While overall U.S. venture capital funding dipped in 2019, the artificial intelligence sector bucked this trend by reaching a new annual high for money raised by startups.
According to 2019 data from the National Venture Capital Association, 1,356 AI-related companies in the U.S. raised $18.457 billion. That topped the 1,281 companies that raised $16.8 billion in 2018, according to the Q4 2019…
KeyMe raises $35 million to duplicate keys with AI
January 15, 2020
Normally, duplicating a key would require an expensive trip to the locksmith, but New York-based KeyMe — which was founded in 2012 by Greg Marsh, former director of finance at auto tech company Aperia Technologies — hopes to change the paradigm with a network of…
Why do customers buy products seemingly irrelevant to their web and voice assistant searches? That’s a good question — and one a team of Amazon researchers sought to answer in a study scheduled to be presented at the upcoming ACM Web Search and Data Mining conference in…
Though it’s a coincidence that I’m writing this article roughly one year after my colleague Khari Johnson railed against the “public nuisance” of “charlatan AI,” the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) clearly inspired both missives. At the tail end of last year’s show, Khari called out a seemingly fake robot AI demo at LG’s CES press conference, noting that for society’s…
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute say they’ve developed a system that taps machine learning to analyze online comments and pick out those that defend or sympathize with disenfranchised peoples. Although it hasn’t been commercialized…
Google hopes to tap AI and machine learning to make speedy local weather predictions. In a paper and accompanying blog post, the tech giant detailed an AI system that uses satellite images to produce “nearly instantaneous” and high-resolution forecasts — on average…
Canon's Robotic Camera System controls multiple DSLRs from afar
January 13, 2020
Pro photographers who need to control multiple cameras at once just got a useful tool — if they have the right camera. Canon has introduced a CR-S700R Robotic Camera system that lets you remotely steer multiple DSLRs from a PC. You can only use it for still photos, but you can zoom, pan, tilt and roll when you’re trying to capture a sporting event from multiple angles. The absence…
On Monday, Waymo — the subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet that’s developing a full-stack driverless vehicle platform — announced that its cars have driven a combined 20 million autonomous miles to date, up from 10 million miles in October 2018. The metric…
Chinese court rules AI-written article is protected by copyright
January 13, 2020
A court in Shenzhen, China, has ruled that an article generated by artificial intelligence (AI) is protected by copyright, according to state news outlet China News Service, representing a notable milestone for AI’s credentials as a creative force.
For the past five years…
Obama-era tech advisors list potential challenges for the White House’s AI principles
January 13, 2020
Former Obama administration advisors say the White House regulatory AI principles announced this week are a good start in many ways, but they’re incorrect in their oversimplified mandate to avoid overregulation of private business use, and that the Trump administration could face an uphill battle in its appeal to the rest of the world.
Though the Trump administration has developed a reputation…
