Company developments:
Aptiv’s self-driving cars hit 50,000 ride milestone in Las Vegas – Jun. 14, 2019 (NBC)
- Their fleet currently offers ride-sharing options through Lyft, as users have the option to request the self-driving cars if they’d like to
Facebook to open third London office with 100 new AI roles – Jun. 12, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Speaking at AI Summit, a two-day event within London’s annual Tech Week, Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president of Facebook for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), revealed that the company will add to its two existing London hubs with a new base on Shaftesbury Avenue, a prestigious thoroughfare in the center of the U.K. capital
- London has served as a key engineering hub for Facebook since 2016, and many of the company’s AI tools are developed at its Rathbone Square office. Indeed, startups in London and the broader U.K. have presented key acquisition targets for many of the big tech giants — last year, Facebook snapped up Bloomsbury AI, a startup building natural language processing (NLP) technology that could be used to combat fake news
GE Power touts AI-powered analytics tools to maintain electricity supplies – Jun. 11, 2019 (Silicon Angle)
- General Electric Co.’s subsidiary GE Power wants to help its electrical grid customers keep a better handle on their operations with a suite of new artificial intelligence-based analytics products that it says can make better use of their network data
- The new products leverage GE’s latest machine learning technology, which is a subset of AI that enables machines to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. They rely on data pulled from electrical grid operators’ networks, and are designed to boost operational efficiency, GE said
Yandex promises 100 driverless cars on the road by 2020 – Jun. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Russian tech giant Yandex has been testing autonomous vehicles on public roads since December 2017, starting in Moscow and later expanding to Innopolis and Skolkovo, Russia, as well as Las Vegas. The program’s next phase saw cars reach Tel Aviv’s city limits, and now, after five months of successful testing in Israel, the company is prepping for further expansion
- Yandex today announced that it’ll open a local Tel Aviv office with a team of self-driving engineers and that it plans to operate upwards of 100 driverless cars worldwide by the end of this year
Facebook launches PyTorch Hub for reproducing AI model results – Jun. 10, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- PyTorch Hub can quickly publish pretrained models to a GitHub repository by adding a hubconf.pyfile and publishing models using a GitHub pull request. PyTorch Hub comes with support for models in Google Colab and PapersWithCode
- “Our goal is to curate high-quality, easily reproducible, maximally beneficial models for research reproducibility. Hence, we may work with you to refine your pull request and in some cases reject some low-quality models to be published,” the PyTorch team said in a blog post today. “With the continued growth in the number of research publications, including tens of thousands of papers now hosted on arXiv, and submissions to conferences at an all-time high, research reproducibility is more important than ever.”
Google launches TensorFlow.Text library for language AI models – Jun. 10, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- At launch, TensorFlow.Text can recognize white space, unicode script, and predetermined sequences of word fragments like suffixes or prefixes that Google calls wordpieces. Wordpieces are commonly used in approaches like BERT, a pretraining technique for language models Google open-sourced last fall
- TensorFlow.Text’s tokenizers use RaggedTensors, a new kind of tensor made for recognizing text. RaggedTensors and Unicode support for TensorFlow were first detailed by Google engineer Mark Omernick earlier this year at the TensorFlow Dev Summit
Fundraising / investment:
Bellwethr Announces $2.5M Seed Funding – Jun. 12, 2019 (Yahoo Finance)
- Bellwethr, a machine learning-powered customer conversion, and retention platform, has just announced a $2.5 million seed funding round
- The financing comes at a pivotal time for the enterprise software company, priming it for rapid growth. The seed round was led by Royal Street Ventures, with participation from Greenway Capital, KCRise Fund, SaaS Venture Capital, Stout Street Capital, Beth Ellyn McClendon, Karen and Paul Fenaroli (Minerva Fund) amongst others
RealityEngines.AI raises $5.25M seed round to make ML easier for enterprises – Jun. 12, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- RealityEngines.AI, a research startup that wants to help enterprises make better use of AI, even when they only have incomplete data, today announced that it has raised a $5.25 million seed funding round. The round was led by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google founding board member Ram Shriram. Khosla Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Deepchand Nishar, Elad Gil, Keval Desai, Don Burnette and others also participated in this round
Alyce picks up $11.5 million Series A to help companies give better corporate gifts – Jun. 11, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Alyce, an AI-powered platform that helps sales people, marketers and event planners give better corporate gifts, has today announced the close of an $11.5 million Series A funding. The round was led by Manifest, with participation from General Catalyst, Boston Seed Capital, Golden Ventures, Morningside and Victress Capital
- According to Alyce, $120 billion is spent each year (just in the United States) on corporate gifts, swag, etc. Unfortunately, the impact of these gifts isn’t usually worth the hassle. No matter how thoughtful or clever a gift is, each recipient is a unique individual with their own preferences and style. It’s nearly impossible for marketers and event planners to find a one-size-fits-all gift for their recipients
Pryon raises $20 million to automate enterprise workloads with AI – Jun. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Pryon, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based provider of AI-powered tools targeting enterprise, today announced that it’s raised $20 million in a series A funding round in partnership with Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, with participation from Breyer Capital and Digital Alpha Advisors
- The capital infusion follows on the heels of a $4.5 million seed round in November 2018, and CEO Igor Jablokov says it’ll be used to further develop Pryon’s core product, grow its roster of Fortune 500 customers, and develop strategic partnerships
Vectra lands $100M Series E investment for AI-driven network security – Jun. 10, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- Vectra, a seven-year-old company that helps customers detect intrusions at the network level, whether in the cloud or on premises, announced a $100 million Series E funding round today led by TCV. Existing investors, including Khosla Ventures and Accel, also participated in the round, which brings the total raised to more than $200 million, according to the company
- As company CEO Hitesh Sheth explained, there are two primary types of intrusion detection. The first is end point detection and the second is his company’s area of coverage, network detection and response, or NDR. He says that by adding a layer of artificial intelligence, it improves the overall results
London Tech Entrepreneur Tej Kohli Pours $100m into AI & Machine Learning Ventures – Jun. 10, 2019 (Yahoo Finance)
- At London Tech Week: Tej Kohli, the London-based tech entrepreneur, has invested another $100m into Rewired, a robotics-focused venture studio with a humanitarian bent. Rewired is pioneering investment into artificial intelligence and machine learning ventures that will power the new economy, transform businesses, revolutionise global healthcare and even improve and extend human life
Partnerships:
VW, Ford Near Deal on Electric, Autonomous Vehicles – Jun. 13, 2019 (Transport Topics)
- Volkswagen AG is nearing a deal to cooperate with Ford Motor Co. on electric-car technology and self-driving vehicles, according to CEO Herbert Diess, who also called for a faster transformation of the German manufacturer
- Talks with Ford are “progressing well” and are close to being finalized, Diess said in prepared remarks seen by Bloomberg and delivered at a gathering of the carmaker’s 500 most senior executives in Wolfsburg, Germany. The pact, which already includes co-producing vans and pickups trucks, is part of VW’s plan to add scale and save costs to counter slower sales and record spending requirements to develop new technologies
Top US universities have ties with AI firm in Xinjiang security – Jun. 13, 2019 (ejinsight)
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at least one other university have research partnerships with a Chinese artificial intelligence company that has business ties with police in China’s Xinjiang region, where a sweeping crackdown on Uighurs has drawn international condemnation
- A 2016 government procurement announcement named a subsidiary of iFlytek as the sole supplier of 25 “voiceprint” collection systems to police in Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang. Another iFlytek subsidiary signed a “strategic cooperation framework agreement” with Xinjiang’s prison administration bureau, according to a May 2017 company blog post on social media platform WeChat
Alibaba A. I. Labs Partners with Audi, Renault and Honda for Intelligent In-car Experience – Jun. 11, 2019 (Yahoo Finance)
- Owners of the three auto brands’ specific-model vehicles equipped with Tmall Genie Auto will have access to a wide variety of voice-controlled information and services in the near future; these include identifying nearby attractions and restaurants, booking movie tickets, ordering to-go boxes, checking the status of package deliveries, reading children’s books and ordering items on Alibaba’s retail platform
- In addition, car owners with a Tmall Genie-compatible device at home would be able to monitor and control their smart-home devices from their cars in the near future, performing daily tasks such as running a status check on temperature and light, or turning on the heater and air conditioning at home
Fiat Chrysler and Aurora, A Driverless Car Company, Sign Agreement to Work Together – Jun. 10, 2018 (TechCrunch)
- The partnership will focus on integrating Aurora’s technology into FCA’s line of Ram Truck commercial vehicles, a portfolio that includes cargo vans and trucks. The deal could extend to FCA’s Fiat Professional brand as well, TechCrunch has learned
- The deal with Aurora aims to specifically develop and deploy self-driving commercial vehicles that could be used by any third party with a delivery-to-consumer need. For instance, once Aurora’s technology is integrated into its commercial vans, FCA could sell them to a third-party logistics company — like say, Amazon — that intends to use autonomous vehicles for deliveries
Research / studies:
Ford opens Israel tech lab in move toward driverless cars – Jun. 13, 2019 (Physics.org)
- Ford joined 130 local and international companies at Israel’s EcoMotion conference this week promoting the country’s smart transportation sector
- Chairman William Ford met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday as part of his visit, where he called Israel “ground zero” for technologies demanded by the fast-growing field of autonomous vehicles. General Motors, BMW and others have also recently opened Tel Aviv labs
Intel AI researchers combine reinforcement learning methods to teach 3D humanoid how to walk – Jun. 11, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Researchers from Intel’s AI Lab and the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute at Oregon State University have combined a number of methods to make better-performing reinforcement learning systems that can be applied to things like robotic control, systems governing autonomous vehicle function, and other complex AI tasks
- Collaborative Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (CERL) can achieve better performance in benchmarks like Humanoid, OpenAI’s Hopper, Swimmer, HalfCheetah, and Walker2D than gradient-based or evolutionary algorithms for reinforcement learning can on their own. Using the CERL approach, researchers were able to make a 3D humanoid agent walk upright with OpenAI’s Humanoid benchmark
Government / policy:
Spies may have used an AI-generated face to infiltrate US politics – Jun. 15, 2019 (Engadget)
- Experts talking to the AP believe that spies used AI to create a ‘photo’ of Katie Jones, a non-existent person used in an attempt to infiltrate the American political scene
- While the snapshot may have looked plausible with a cursory look, there were telltale clues like a blurry earring and hetero-chromatic eyes that didn’t quite line up. And crucially, that AI fakery might have been enough to fool some important political figures
House holds hearing on “deepfakes” and artificial intelligence amid national security concerns – Jun. 13, 2019 (CBS News)
- The House Intelligence Committee heard from experts on the threats that so-called “deep fake” videos and other types of artificial intelligence-generated synthetic data pose to the U.S. election system and national security at large. Witnesses at Thursday’s hearing included professors from the University of Maryland, University at Buffalo and other experts on AI and digital policy
- In a statement, the committee says it aims to “examine the national security threats posed by AI-enabled fake content, what can be done to detect and combat it, and what role the public sector, the private sector, and society as a whole should play to counter a potentially grim, ‘post-truth’ future,” during Thursday’s hearing
New Florida Law Just Legalized Driverless, Human-Less, Self-Driving Vehicles – Jun. 13, 2019 (Clean Technica)
- “The new law means human-less self-driving vehicles could be hitting the streets in the Sunshine State in the near future. The law also helps pave the way for rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft to expand the use of driverless vehicles, CBS Miami reported in May.” Of course, that also means Tesla once it rolls out its robotaxi network/app
- “The law also says that a human is not required to operate an autonomous vehicle and provides insurance guidelines for rideshare companies that use self-driving vehicles. The sponsor of the bill, Rep. Jason Fischer, said he wants the state to be a leader in allowing autonomous vehicle technology on roadways.”
Events:
Xinhua presents AI anchors at News Agencies World Congress – Jun. 15, 2019 (Xinhua.net)
- China’s official Xinhua News Agency presented its artificial intelligence (AI) news anchors at the sixth News Agencies World Congress here on Friday. Of the three anchors, One speaks English, one Chinese, and another Russian
- African News Agency CEO Grant Fredericks told Xinhua that AI is the future of where we are heading and he was pleased with Xinhua’s innovations