Ada Support, a Toronto-based company developing AI-driven customer experiences, today revealed that it nabbed a $44 million series B tranche. Cofounder and CEO Mike Murchison says it will be used to scale Ada’s platform and provide enhanced functionality across traditional business silos, which could help organizations optimize customer service operations while improving overall customer…
Bnh.ai is a new law firm focused only on AI
March 19, 2020
When VentureBeat asked Andrew Burt why he was starting an AI-focused law firm, Burt was quick to clarify that it’s about AI analytics. But that didn’t answer the underlying question of why the world needs a law firm focused so precisely on this one key area.
“The…
Skylum’s photo editing app Luminar has used AI and machine learning tricks to bolster its last two major releases, bringing AI sky enhancement and object removal tools to version 3, then ML-automated sky replacement and face cleaning tools to version 4. Today, the company…
Members of the Google Brain team and Google AI this week open-sourced EfficientDet, an AI tool that achieves state-of-the-art object detection while using less compute. Creators of the system say it also achieves faster performance when used with CPUs or GPUs than other popular objection detection models like YOLO or AmoebaNet.
When tasked with semantic segmentation, another task related to object…
In a preprint paper, Microsoft researchers describe a machine learning system that reasons out the correct actions to take directly from camera images. It’s trained via simulation and learns to independently navigate environments and conditions in the real world, including…
Intel debuts Pohoiki Springs, a powerful neuromorphic research system for AI workloads
March 18, 2020
This morning, Intel announced the general readiness of Pohoiki Springs, a powerful self-contained neuromorphic system that’s about the size of five standard servers. It says the system will be available to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community via the cloud…
Over the past four years, the strongest demand for candidates with AI skills hasn’t come from IT departments, but from other business units within organizations. That’s according to a Gartner report that found that the number of AI jobs posted by IT was less than half of that from other departments, indicating that hiring strategies haven’t kept pace with demand in the AI labor market.
In…
Coronavirus fears halt autonomous vehicle testing for Uber, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Waymo, and others
March 17, 2020
Following Waymo’s announcement that it would limit its ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona and autonomous car testing on public California roads in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, several competitors adopted similar measures this week. Uber, GM’s Cruise, Aurora…
Researchers detail TrojAI, a framework for hardening AI models against adversarial attacks
March 17, 2020
One way to test machine learning models for robustness is with what’s called a trojan attack, which involves modifying a model to respond to input triggers that cause it to infer an incorrect response. In an attempt to make these tests more repeatable and scalable…
Tech Nation: U.S. companies raised 56% of global AI investment since 2015, followed by China and U.K.
March 17, 2020
A new report shines some light on the investments made into artificial intelligence (AI) between 2015 and 2019, revealing that the U.S. attracted more than half of all global AI investments during the five year period, followed by China and the U.K.
The UK Tech For a Changing World report was produced by government-funded Tech Nation, and focuses largely on the British digital economy. However, it…
