AI & Robotics

Onfido, a provider of cloud-based identity verification tools, today announced that it raised $100 million in equity financing. CEO Husayn Kassai says the bulk of the fresh capital will be put toward product R&D and global expansion, including further market penetration in North America. “Unlike most tech companies, our first investment check was $20,000 back in 2012, and we made that last…

Edited, a retail tech company leveraging AI to optimize product pricing, today announced that it raised $29 million. CEO Geoff Watts said the tranche will be put toward R&D and hiring as the company expands its global presence. Tools like Edited serve a real and present need in the over $3.53 trillion retail ecommerce market. Where price decision-making is concerned, retailers historically…

In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org this week, researchers at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) propose an AI technique to improve autonomous vehicles’ traffic movement predictions. It’s directly applicable to the driverless technologies that Uber itself is developing, which must be able to detect, track, and anticipate surrounding cars’ trajectories in order to…

Google today released a natural language processing systems benchmark — Xtreme — with nine tasks that require reasoning about semantics across 40 languages and 12 language families. Researchers at the tech giant assert it can evaluate whether AI models capture knowledge shared across languages, which can be useful for a growing number of natural language applications. The goal is to spur on…