Bits and Bytes
Apple hires Google’s AI head
Google forms A.I. business unit. The latest in the AI talent wars, John Giannanderea, previously Google’s chief of search and AI, was hired to run Apple’s “machine learning and A.I. strategy.” It’s an important victory for Apple who has lagged behind in AI. Google took the change as an opportunity to put AI into its own business unit under recent TWIML guest Jeff Dean. As the AI “arms race” intensifies, larger players are putting ever more resources into solidifying their positions. Last week we shared a similar story from Microsoft on its own reorg to better focus on AI.
Researchers at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab train models to recognize dynamic events.
It’s easy for humans to recognize dynamic events, for example, opening a door, a book, or a bottle. MIT-IBM researchers hope to train models to recognize these types of dynamic events. They’ve released a Moments in Time dataset and are hosting a Moments in Time competition at CVPR. Note: I recently discussed similar work from the Univerisity of Montreal and startup Twenty Billion Neurons with its chief scientist Roland Memisevic.
GridGain’s newest release includes continuous learning framework.
The company’s in-memory computing framework based on Apache Ignite now includes machine learning and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network that enables companies to run ML and deep learning algorithms against petabyte-scale operational datasets in real-time.
Amazon SageMaker update.
They’ve added support for more instance sizes and open sourced their MXNet and Tensorflow containers. The updated containers can be downloaded to support local development.
Data scientist uses cloud ML to classify bowls of ramen.
Nevermind hot dog/not hot dog… Data scientist Kenji Doi used Google Cloud AutoML Vision to successfully identify the exact shop each bowl is made at. A very impressive feat when you consider how similar the bowls of ramen actually look.
Dollars and Sense
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Insider, an AI-enabled growth marketing platform, raises $11 million
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Comet.ml, a platform for managing AI projects, raises $2.3 million
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Audioburst, an AI-enabled audio search platform, raises $4.6 million from Samsung
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Conga to acquire, the contract discovery and analytics company Counselytics, to bolster AI strategy and document automation capabilities
