evolution Energy Limited, which will “redefine AI technology for power grids infrastructure”, aimed at improving grid performance and reducing losses

Research / studies:

New ORNL AI Tool Improves Process for Matching Cancer Patients with Clinical Trials – Mar. 5, 2019 (HPC)

  • A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory Health Data Sciences Institute have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to better match cancer patients with clinical trials
  • ORNL’s “SmartClinicalTrials” capability builds upon an existing NCI-DOE collaboration in which ORNL researchers lead a pilot effort to expand cancer surveillance capabilities and build statistical models capable of predicting the clinical course and outcomes for different types of cancer

The first look at how hacked self-driving cars would affect New York City traffic – Mar. 4, 2019 (Tech Xplore)

  • This week at the 2019 American Physical Society March Meeting in Boston, Skanda Vivek will present his research on the cyber-physical risks of hacked internet-connected vehicles. He will also participate in a press conference describing the work. Information for logging on to watch and ask questions remotely is included at the end of this news release
  • Vivek and his team found that even a small-scale hack, affecting only 10 percent of vehicles in Manhattan, could cause citywide gridlock and hinder emergency services. Based on these findings the team also developed a risk-mitigation strategy to prevent mass urban disruption from a few compromised vehicles

A new machine learning model can classify lung cancer slides at the pathologist level – Mar. 4, 2019 (EurekAlert)

  • Machine learning has improved dramatically in recent years and shown great promise in the field of medical image analysis. A team of research specialists at Dartmouth’s Norris Cotton Cancer Center have utilized machine learning capabilities to assist with the challenging task of grading tumor patterns and subtypes of lung adenocarcinoma, the most common form of the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide
  • Currently, lung adenocarcinoma, requires pathologist’s visual examination of lobectomy slides to determine the tumor patterns and subtypes. This classification has an important role in prognosis and determination of treatment for lung cancer, however is a difficult and subjective task

Government / policy:

Defense tech startup founded by Trump’s most prominent Silicon Valley supporters wins secretive military AI contract – Mar. 9, 2019 (The Intercept)

  • A STARTUP FOUNDED by a young and outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump is among the latest tech companies to quietly win a contract with the Pentagon as part of Project Maven, the secretive initiative to rapidly leverage artificial intelligence technology from the private sector for military purposes
  • Anduril Industries is the latest venture of Palmer Luckey, the 26-year-old entrepreneur best known for having founded the virtual reality firm Oculus Rift. Luckey began work on Project Maven last year, along with efforts to support the Defense Department’s newly formed Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, according to documents viewed by The Intercept

U.S. House subcommittee to discuss diversity and bias in tech industry – Mar. 6, 2019 (Biometric Update)

  • Diversity in the tech industry – or the relative lack of it – is being discussed in a hearing by a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, following expressions of concern by Democrat legislators about the use of facial recognition technology, how biased algorithms can lead to discrimination, and the lack of diversity at tech companies, The Hill reports
  • One witness called to the hearing has confirmed her intention to discuss how facial recognition success rates differ between white men and women of color, as MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year

Pittsburgh’s rules for autonomous vehicle testing less stringent than California’s – Mar. 4, 2019 (The Morning Call)

  • Karina Ricks, director of the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, said the city was working on guidelines before the March 18 accident in Tempe when one of Uber’s autonomous test vehicles hit and killed a pedestrian as she crossed a dark road outside the lines of a crosswalk
  • “We don’t want that situation to happen again,” said Raj Rajkumar, professor and co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Vehicular Information Technology Collaborative Research Lab. Another accident would cause “a social backlash,” he said, adding that he hopes guidelines such as those adopted by Pittsburgh and the testing companies will help alleviate public concerns