JJ Abrams’ film company Bad Robot has launched its own game development studio, Bad Robot Games Studio. The entertainment company run by the Star Wars filmmaker has hired Michael Booth, a veteran game creator behind titles such as Valve’s Left 4 Dead.
Booth will be the general manager of the internal studio, and he will report to former Valve and Oculus leader Anna Sweet, who was recently…
Sensorium has teamed up with Mubert to develop AI-driven DJs that can create music at virtual concerts in virtual reality. It’s the latest in an effort to create artificial people, or virtual beings.
Los Angeles-based Sensorium is known for providing simulated virtual…
Papercup raises $10.5 million to dub videos with AI-generated speech
December 10, 2020
Papercup, a U.K.-based startup developing speech translation technology for video creators, has raised $10.5 million in venture funding. The company says the funds will be put toward machine learning research and expanding its human-in-the-loop quality control feature for…
Salesforce today peeled back the curtains on ReceptorNet, a machine learning system researchers at the company developed in partnership with clinicians at the University of Southern California’s Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC. The system, which can determine a critical biomarker for oncologists when deciding on the appropriate treatment for breast cancer…
SoftBank has reportedly sold Boston Dynamics to Hyundai
December 10, 2020
Hyundai Motors is acquiring Boston Dynamics, according to The Korea Economic Daily. The publication says Softbank has agreed to sell the robot maker for 1 trillion won (US$917 million) and that the acquisition will be finalized at a board meeting today, December 10th. The…
Google will investigate the controversial exit of a top AI ethicist
December 10, 2020
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has pledged to investigate the departure of a top AI ethics researcher, according to a company-wide memo Axios obtained. Pichai also apologized for how Google handled Dr. Timnit Gebru’s exit.
“I’ve heard the reaction to Dr. Gebru’s…
Bias in AI is pervasive. From dermatological models that discriminate against patients with dark skin to exam-scoring algorithms that disadvantage public school students, one needn’t look far for examples of prejudice encoded in AI systems. But how do these biases arise in the first place? Researchers at Columbia University sought to uncover this by tasking 400 AI engineers with creating…
Managed enterprise AI startup DataRobot today announced an additional $50 million raise from strategic investors Snowflake Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Together, the fresh capital expands DataRobot’s series F round led by Altimeter…
Parallel Domain, a startup developing a synthetic data generation platform for AI and machine learning applications, today emerged from stealth with $11 million in funding. The company, which has over 25 employees and customers in auto manufacturing and drone delivery, plans…
During IBM’s virtual AI Summit this week, the company announced updates across its Watson family of products in the areas of language, explainability, and workplace automation. A new feature called Reading Comprehension surfaces answers from databases of enterprise documents in response to natural language questions, assigning a confidence score to each response. A novel module in Watson…
