National Grid Partners, the investment arm of big power company National Grid, announced it has invested in three new startups in artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure, bringing its portfolio of investments in the past year to 18 companies.
NGP has invested in CNIguard, SparkCognition, and Uniphore. To date, NGP has invested $125 million of its $250 million venture fund in emerging…
AI can help doctors spot brain hemorrhages faster
October 24, 2019
The process relied on a convolutional neural network that pored over 4,396 CT scans. That’s a comparatively small number of samples, but the abnormalities were detailed “at the pixel level,” according to UCSF. In other words, they were far less likely to…
The Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence is calling for the U.S. government to make a $120 billion investment in the nation’s AI ecosystem over the course of the next 10 years. The report calls efforts by the Trump administration, like…
Researchers visualize climate change with AI-generated images
October 23, 2019
Generative AI models have been co-opted to synthesize things from faces and apartments to butterflies, but a novel subcategory seeks to bring awareness to climate change by illustrating the consequences of catastrophic flooding. In an effort to establish a metric to quantify the veracity of these synthetic climate change images, researchers University of Montreal and Stanford University…
Viz.ai, a healthcare startup that’s using artificial intelligence (AI) to help medical professionals spot the early signs of stroke, has raised $50 million in a series B round of funding led by Greenoaks, with participation from Alphabet’s VC arm GV and Kleiner…
Google’s Coral AI edge hardware launches out of beta
October 22, 2019
Last March, Google took the wraps off of Coral, a collection of hardware development kits and accessories intended to bolster the development of machine learning models at the edge. It launched in select regions in beta, but the tech giant today announced that it’s…
What’s the best way to measure the quality of media generated from whole cloth by AI models? It’s not easy. One of the most popular metrics for images is the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), which takes photos from both the target distribution and the model being evaluated and uses an AI object recognition system to capture important features and suss out similarities. But although several…
France’s aggressive push to develop its AI ecosystem seems to be paying dividends as the number of startups continues to soar.
A new report released today identified 432 AI-related startups in France, up from 312 last year and 180 back in 2016. The report was produced by…
Aurora Insight raises $18 million for sensors and AI that monitor radio frequency spectrum in near-real time
October 22, 2019
Keeping tabs on the ever-changing global connectivity map isn’t easy, particularly for the businesses spending billions to secure wireless spectrum. It’s this gap in strategic intelligence that motivated the founding of Aurora Insight, a Washington, D.C. startup using a…
Google Duplex, the futuristic service that uses AI to place phone calls and make reservations, can already book movie tickets and will soon be able to rent a car. The service has been rolled out across the US, and now international rollout is beginning with a test in New Zealand.
As spotted by The Verge, Google New Zealand has published a blog post announcing a pilot of the Duplex…
