Following Twitter, Google and YouTube have become the latest companies to send a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, the startup behind a controversial facial recognition program that more than 600 police departments across North American use. Clearview came under scrutiny earlier this year when The New York Times showed that the company had been scraping billions of images on the…
Google Assistant can now say where your Tile is
February 5, 2020
Tracking gadget Tile has been a boon to the forgetful, and now it’s set to get even more helpful. Previously, you could use Google Assistant to ring your Tile, so finding your keys or wallet was a matter of listening out for the beep. Now, though, it’s able to…
Cherre raises $16 million to analyze real estate data with AI
February 5, 2020
Real estate data collection and analytics costs can total in the millions of dollars. That’s why in 2016, L.D. Salmanson founded Cherre, a startup that leverages AI to cost-effectively resolve property data from disparate public and private sources. After raising $9…
IDC predicts that worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by 2025, which will invariably put a strain on infrastructure as organizations look to sort, search, scan, and otherwise derive value from this data. That’s where NGD Systems comes in — it’s an Irvine, California-based company offering a computational storage drive tailor-made for on-device AI and machine workloads. To lay a…
How AI helped upscale an antique 1896 film to 4K
February 4, 2020
When the 50-second silent short film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat premiered in 1896, some theatergoers reportedly ran for safety at the sight of a projected approaching train, thinking that a real one would burst through the screen at any moment…
If Amazon has its way, companies will soon tap Amazon Web Services (AWS) en masse to create voices tailored to their brands. The Seattle tech giant today launched Brand Voices, a fully managed service within Amazon Polly, Amazon’s cloud service that converts text into…
Kaskada raises $8 million to facilitate AI feature engineering
February 4, 2020
Feature engineering — the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data — is essential to tuning machine learning performance. It’s also typically arduous and involves rewriting features before they’re deployed, which is why in 2018 Ben Chambers and Davor Bonaci cofounded Kaskada, which uses mining techniques to compute and serve AI features in real time.
Today the…
Labelbox raises $25 million to grow its data-labeling platform for AI model training
February 4, 2020
Labelbox today announced the close of a $25 million series B funding round to grow its platform that labels data needed to train AI systems.
The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund, Kleiner…
BenchSci raises $22 million for AI-powered drug discovery tools
February 4, 2020
Assessing the health of pharmaceutical R&D by unearthing hidden patterns in procurement data is a task made simpler by AI. At least, that’s the pitch given by David Qixiang Chen, Elvis Wianda, Liran Belenzon, and Tom Leung, who cofounded BenchSci in 2015. The Toronto…
Apple details AI to help voice assistants recognize hotwords and multilingual speakers
February 3, 2020
Speech recognition is an acute area of interest for Apple, whose cross-platform Siri virtual assistant is used by over 500 million customers worldwide. This past week, the tech giant published a series of preprint research papers investigating techniques to improve voice trigger detection and speaker verification, as well as language identification for multiple speakers.
Speaker verification and…
