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 intriguing features, Adobe users can look forward to a lot of AI assistance in the foreseeable future, including tools for…
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…
Extended warranties are big business. How big? A report from Research and Markets estimates the segment will reach a whopping $50.2 billion by 2026. There’s unsurprisingly merchant interest in the opportunity, but most sellers lack the know-how and bandwidth required to…
AI holds enormous promise for the public sector — at least theoretically. But in practice, integrating AI components into public sector apps is limited by the fragility of those components and by mismatches among them. For example, if a machine learning model is trained on data that’s different from data in an operational environment, the component’s performance will be dramatically…
NVIDIA's AI will help USPS handle packages 10 times faster
November 5, 2019
The US Postal Service (USPS) delivers an estimated 146 billion pieces of mail annually, including 6 billion packages. In an attempt to process package data more efficiently, USPS is experimenting with AI. Today, NVIDIA announced that it will provide USPS with its AI tech.
How can you distinguish between satire and fake news? It usually comes down to semantic and linguistic differences, but the nuances can be tough to spot. That’s why researchers at George Washington University, Amazon AWS AI, and startup AdVerifai investigated a machine…
Facebook details wav2vec, an AI algorithm that uses raw audio to improve speech recognition
November 5, 2019
Automatic speech recognition, or ASR, is a foundational part of not only assistants like Apple’s Siri, but dictation software such as Nuance’s Dragon and customer support platforms like Google’s Contact Center AI. It’s the thing that enables machines to parse utterances for key phrases and words and that allows them to distinguish people by their intonations and pitches.
Perhaps it goes…
HomeLight raises $109 million for AI that matches home buyers with real estate agents
November 5, 2019
San Francisco-based HomeLight, which develops AI-driven software and services for home buyers, sellers, and real estate agents, today announced that it has raised $109 million in funding from a raft of investors, bringing its total raised to over $160 million. Zeev Ventures…
Untether AI, a Toronto-based startup that’s developing high-efficiency, high-performance chips for AI inferencing workloads, this morning announced that it has raised a $20 million series A round, following a small seed investment. Radical Ventures joined Intel Capital and…
RedMarlin raises $10 million to fight counterfeiting with AI
November 5, 2019
Counterfeiting isn’t a new problem, but it’s a growing one. The global market for fake goods is estimated to exceed $1.2 trillion. Counterfeits take roughly $300 billion worth of revenue away from brands that have to compete with them. In worse news still, roughly two out of every five products purchased online was counterfeit, according to the U.S. Government of Accountability Office.
Perhaps…
