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…
The internet can be a difficult place to navigate for people who are blind or who have low vision. A large portion of content on the internet is visual, and unless website creators use alt text to label their images, it’s hard for users of screen readers or Braille…
Issa Rae is Google Assistant's newest celebrity voice
October 10, 2019
The long-promised John Legend voice eventually landed on Google Assistant back in April, now we’ve got the next celebrity voice offering in the form of the brilliant actress, writer and producer, Issa Rae. Just say, “Hey Google, talk like Issa,” or switch…
Nvidia’s AI prevents car high beams from producing glare
October 9, 2019
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…
Benchmarks made to measure the performance of AI systems that control robots are often limited to expensive hardware designed for industrial environments that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Researchers from UC Berkeley and Google Brain addressed this problem by…
White sharks are being spotted off the Pacific coast more than ever before. A 2014 study found that, at minimum, California’s shark population now exceeds 2,000. And the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reports that since 1950, there’s been at least 158…
Rasa’s conversational AI can selectively ignore bits of dialogue to improve its responses
October 9, 2019
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…
MIT-IBM developed a faster way to train video recognition AI
October 9, 2019
Machine learning has given computers the ability to do things like identify faces and read medical scans. But when it’s tasked with interpreting videos and real-world events, the models that make machine learning possible become large and cumbersome. A team from…
AI startups on pace to break funding records in 2019
October 9, 2019
Artificial intelligence’s potential to transform a growing range of industries has venture capitalists writing checks to promising startups at a rate that will likely set a new record in 2019 for the industry.
According to the Q3 2019 data from the National Venture Capital…
MIT CSAIL’s AI detects possible IP address hijacking
October 9, 2019
Border gateway protocol (BGP), a routing protocol used to transfer data and information between different host gateways, is fundamental to the internet’s design. Unfortunately, it’s flawed in two respects: It lacks route authentication and basic origin validation. That makes BGP liable to cause connectivity issues in the event of misconfigurations, and worrisomely opens the door to malicious…
