Company developments:
C3.ai Named a Leader in Worldwide Industrial IoT Platforms for Energy by IDC MarketScape – Jun. 20, 2019 (Yahoo Finance)
- C3.ai, a leading enterprise AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation, today announced it has been named a leader in IIoT platforms within the energy sector according to the IDC Marketscape: Worldwide Industrial IoT Platforms in Energy 2019 Vendor Assessment
- C3.ai delivers a software suite for rapidly developing, deploying, and operating large scale AI, predictive analytics, and IoT applications for any enterprise value chain in any industry, with a focus on industrial organizations
Chinese self-driving start-ups AutoX and Pony.ai get green light to offer rides on California roads – Jun. 20, 2019 (South China Morning Post)
- It marks the first time US robotaxi permits have been issued to companies of Chinese origin as players from both countries bet on a driverless future for urban transport
- Founded in 2016 by Xiao Jianxiong, a former assistant professor at Princeton University who was known as “Professor X”, AutoX has offices in the US and China and moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Hong Kong with a goal to “democratise autonomy” and make driverless technology universally accessible
Udacity launches nontechnical AI product manager nanodegree – Jun. 18, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Online education provider Udacity said today it’s launching a nanodegree program to teach product managers how to create AI-powered products. The nontechnical course will also teach product managers how to identify business opportunities with AI or machine learning
- “Students will start off by learning the foundations of AI and machine learning, starting with the unsupervised and supervised models that are used in industry today,” Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun told VentureBeat in an email
NVIDIA Builds DGX SuperPOD for Autonomous Vehicle Development – Jun. 18, 2019 (HPC)
- In a clear demonstration of why AI leadership demands the best compute capabilities, NVIDIA today unveiled the world’s 22nd fastest supercomputer — DGX SuperPOD — which provides AI infrastructure that meets the massive demands of the company’s autonomous-vehicle deployment program
- The system was built in just three weeks with 96 NVIDIA DGX-2H supercomputers and Mellanox interconnect technology. Delivering 9.4 petaflops of processing capability, it has the muscle for training the vast number of deep neural networks required for safe self-driving vehicles
M&A:
Samsung to expand artificial intelligence business with NPU unit – Jun. 18, 2018 (UPI)
- South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it is open to a major merger, if needed, as it seeks to expand the neural processing unit for its artificial intelligence business
- NPU allows computers to perform AI-related functions much faster than predecessors by accelerating neural network processing
Fundraising / investment:
Velodyne Lidar hires bankers for an IPO: Business Insider – Jun. 24, 2019 (Reuters)
- Autonomous vehicle technology company Velodyne Lidar has hired bankers for an initial public offering, Business Insider reported on Saturday, citing sources familiar with the process
- The San Jose, California-based company is working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup Inc, Royal Bank of Canada, and William Blair for a potential IPO, the report said. Velodyne is looking to surpass its private valuation of $1.8 billion and go public before the end of 2019, Business insider added, citing a source
Driverless car start-up Baraja worth $145m after latest fundraising – Jun. 24, 2019 (AFR)
- Autonomous vehicles may be years from ruling the roads but investors see promise in Australian player Baraja, valuing the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) provider at $145 million after a recent fundraise which made one founder a contender for the Financial Review Young Rich List
- Baraja has taken the type of telecommunications-grade laser that powers the internet and applied it to a LiDAR system, which measures the distance of surrounding objects for driverless cars
Indonesia’s NLP-focused AI startup Prosa bags Series A funding from GDP Venture – Jun. 20, 2019 (Deal Street Asia)
- Prosa.ai, an Indonesian AI startup focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP), has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from local VC firm GDP Venture
- Founded by NLP and speech experts Dr Ayu Purwarianti and Dessi Puji Lestari, and IT entrepreneur Teguh Eko Budiarto, Prosa.ai focuses on artificial intelligence for processing Bahasa Indonesia
Humanising Autonomy pulls in $5M to help self-driving cars keep an eye on pedestrians – Jun. 20, 2019 (TechCrunch)
- The company has raised a $5.3 million seed round from an international group of investors on the strength of its AI system, which it claims outperforms humans and works on images from practically any camera you might find in a car these days
- HA’s tech is a set of machine learning modules trained to identify different pedestrian behaviors — is this person about to step into the street? Are they paying attention? Have they made eye contact with the driver? Are they on the phone? Things like that
Text IQ raises $12.6 million for AI-powered sensitive information detection – Jun. 18, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Text IQ today announced a $12.6 million funding round for its sensitive information detection tool. The service helps government agencies and businesses comply with privacy legislation and laws requiring omission of personally identifiable information
- The funding will help grow Text IQ’s AI research and engineering team, as well as its sales and marketing teams. Funds will also be used to spur growth in Ireland and the European Union, where companies need to comply with GDPR privacy laws
Partnerships:
Victoria to trial automated vehicles in partnership with Telstra and Lexus – Jun. 24, 2019 (ZD Net)
- According to a blog post by Telstra chief technology officer Hakan Eriksson, “C-V2X is technology that lets cars talk to each other, and the environment around them, via 4G mobile networks, and via direct short-range wireless links”
- The project is researching cars fitted with this technology under controlled conditions and is testing several road safety features including Red-light Violator Warnings and Pedestrian Alert Right-Turn Assist, Pulford explained
O2 signs up European Space Agency to test satellite systems for driverless cars in Oxfordshire – Jun. 22, 2019 (The Telegraph)
- The project, at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus near Oxford, will see the mobile operator working with the European Space Agency, the British Space Agency, Spanish satellite operator Hispasat and driverless car start-ups to design systems that route traffic and road data to connected cars
Waymo just signed a deal to make self-driving cars for use in France and Japan – Jun. 20, 2019 (CNBC)
- Waymo has signed a deal with Renault and Nissan to develop self-driving cars and trucks for use in France, Japan and possibly other countries in Asia
- It’s the first agreement Waymo has signed to provide its technology and services to automakers working to build their own self-driving cars
Shopify announces new partner and developer tools, plus an AI-powered fulfillment network – Jun. 19, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Shopify claims its fulfillment network uses machine learning to ensure timely deliveries and lower shipping costs. The company’s inventory-allocation technology predicts the closest fulfillment centers and optimal inventory quantities per location. After a customer completes a checkout, the Shopify Fulfillment Network takes it from there
Nuro partners with Domino’s to deliver pizza via self-driving cars in Houston – Jun. 17, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Nuro, a self-driving car company founded by two former Google employees, this morning announced that it’s teaming up with Domino’s Pizza to pilot delivery in select Texas markets. Nuro plans to start by ferrying pizzas from one of Domino’s corporate-owned stores by Q4 2019 via its custom R1 vehicle in Houston, where it has been serving Kroger customers since earlier this year
- Once an order is ready to be delivered from a participating location, Domino’s employees will load it into one of several compartments in Nuro’s thin, stout R1, which packs a proprietary combo of laser sensors, cameras, and computers. The vehicles top out at 25 miles per hour and are fully driverless, although they are for now escorted by human-driven cars
Research / studies:
Researchers teach AI to write haikus – Jun. 21, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- Scientists have recruited AI to craft semi-coherent piano melodies and accompanying lyrics and to create snippets of pithy (not to mention human-like) prose. In a new paper (“Autonomous Haiku Generation”) published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, Stanford University students Rui Aguiar and Kevin Liao tasked a machine learning system with generating the last two lines of a haiku poem when given the first line
US CEO donates $188 million to study ethics and AI – Jun. 19, 2019 (ABC News)
- An American billionaire has given Oxford University 150 million pounds ($188.6 million) for a new institute that will study the ethical implications of artificial intelligence and its vast potential to change society as we know it
- The donation from Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone, will also fund a center to house all of the university’s humanities subjects in a single space to encourage collaborative study. The idea is to bring together those working on projects that make life worth living with those trying to make sure that the technology of the future works for the interest of society
Scientists use machine learning to improve gut disease diagnosis – Jun. 17, 2019 (Science News)
- A study published in the open access journal JAMA Open Network June 14 by scientists at the University of Virginia schools of Engineering and Medicine and the Data Science Institute says machine learning algorithms applied to biopsy images can shorten the time for diagnosing and treating a gut disease that often causes permanent physical and cognitive damage in children from impoverished areas
Government / policy:
DoD’s Joint AI Center to open-source natural disaster satellite imagery data set – Jun. 23, 2019 (VentureBeat)
- To encourage the use of machine learning for building damage assessment this week, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute and CrowdAI — the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint AI Center (JAIC) and Defense Innovation Unit — shared plans to open-source a labeled data set of some of the largest natural disasters in the past decade. Called xBD, it covers the impact of disasters around the globe, like the 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti