Lots of news this week on privacy in the world of AI. China is drafting up a bill to regulate the collection of biometric data, while in the U.S. citizens of Oakland and Brooklyn are fighting the use of facial recognition technology. The precedent set by these ongoing legal matters will have a big impact on how other cities/countries approach privacy regulations going forward. More weekly news can be found below.
Company developments:
Tesla says it can’t make affordable autonomous vehicles without China’s help – May. 4, 2019 (Quartz)
- Since July 2018, Tesla has petitioned the US government to exclude an electronic control unit for its Model S, Model X, and Model 3 from a 25% tariff when importing the part, according to government filings obtained by Reuters and TechCrunch. Authorities have denied the requests for the Models S and X, and the Model 3’s request is still pending
- The electronic control unit that Tesla is trying to exempt was described as the “brain” of the car in the documents. At a company event last month, Elon Musk said that this Autopilot 3.0 hardware would be the technology to allow full self-driving capabilities on Tesla vehicles. While Tesla designs all of these hardware components internally, it relies on other companies around the world to actually manufacture the parts on a large scale for the production of vehicles
Microsoft launches a drag-and-drop machine learning tool – May. 2, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Microsoft today announced three new services that all aim to simplify the process of machine learning. These range from a new interface for a tool that completely automates the process of creating models, to a new no-code visual interface for building, training and deploying models, all the way to hosted Jupyter-style notebooks for advanced users
- The new interface for Azure’s automated machine learning tool makes creating a model as easy as importing a data set and then telling the service which value to predict. Users don’t need to write a single line of code, while in the backend, this updated version now supports a number of new algorithms and optimizations that should result in more accurate models. While most of this is automated, Microsoft stresses that the service provides “complete transparency into algorithms, so developers and data scientists can manually override and control the process.”
Fundraising / investment:
DOE awards $5.5M to apply machine learning to geothermal exploration – May. 6, 2019 (Green Car Congress)
- The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $5.5 million for 10 new projects to apply machine learning techniques to geothermal exploration and production. Machine learning—the use of advanced algorithms to identify patterns in and make inferences from data—could assist in finding and developing new geothermal resources. If applied successfully, machine learning could lead to higher success rates in exploratory drilling, greater efficiency in plant operations, and ultimately lower costs for geothermal energy
- The projects selected by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office focus in two areas: machine learning for geothermal exploration and advanced analytics for efficiency and automation in geothermal operations
Toyota to invest $100 million in self-driving and robotic technology start-ups – May. 2, 2019 (CNBC)
- The company said the fund is part of Toyota’s mission to help “discover what’s next” for Japan’s biggest automaker. Toyota’s AI venture fund has already invested in 19 different start-ups over the last two years, bringing its total funding commitment to autonomous driving technology to $200 million, the company said
- This is just the most recent investment Toyota is making in the autonomous vehicle market. In April, Toyota and auto-parts supplier Denso said they would together invest $667 million into Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit. Toyota also committed to contributing an additional $300 million to Uber’s push into self-driving vehicles over the next three years
UiPath nabs $568M at a $7B valuation to bring robotic process automation to the front office – Apr. 30, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- UiPath — a robotic process automation startup originally founded in Romania that uses artificial intelligence and sophisticated scripts to build software to run these tasks — today confirmed that it has closed a Series D round of $568 million at a post-money valuation of $7 billion
- “We are at the tipping point. Business leaders everywhere are augmenting their workforces with software robots, rapidly accelerating the digital transformation of their entire business and freeing employees to spend time on more impactful work,” said Daniel Dines, UiPath co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “UiPath is leading this workforce revolution, driven by our core determination to democratize RPA and deliver on our vision of a robot helping every person.”
Ablacon raises $21.5 million for AI to treat atrial fibrillation – Apr. 30, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Ablacon, a Wheat Ridge, Colorado-based provider of AI-guided atrial fibrillation therapies, today announced it has raised $21.5 million in a series A round led by Ajax Health that Ablacon says will be used to advance its technology pipeline and finance clinical trials. The startup also revealed that Duke Rohlen, a veteran of Epix Therapeutics, Spirox, CV Ingenuity, and FoxHollow Technologies, has been appointed chair and CEO
- “Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is the most common heart arrhythmia in the world. Around 30 million people are predicted to be affected by 2060 in the U.S. and in Europe,” CTO Dr. Philip Haeusser said. “Ablacon builds a real-time high-precision diagnosis system for atrial fibrillation.”
Prisma Labs raises $6M for its AI-powered approach to visual editing – Apr. 30, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- While one of Prisma’s original co-founders left the company in the middle of last year, taking some team members with him, to work on building a new social app — the still, as yet, unreleased Capture — co-founder Andrey Usoltsev stayed on to keep developing Prisma Labs, taking up the CEO role
- The Series A funding will go towards expanding Prisma’s 21-strong team and scaling the business by spending on marketing to grow uptake of its apps’ premium subscription offers. These include a subscription layer for its eponymous app which gives users access to styles not available in the free version
Partnerships:
BenevolentAI starts AI collaboration with AstraZeneca to accelerate drug discovery – May. 1, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- BenevolentAI is an AI company where AI actually means something. Founded in 2013, it focuses on “accelerating the journey from data to medicines.” To achieve that, it has raised a whopping $202 million to look at early drug discovery through to late-stage clinical development, and has a research facility in Cambridge, U.K. where there is plenty of AI talent to be had
- The two organizations will begin collaboration between their respective teams to combine AstraZeneca’s genomics, chemistry and clinical data with BenevolentAI’s target identification platform and biomedical knowledge graph. This is designed to create a “network of contextualised scientific data” (genes, proteins, diseases and compounds) and to look at the relationship between them
Boston Properties and Stem Launch Largest Indoor AI-Driven Energy Storage System – Apr. 30, 2019 (AltEnergy Mag)
- Boston Properties, Inc. and Stem, Inc., the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered energy storage, have commenced operation of the largest indoor energy storage system in the U.S., at the Colorado Center in downtown Santa Monica
- The Colorado Center is a 1.1 million square foot property in the heart of the “Silicon Beach” of Santa Monica. Stem has installed a 3.9 megawatt-hour (MWh) AthenaTM-powered storage system to lower energy bills for eight buildings on the property and increase the sustainability of the local grid
Research / studies:
Google releases AI training data set with 5 million images and 200,000 landmarks – May. 3, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Today, in a significant step toward its goal of more sophisticated landmark-detecting computer vision models, Google open-sourced Google-Landmarks-v2, a new, larger landmark recognition corpus containing twice as many photos and seven times as many landmarks. Additionally, it’s launched two new challenges (Landmark Recognition 2019 and Landmark Retrieval 2019) on Kaggle, its machine learning community, and released the source code and model for Detect-to-Retrieve, a framework for regional image retrieval
IBM’s AI can detect glaucoma from eye scans – May. 1, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Early detection and treatment is essential — glaucoma progresses irreversibly and almost imperceptibly. (According to some estimates, a person can lose as much as 40% of their vision without noticing.) Toward that end, scientists at IBM Research and New York University describe in a paper a noninvasive technique that uses AI to detect patterns characteristic of glaucoma in retina imaging data. It’s scheduled to be presented at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology later this month in Vancouver
Harvard AI determines when tuberculosis becomes resistant to common drugs – Apr. 29, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Researchers at Harvard Medical School’s Blavatnik Institute have devised a computational approach capable of detecting resistance to commonly used TB drugs pre-treatment. In experiments, they managed to accurately anticipate a TB strain’s resistance to 10 first- and second-line drugs in a tenth of a second and with greater precision than similar models
- “Drug-resistant forms of TB are hard to detect, hard to treat and portend poor outcomes for patients,” said Maha Farhat, senior study author and assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, in a statement. “The ability to rapidly detect the full profile of resistance upon diagnosis is critical both to improving individual patient outcomes and in reducing the spread of the infection to others.”
Government / policy:
China working on data privacy law but enforcement is a stumbling block – May. 5, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- In what is seen as a major step to protect citizens’ personal information, especially their biometric data, from abuse, China’s legislators are drafting a new law to safeguard data privacy, according to industry observers – but enforcement remains a major concern
- “This is a big problem in China,” said Liu Deliang, a law professor at Beijing Normal University. “Because it’s about regulating the government’s abuse of power, so it’s not only a law issue but a constitutional issue.”
Oakland’s Facial Recognition Ban Passes First Administrative Hurdle – May. 3, 2019 (CBS SF Bay Area)
- A proposal to ban Oakland’s use of facial recognition technology passed its first administrative hurdle late Thursday, but has a long road ahead before it becomes a law. The city’s Privacy Commission unanimously approved the ban which now has to pass through the Public Safety Committee and the Oakland City Council before being adopted
- The risks of Amazon’s facial recognition technology, Rekognition, were highlighted last year when the ACLU tested the software and found that it falsely matched 28 members of Congress with mugshots. In a statement, the ACLU said, “The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus.”
Residents of Brooklyn Building Furious Over Landlord’s Attempt to Install Facial Recognition Technology – May. 1, 2019 (NBC New York)
- Residents of a Brooklyn building want their landlord to face facts and ditch plans to install facial recognition technology in their building. The tenants of more than 700 apartments at the Atlantic Plaza towers in Brownsville are currently fighting the decision to replace the key FOB entry they use now with a biometric security system
- “It’s my biometrics, it’s my identity and we don’t want that in anyone’s hands,” said tenant Tasliym Francis. The building now has residents use a key fob for three separate doors to get inside. The landlord filed an application last year to get that system replaced with the proposed one utilizing facial recognition. The request has yet to be approved
Uber Cheers as Florida Legalizes Self-Driving Rideshares That Could Cut Jobs From Humans – May. 1, 2019 (Broward Palm Beach New Times)
- “On behalf of Uber, we thank the Florida Legislature and their leadership in helping Florida continue to be a leader in welcoming self-driving technology,” Stephanie Smith, Uber’s senior policy manager, said in a media release. “This measure provides direction on the roles of state and local government and authorization for the deployment of automated vehicles on a ridesharing network. These provisions establish a clear pathway to bring the benefits of automation to our state.”
- State records show four Uber lobbyists met with state representatives on the House version of the bill, HB 311. The Senate bill, SB 932, legalizes not only automated vehicles but also “on-demand autonomous vehicle networks,” defined as a service that uses “a software application or other digital means to connect passengers to fully autonomous vehicles, exclusively or in addition to other vehicles, for transportation, including for-hire transportation and transportation for compensation.”
China’s latest tech export: an Arabic-speaking, AI-powered news anchor from Sogou – Apr. 30, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- The lifelike AI virtual anchor will help Abu Dhabi Media (ADM) provide news broadcasts more efficiently, in a range of engaging formats and potentially, on a round-the-clock basis every day, according to a statement by Sogou on Sunday after signing the agreement with the broadcaster
- The deal between Sogou and ADM comes several months after the New York-listed search engine operator and the state-owned Xinhua News Agency introduced in November last year so-called “composite anchors”, which combine the images and voices of human anchors with AI technology
China’s SenseTime to help build $1bn AI park in Malaysia – Apr. 30, 2019 (Global Construction Review)
- The agreement, which was signed during last week’s Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, envisages a $1bn, five-year project to build a campus for research into computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and robotics
- During the forum, SenseTime Founder Xiao’ou Tang gave Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad a demonstration of the company’s applications in autonomous driving, smart city, education and, healthcare