The AI underlying assistants like Alexa gets better in part through manual data transcription and annotation, which takes outsized time and effort. In pursuit of a more scalable approach, scientists at Amazon — noting that people tend to reformulate misinterpreted commands — leveraged feedback from interactions to glean insights. In a paper detailing their work, they say that the automated…
Reonomy, a commercial real estate analytics company headquartered in New York, today announced that it’s raised $60 million in series D funding led by Georgian Partners. Existing investors including Sapphire Ventures contributed alongside Wells Fargo Strategic Capital and…
Applause targets AI bias by sourcing training data at scale
November 7, 2019
One of the biggest challenges — and there are many — facing the artificial intelligence (AI) realm today is inherent biases created by limited training data. Researchers have already demonstrated how Amazon’s facial analysis software, for example, distinguishes…
Snapdocs raises $25 million to streamline mortgages with AI
November 7, 2019
Real estate tech company Snapdocs today revealed that it has raised $25 million in series B funding to further develop its products and platform. Coinciding with the news, the San Francisco-based company announced the opening of a new office in Denver, Colorado. Snapdocs said the new office would serve as a center for a “wide variety” of roles, with an emphasis on engineering and…
Nightfall (formerly Watchtower AI), a San Francisco-based provider of cloud data loss prevention solutions, today emerged from stealth with $20.3 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock, with participation from Pear VC and Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath. CEO…
Miso Robotics seeks $30 million in equity crowdfunding campaign
November 7, 2019
Pasadena, California-based Miso Robotics is pursuing an unconventional approach to fundraising. The robotics company announced that instead of securing a tranche from institutional investors, as is typical for young startups, it will kick off an equity crowdfunding round…
Nvidia unveils Jetson Xavier NX for edge AI
November 6, 2019
Nvidia today unveiled the Jetson Xavier NX, a module for training and deploying AI systems on edge devices like drones, cars, and robots. The Xavier NX is about the size of a credit card that can achieve 21 TOPS for AI workloads, while consuming as little as 10 watts of power.
The Xavier NX will retail for $399 and be available in March.
“So we’ve taken Xavier and tuned it for extremely high…
Samsung’s VASTA system uses AI to let users program smartphone tasks visually, without coding
November 6, 2019
Assistants like Samsung’s Bixby are fairly versatile where task automation is concerned — they’ll perform multi-step commands like “Open Facebook and share the three most recent photos” without complaint — but they’re not perfect. It’s incumbent on developers…
Whenever an Adobe event offers Sneaks — quick previews of what its researchers are working on — there’s a caveat that the “projects” might not wind up in shipping products. But they often do, and if that happens with the company’s just-revealed collection of…
Neural Magic raises $15 million to boost AI training speed on off-the-shelf processors
November 6, 2019
Despite the proliferation of accelerator chips like Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) and Intel’s forthcoming Nervana NNP-T, most machine learning practitioners are limited by budget or design to commodity processors. Unfortunately, these processors tend to train sophisticated AI models rather slowly, exacerbating one of the many challenges involved in AI R&D.
Hence, Neural Magic. MIT…
