Locus Robotics, a Wilmington, Massachusetts-based warehouse robotics startup, today announced it has raised $150 million in series E funding at a $1 billion post-money valuation. The company says the funding will allow it to accelerate product innovation and global expansion. Locus expects that in the next four years, over a million warehouse robots will be installed and that the number of…
While appreciation of the potential impact AI can have on business processes has been building for some time, progress has not nearly been as quick as many initial forecasts led many organizations to expect.
Arin Bhowmick, chief design officer for IBM, explained to…
AI shapes people’s lives on a daily basis. It sets prices in retail stores and makes recommendations ranging from movies to romantic partners. But it’s an open question whether AI can become a trusted advisor or even a corrupting force, influencing people’s behavior…
Boston, Massachusetts-based AdmitHub, a startup developing a chatbot platform aimed at boosting student enrollment and graduation rates, today revealed it has raised $14 million in a series B round led by Rethink Education. The company, which also announced it will be rebranding as Mainstay, plans to put the funds toward expanding its workforce and acquiring new education customers.
The percentage…
Scaling AI: The 4 challenges you’ll face
February 15, 2021
Organizations of all sizes are embracing AI as a transformative technology to power their digital transformation journeys. Still the challenges around operationalizing AI at scale can still seem insurmountable, with a large number of projects failing.
I’ve worked in big…
AI progress depends on us using less data, not more
February 14, 2021
In the data science community, we’re witnessing the beginnings of an infodemic — where more data becomes a liability rather than an asset. We’re continuously moving towards ever more data-hungry and more computationally expensive state-of-the-art AI models. And that is…
Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy
February 14, 2021
Our thoughts are private – or at least they were. New breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence are changing that assumption, while at the same time inviting new questions around ethics, privacy, and the horizons of brain/computer interaction.
Research published last week from Queen Mary University in London describes an application of a deep neural network that can determine a…
AI Weekly: Techno-utopianism in the workplace and the threat of excessive automation
February 13, 2021
Every so often, VentureBeat writes a story about something that needs to go away. A few years back, my colleague Blair Hanley Frank argued that AI systems like Einstein, Sensei, and Watson must go because corporations tend to overpromise results for their products and…
Since the start of the pandemic, there’s been an influx of papers on epidemic forecasting. Indeed, as of February, a search for “COVID forecasting” on Google Scholar yields over 14,000 results. But while many researchers compare their approaches against traditional…
Colorado State University researchers Jason Stock and Tom Cavey have published a paper on an AI system that rewards dogs for doing tricks.
The computer science grad students trained image classification networks to determine whether a dog is sitting, standing, or lying down. If a dog responds to a command by adopting the correct posture, the machine dispenses a treat.
The students used an…
