Bits & Bytes

In a publicity stunt in the spirit of Deep Blue’s match with Garry Kasparov, or IBM Watson’s appearance on Jeopardy, IBM hosted the first ever live public debate between its Project Debater AI and a human in San Francisco last week. The company has published several datasets and technical papersoutlining various components of the system.

At last week’s CVPR, NVIDIA researchers presented research into a deep learning model for interpolating between video frames to produce slow-motion video from a standard 30-frame-per-second video.

In a recent update, Amazon SageMaker has added support for PyTorch deep learning models. I’m now wondering if the fast.ai course and library can be completed on SageMaker. AWS is also now supporting the latest stable TensorFlow versions.

Berkeley-based Bonsai, a client of mine and sponsor of last year’s Industrial AI series, offers a deep reinforcement learning platform for enterprise AI. I’m super excited for them and looking forward to seeing how things evolve now that they’ll be part of Microsoft.

Researcher Sebastian Ruder has put together an interesting project to track the SOTA of a variety of problems in natural language processing.

Dollars & Sense

AI-powered fitness startup Vi raises $20 million
Falkonry, a provider of machine learning software for manufacturing, raised $4.6 million in Series A funding
Prifender, whose software uses AI to map PII in enterprise data systems, raised a $5M seed round
AI-as-a-service startup Noodle.ai announced a $35 million round led by Dell Technologies
WalkMe announced that it has acquired DeepUI, whose ML models seek to understand any software at the GUI level, without the need for an API
Twitter has agreed to buy San Francisco-based Smyte, which offers tools to stop online abuse, harassment, and spam, and protect user accounts
PayPal announced today that it has agreed to acquire Simility, a leading fraud prevention and risk management platform provider for $120 million