Bits & Bytes
Philips and Microsoft launch AI products for healthcare.
- The HIMSS Conference is going on this week, so healthcare AI is in the news. Philips announced a suite of AI-powered tools for diagnostic imaging, patient monitoring, oncology, genomics and other applications. Meanwhile, Microsoft launched a number of new healthcare tools and products powered by AI and Azure.
Microsoft also updated several of its hosted artificial intelligence algorithms.
- Their Custom Vision service (see my article on Google’s AutoML) is now in public preview, and they’ve updated their Face API.
Amazon Alexa’s head AI researcher, Ashwin Ram has left for Google.
- Ram will be joining Google as the technical director of AI for Google Cloud. Amazon has a reputation for being fairly litigious when it comes to departing talent, so I wonder if there’s a lawsuit in the works here.
Google and Microsoft announce new AI learning portals.
- Google’s offering includes lessons on core ML concepts as well as in-depth Tensorflow tutorials. Microsoft’s is similarly structured, with boot camp style content as well as more detailed product guides.
AI2 launches Project Alexandria to develop “common sense” AI.
- Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, announced a $125m fund for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) to kickstart new research into common sense AI. The first challenge is to develop a set of standard measurements for the common sense abilities of an AI system, which sounds like a great place to start!
Dollars & Sense
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Spring Discovery, an AI-based drug discovery platform, lands $4.25 million seed.
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Spruce Up, a company using machine learning for interior design raises $1.5M.
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CounterFlow AI, a cybersecurity startup closes $2.7M in seed funding.
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Wecash, the Chinese big data startup, raises $160m led by ORIX Asia, Sea Group.
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Tellius raises $7.5M to transform business analytics with AI.
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Genesys, a customer support and contact center solution company acquires Altocloud to bolster analytics offerings.
