What’s happened in AI: May 13th-May 19th

By | May 24, 2019
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China’s focus on facial recognition continues to expand to various use cases. The latest? Pandas. Our favorite bear is now the subject of a new app developed by China’s Research and Conservation Centre. Given there’s less than 2,000 wild pandas left, the government is focusing on ways to conserve the population. More weekly news below.

Company developments:

In Japan, driverless tractors are on the move – May. 18, 2019 (The Hindu)

  • A number of Japanese machinery manufacturers are betting big on the future of agriculture being ‘smart’ and automated. Iseki and Co. Ltd, one of the archipelago’s largest players in the field, already manufactures driverless, smart rice transplanters that fertilize as they transplant, while simultaneously measuring soil depth and sending the relevant information to fertilizer dispensers
  • This driverless tractor came in the market in December 2018. It can sense any obstruction on the field and come to an automatic halt when needed. It can make U-turns using GPS technology to determine its location. The machine can also be used for tilling the ground and applying the optimal amount of fertilizer and pesticide. Katsushi Miwada, the general manager of Iseki’s Agri-Business Solutions Department, says driverless tractors are likely to become popular faster than autonomous cars, given that they need to worry less about compensating for the behaviour of other vehicles and pedestrians

Microsoft aims to train and certify 15,000 workers on AI skills by 2022 – May. 17, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Microsoft is investing in certification and training for a range of AI-related skills in partnership with education provider General Assembly, the companies announced this morning. The goal is to train some 15,000 people by 2022 in order to increase the pool of AI talent around the world. The training will focus on AI, machine learning, data science, cloud and data engineering and more
  • In the new program’s first year, Microsoft will focus on training 2,000 workers to transition to an AI and machine learning role. And over the full three years, it will train an additional 13,000 workers with AI-related skills

UBS looks to machine learning to plug FX liquidity gaps – May. 14, 2019 (KFGO)

  • First rolled out to a limited numbers of clients in May 2018, it helped volumes in the bank’s algorithmic FX business double in 2018. That made UBS the fastest-growing FX algo broker by market share from the second to the fourth quarter, according to Boston Consulting Group and Expand, a benchmarking house for financial institutions
  • UBS is not the only large bank investing millions of dollars in algo technology as it cuts back on trading teams and relies more on automatically computed strategies to trade more efficiently. JP Morgan, which also reported double-digit growth in its algorithmic trading business in recent months, has released a new machine learning algorithm, and Citibank is another top player in electronic currency trading.

M&A:

HPE Acquiring Cray For $1.3 Billion To Drive Supercomputing And AI – May. 17, 2019 (CRN)

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled Friday its intent to acquire global supercomputer innovator Cray for approximately $1.3 billion in a move to take high-performance computing (HPC) to the next level with new solutions such as HPC-as-a-Service through HPE GreenLake
  • “Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data,” said HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri in a statement. “Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high-performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work.”

Fundraising / investment:

Health at Scale lands $16M Series A to bring machine learning to healthcare – May. 17, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Health at Scale, a startup with founders who have both medical and engineering expertise, wants to bring machine learning to bear on healthcare treatment options to produce outcomes with better results and less aftercare. Today the company announced a $16 million Series A. Optum, which is part of the UnitedHealth Group, was the sole investor
  • “We are a machine learning shop, and we focus on what I would describe as precision delivery. So in other words, we look at this question of how do we match patients to the right treatments, by the right providers, at the right time,” Zeeshan Syed, Health at Scale CEO told TechCrunch

Revenue Analytics raises $11 million to predict product pricing with AI – May. 16, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Today, in anticipation of substantial growth this year, Revenue Analytics revealed that it has raised $11 million in a series A round led by Noro-Moseley Partners, with participation from Blue Lagoon Capital. The fresh funds will be used to hire at least 50 people across the company’s sales, marketing, and product development teams in the next 12-18 months, said CEO Dax Dross
  • “There is truly no company that has had more success in helping companies apply predictive analytics to commercial decisions than ours,” said Cross. “But we’re even more excited about our future. Thanks to the investment by Noro-Moseley Partners and Blue Lagoon Capital and the expertise they bring to the table, we can now grow faster and have even greater impact. Scaling the company drives our mission of creating value and enriching lives.”

Quadric raises $15 million to accelerate AI at the edge – May. 14, 2019 (VentureBeat)

  • Quadric, a Burlingame, California-based startup developing a custom-designed chip and software suite for autonomous systems, today announced that it has raised $15 million in a funding round led by automotive components manufacturer Denso, which plans to integrate Quadric’s technology into its autonomous driving stack. Pear, Uncork Capital, SV Angel, Cota Capital, and Trucks Venture Capital also participated
  • “We’re developers ourselves and have seen the shortcomings of existing technologies for real-time edge computing — we’re building the Quadric platform to address this and unlock new capabilities that will accelerate development of autonomous systems,” said Quadric CEO and cofounder Veerbhan Kheterpal. “Quadric is the next step in the virtuous cycle of better platforms enabling better algorithms, leading to better app engagement that in turn drives better innovation.”

Algorithmia raises $25M Series B for its AI automation platform – May. 14, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • Algorithmia, a Seattle-based startup that offers a cloud-agnostic AI automation platform for enterprises, today announced a $25 million Series B funding round led by Norwest Partners. Madrona, Gradient Ventures, Work-Bench, Osage University Partners and Rakuten Ventures also participated in this round
  • While the company started out five years ago as a marketplace for algorithms, it now mostly focuses on machine learning and helping enterprises take their models into production. “It’s actually really hard to productionize machine learning models,” Algorithmia CEO Diego Oppenheimer told me. “It’s hard to help data scientists to not deal with data infrastructure but really being able to build out their machine learning and AI muscle.”

Houston AI-enabled retail energy platform receives $18.2M investment – May. 14, 2019 (Innovation Map)

  • Houston-based Innowatts has closed its Series B funding round lead by Energy Impact Partners. The company, which enables artificial intelligence through its retail energy technology platform, secured a $18.2 million investment. Current funders also include Shell Ventures, Iberdrola, and Energy and Environment Investment (EEI Japan) — which all three supported the company in its Series A — along with new investor Evergy Ventures
  • The funds will be used to grow the company’s eUtilityTMplatform technology — a B2B cloud-based software tool to help retail energy providers better deliver quality energy services and insights to clients. The eUtilityTM platform already processes meter data from over 21 million customers globally and across 13 regional energy markets, according to the release

India’s Locus raises $22 million to expand its logistics management business – May. 13, 2019 (TechCrunch)

  • The financing round for the four-year-old startup was led by Falcon Edge Capital and Tiger Global. Existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date, Nishith Rastogi, co-founder and CEO of Locus, told TechCrunch in an interview
  • Locus works with companies that operate in FMCG, logistics and e-commerce spaces. Some of its clients include Tata Group companies, Myntra, BigBasket, Lenskart and Bluedart. It helps these clients automate their logistics workload — tasks such as planning, organizing, transporting and tracking of inventories, and finding the best path to reach a destination — that have traditionally required intensive human labor

Partnerships:

YSEOP and LTI Announce Strategic Partnership to Drive NLG Deployments at Global Scale – May. 16, 2019 (Yahoo Finance)

  • Founded in 2007, YSEOP’s breakthrough NLG technology platform relies on numerous patents and extensive real-world experience gained successfully delivering hundreds of NLG projects to Fortune 5000 clients. It is recognized for its unique capabilities to industrialize and achieve scale delivering complex and personalized report generation. YSEOP clients benefit through a variety of operating efficiencies and lower costs
  • With operations in 30 countries and unrivalled industry expertise of over 22 years, LTI is a market leader in offering accelerated digital transformation to enterprises across the globe. YSEOP’s NLG platform will further strengthen LTI’s capabilities to address the growing need for intelligent automation with the best-in-class solutions

Penske Joins Autonomous Vehicle Coalition PAVE – May. 14, 2019 (Transport Topics)

  • Penske Truck Leasing has joined Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, a coalition of industry leaders that seeks to educate and assure the public about automated vehicles, according to a news release from the two organizations. It was the first membership of a major trucking firm for PAVE, which was founded in 2018, according to Penske
  • Penske officials told Transport Topics they signed up for PAVE after seeing some autonomous trucking technology at CES, the world’s largest technology show, held in January in Las Vegas. It was at CES that Penske realized that membership in PAVE might help the Reading, Pa., company communicate with customers about the growing sophistication of its trucks. Penske owns 311,000 vehicles through its leasing, logistics and rental companies

Research / studies:

NLP identifies cancer patients suffering in silence from social isolation – May. 17, 2019 (AI in Healthcare)

  • A natural language processing algorithm has achieved 90% precision in automatically spotting signs of social isolation in cancer patients by “reading” clinical notes in a hospital’s electronic health record. The feat was the work of behavioral scientists and biomedical informaticists at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Their findings are running online in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
  • The researchers developed a lexicon and NLP pipelines able to extract from digitized clinical notes terms like “lack of social support,” “lonely,” “social isolation,” “no friends” and “loneliness.” They trained the algorithm on 55,516 clinical notes from a random sampling of 3,130 patients, using a dataset of 1,057 other prostate-cancer patients as their test mechanism. The tool identified 35 unique patients, about 1.2% of the experimental cohort, who were likely to be suffering from social isolation

China is the biggest obstacle to US AI advancement, half of CEOs say – May. 14, 2019 (Tech Republic)

  • US CEOs are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence (AI), but are faced with international challenges when it comes to automation dominance, according to a Tuesday report from EY. Of the 500 US CEOs and business leaders surveyed, 85% describe themselves as “AI optimists,” with 87% reporting that their companies plan to invest in AI initiatives this year
  • “AI is transforming businesses for the better, as CEOs and boards are seeing the bottom-line impact the technology is having on their businesses,” Jeff Wong, EY global chief innovation officer, said in a press release. “This drive for greater economic impact has led to a global race for adoption, scaling and greater efficiencies in the technology.”

Government / policy:

China says it’s created a facial recognition app for pandas – May. 19, 2019 (Quartz)

  • Researchers from the China Conservation and Research Centre for Giant Pandas have developed an app that could recognize individual pandas using facial recognition technology, the Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Friday (May 17)
  • According to a 2014 census conducted by the Chinese government, there are fewer than 2,000 giant pandas left in the wild, and they live in three provinces in western China. The country has taken a proactive role in conservation efforts, announcing last year that it would build a 10,476-square-mile panda reserve called the Giant Panda National Park at a cost of at least 10 billion yuan ($1.45 billion)

China to further promote AI in education – May. 17, 2019 (XinhuaNet)

  • China will continue promoting the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in education to facilitate teaching and learning a variety of subjects, said Minister of Education Chen Baosheng at the ongoing International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education
  • China has issued several plans for the integrated development of AI and education and supporting the modernization of education with information technologies, Chen said at a ministerial forum held during the conference

EU project uses AI to boost turbine performance and efficiency – May. 17, 2019 (Smart Energy)

  • The project, called ELEMENT is led by Scotland-based Nova Innovation, and has the goal of cutting the lifetime cost of energy by 17%. Other organisations that make up the consortium include IDETA, Chantier Bretagne Sud, Innosea, Wood, Nortek AS, University of Strathclyde, DNV GL UK, France Energies Marines, Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult and ABB UK
  • The project, valued at €5 million project will commence in June 2019, and will include AI technology born in the wind energy industry in the wave-energy turbines, to deliver an adaptive control system to improve performance. According to Nova Innovation, AI technology has been successful in the wind energy sector in recent years. The technology allows for turbines to be adapted continually to changing conditions, thereby generating significant commercial benefits

The NYPD uses altered images in its facial recognition system, new documents show – May. 16, 2019 (The Verge)

  • A new report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology (CPT) has uncovered widespread abuse of the New York Police Department’s facial recognition system, including image alteration and the use of non-suspect images. In one case, officers uploaded a picture of the actor Woody Harrelson, based on a witness description of a suspect who looked like Harrelson. The search produced a match, and the matched suspect was later arrested for petty larceny
  • In more complex cases, image editing software can be used to manipulate a photo to create a higher chance of an affirmative match. One training presentation recommends the “removal of facial expression technique,” in which an open-mouthed subject is edited into a neutral mug shot expression. Crucially, this can mean pasting in stock images of eyes or lips, which can affect the matching algorithm in unpredictable ways

Public safety, civil rights groups battle over face ID tech – May. 13, 2019 (Spectrum News)

  • San Francisco is on track to become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition by police and other city agencies, reflecting a growing backlash against a technology that’s creeping into airports, motor vehicle departments, stores, stadiums and home security cameras
  • Efforts to restrict its use are getting pushback from law enforcement groups and the tech industry, though it’s far from a united front. Microsoft, while opposed to an outright ban, has urged lawmakers to set limits on the technology, warning that leaving it unchecked could enable an oppressive dystopia reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel “1984.”