InterVenn Biosciences today raised $34 million to further develop its platform for precision medicine. The New York-based startup says the funds will be used to accelerate its go-to-market, expansion, and ongoing product R&D efforts. Mass spectrometry, a technique that measures the mass-to-charge ratio of ions, can be applied to genomics studies with implications for clinical medicine. But…

Emerging technology fields need industrywide metrics to measure progress. So a pun-loving chatbot startup called Pandorabots decided to put on a flashy Bot Battle. The Bot Battle consisted of two virtual beings chatting 24 hours a day, seven days a week for two weeks (unlike humans, AIs never tire). Viewers were invited to vote on the better chatbot. The first contestant, “Mark Zuckerb0rg,” is…

As the pandemic wears on, humanoid robots that can perform general tasks could become increasingly important. They can move heavy objects in warehouses, assist with last-yard deliveries, and potentially be involved in other tasks where low human-to-human contact is preferable for safety reasons. Agility Robotics is one of the companies making these helper robots. The company, which was spun out of…

Entity linking fulfills a key role in grounded language understanding. Given a text mention of an entity (e.g., the word “helpful”), an algorithm identifies the entity’s corresponding entry in a knowledge base (such as a Wikipedia article). To extend its usefulness, researchers at Google propose a new technique where language-specific mentions resolve to a language-agnostic knowledge base.