AI & Robotics

This evening in Philadelphia, Comcast NBCUniversal’s Lift Labs Accelerator showcased the 11 companies in its second-ever class during a demo day in front of investors and the local tech community. The event marked the finale of the program’s 13-week program, during which each startup worked with Techstars’ bench of industry experts and Comcast brands including Xfinity, NBC, Telemundo, NBC…

Grammarly, the Kyiv, San Francisco, Vancouver, and New York startup behind the eponymous cross-platform grammar- and spell-checking platform, today revealed that it’s secured $90 million in its second-ever funding round, led by General Catalyst, with participation from IVP as well as undisclosed existing and new investors. CEO Brad Hoover said the fresh capital, which brings Grammarly’s total…

High-beam headlights cut through thick precipitation like a knife cuts through butter, but they’re a literal eyesore to oncoming drivers. That’s because most commercially available systems don’t automatically adjust to compensate for daytime brightness, and because they have a habit of producing glare. The problem spurred a team at Nvidia’s Drive Labs division to investigate an AI…

What might be the key to chatbots or voice-enabled assistants that respond in more natural, human-like ways? Researchers at Rasa, a Berlin, Germany-based startup developing a standard infrastructure layer for conversational AI, believe selective attention might play an outsized role. In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, they detail a system that can selectively ignore or attend to…