Bits & Bytes
Elon Musk, DeepMind co-founders promise never to make killer robots.
- The founders have signed on to the Future of Live Institute’s pledge to develop, manufacture or use killer robots, which was published at the annual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Stockholm, Sweden
Huawei plans AI chips to rival Nvidia, Intel.
- The company is reportedly developing AI chips for both networking equipment and the datacenter in an effort to strengthen its position in growing AI market and to compete with the likes of Nvidia and Intel.
Let the sniping continue.
- Facebook has hired Shahriar Rabii to lead its chip initiative. Rabii previously worked at Google, where he helped lead the team in charge of building the Visual Core chip for the company’s Pixel devices. Apple has appointed former Google AI exec John Giannandrea to lead a new artificial intelligence and machine learning team, to include the Siri unit.
Interesting projects.
- Researchers at Nvidia, MIT, and Aalto University presented an approach to automatically removing noise, grain, and even watermarks from photos at ICML. A Google researcher along with collaborators from academia have developed a deep learning-based system for identifying protein crystallization, achieving a 94% accuracy rate and potentially improving the drug discovery process by making it easier to map the structures of proteins. Google revealed “Move Mirror,” an ML experiment that matches user’s poses with images of other people in the same pose.
Dollars & Sense
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R4 Technologies, a Ridgefield, Connecticut-based AI startup created by Priceline.com founders and executives, secured $20m in Series B funding
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Cambridge-based SWIM.AI, which provides edge intelligence software for IoT applications, announced $10 million in Series B funding
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Viz.ai, a company applying AI in healthcare secured $21 million in Series A funding
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Computer vision technology provider AnyVision announced at it has secured $28 million in Series A financing
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Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Datorama, an AI-powered marketing intelligence platform
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Workday announced that it has acquired Stories.bi, which uses AI to automate analytics and generate natural language business stories
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Robotic retail inventory specialist Bossa Nova announced the acquisition of AI video surveillance company, HawXeye
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Self-driving car company Pony.ai raised $102 million, putting it close to a billion dollar valuation
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Box announced that it has acquired Butter.ai, a startup focused on cross-silo enterprise search
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DataRobot announced that it has acquired Nexosis, an ML platform company whose founders we interviewed in TWIML Talk #69
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Accenture has acquired Kogentix to strengthen Accenture Applied Intelligence’s growing data engineering business
