It’s already possible for robots to navigate without maps, but having them navigate well is another matter. You don’t want them to waste time backtracking, let alone fall down if they bump into an unexpected obstacle. Facebook might have a solution. It recently developed a distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that not only reaches its destination 99.9 percent of the time…
LumApps raises $70 million to fuel development of AI for its workplace collaboration platform
January 22, 2020
LumApps has raised a $70 million round of venture capital as the Paris-based startup seeks to bring more AI and machine learning capabilities to its workplace collaboration platform.
The company’s Social Intranet service is deployed internally by companies with the goal of…
Ever heard of FlyHash? It’s an algorithm inspired by fruit flies’ olfactory circuits that’s been shown to generate hash codes — numeric representations of objects — with superior performance compared with classical algorithms. Unfortunately, because FlyHash uses…
Facebook’s AI learns the relationships between physical places from first-person video footage
January 21, 2020
Computer vision systems generally excel at detecting objects but struggle to make sense of the environments in which those objects are used. That’s because they separate observed actions from physical context — even those that do model environments fail to discriminate between elements relevant to actions versus those that aren’t (e.g., a cutting board on the counter versus a random patch of…
Snyk raises $150 million at $1 billion valuation for AI that protects open source code
January 21, 2020
Snyk, a cybersecurity platform that helps developers find vulnerabilities in their open source applications, has raised $150 million in a round of funding led by New York-based private equity firm Stripes, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Coatue, Tiger Global…
IBM unveils Policy Lab, advocates ‘precision regulation’ of AI
January 21, 2020
During a panel discussion hosted by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday with Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Coordination Chris Liddell, and OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria, IBM formally announced the IBM…
Soft Robotics raised another $23 million to continue developing its solutions to the seemingly intractable problems gripping and sorting machines face.
As work published by MIT and others has established, picker robots struggle with complex poses and unfamiliar objects. That’s because they not only have to locate objects and understand how to grasp them, but because they’ve got to set them…
Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls for 'sensible regulation' of AI
January 20, 2020
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai takes his sweet time getting to the point in a new Financial Times editorial. But when he gets there, he leave’s little room for interpretation: “…there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to…
Supplier discovery often isn’t a walk in the park. According to a survey by Thomasnet, nearly 50% of buyers have worked with a supplier that unexpectedly went out of business. That’s why in 2015, four German entrepreneurs — Christian Heinrich, Fabian Heinrich, Gregor…
No matter the claimed robustness of AI and machine learning systems in production, none are immune to adversarial attacks, or techniques that attempt to fool algorithms through malicious input. It’s been shown that generating even small perturbations on images can fool the best of classifiers with high probability. And that’s problematic considering the wide proliferation of the “AI as a…
