AI & Robotics

Healx, a company that said it’s using artificial intelligence (AI) to discover new drug treatments for rare diseases, has raised $56 million in a series B round of funding led by Atomico, with participation from Intel Capital, Balderton Capital, Global Brain, Btov Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Cambridge Innovation Capital’s Jonathan Milner. Founded out of Cambridge in 2014, Healx’s…

Robots with truly humanlike dexterity are far from becoming reality, but progress accelerated by AI has brought us closer to achieving this vision than ever before. In a research paper published in September, a team of scientists at Google detailed their tests with a robotic hand that enabled it to rotate Baoding balls with minimal training data. And at a computer vision conference in June, MIT…

A faster, near real-time Google Assistant made its debut at a hardware event held today in New York, where the flagship Pixel 4 smartphone was also debuted. The next-generation Google Assistant can be used to open apps and deliver automated speech transcription from voice recordings, as well as using multi-turn dialogue to respond to multiple commands or queries. Google Assistant is also getting…

Fake news — loosely defined as a type of propaganda consisting of deliberate disinformation spread via traditional outlets or social media — is a menace. A December 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center suggests that 23% of U.S. adults have shared fake news, knowingly or unknowingly, with friends and others. It’s begun to erode trust in major television and newspaper outlets, studies show…