CrowdFlower raises $20 million in venture funding citing ‘Cambrian’ AI explosion

San Francisco-based crowdsourcing firm CrowdFlower has raised $20 million in venture funding which will be used to extend its ‘human-in-the-loop’ AI platform functionality and develop integrations into other machine learning technologies. The funding will also enhance its operations team by hiring new data scientists, machine learning experts, engineers, customer success managers, and sales and marketing professionals. The investment round was led by Industry Ventures, with new...

14 June 2017 | Funding

Here’s how AI can assist medical science in telling a patient’s lifespan

Artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning can help analyse images of a patient’s organs to assess potential diseases and predict their potential lifespan, according to new research. Researchers from the University of Adelaide’s School of Public Health and School of Computer Science, along with Australian and international collaborators, have merged AI and medical images in a first-of-its-kind study. The research was published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. This...

12 June 2017 | Healthcare

People.ai grabs $7 million funding to launch world’s first AI-powered sales management platform

People.ai has received $7 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Its list of investors includes Y Combinator, Ron Conway's SV Angel, Index Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Nakul Mandan, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, will be a part of the People.ai board of directors. People.ai is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered sales management platform that helps sales managers make better and faster decisions by providing refreshing insights and utilising a data...

8 June 2017 | Big Data

Cylance launches first claimed AI-driven endpoint detection and response solution

Australia-based Cylance has announced the general availability of CylanceOPTICS, an artificial intelligence (AI) driven endpoint detection and response product which aims to simplify threats without cloud connectivity. The Cylance AI Platform acts as a data-science engine that generates specialised machine-learning models. The integrated solution of CylancePROTECT and CylanceOPTICS delivers a more effective, simplified and high-performance security approach. It leverages AI to change the...

26 May 2017 | Security

New intelligent street light software aims to respond to real-time events

TCS Digital Software & Solutions Group, part of Tata Consultancy Services, has launched a cloud-based software, the Intelligent Urban Exchange (IUX), for Adaptive Streetlight Optimisation designed for both conventional streetlights and LED lights. The product uses self-learning algorithms to learn about real-time events occurring on streets and responds to them by enabling individual streetlights to adjust according to changes in crime patterns, traffic, people movement, and weather. For...

24 May 2017 | IoT

Cray launches two new CS-Storm accelerated cluster supercomputers

Cray has launched two new CS-Storm accelerated cluster supercomputers – the Cray CS-Storm 500GT and the Cray CS-Storm 500NX – which are designed to serve the purpose of the most demanding AI workloads. The supercomputers, which also utilise NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, aim to provide customers with powerful accelerator-optimised solutions for running machine learning and deep learning applications. The Cray CS-Storm 500GT includes support for up to ten NVIDIA Tesla P40 or P100 PCIe...

18 May 2017 | Deep Learning

UNICEF joins Apple, Google, Facebook et al in AI partnership

UNICEF has announced it has joined Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (AI), with data technologists at the organisation’s Office of Innovation aiming to create collaborations to innovatively solve humanitarian challenges for social good and to benefit children. Chris Fabian, senior advisor of ventures at UNICEF Innovation believes UNICEF to be in a position to cater to the needs of vulnerable children and to bring about positive changes in their lives through usage of advanced...

18 May 2017 | Healthcare

University of Cambridge bolsters AI research efforts with new partnerships

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) is joining a not-for-profit, international coalition, Partnership on AI, which is founded by the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft, according to an announcement from the University of Cambridge. CFI is a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Imperial College London and the University of California at Berkeley and is funded by an unprecedented £10 million grant from the...

17 May 2017 | Applications

Cisco acquires AI firm MindMeld to create more natural conversations

Cisco has announced its intent to acquire MindMeld, a privately held artificial intelligence (AI) provider based in San Francisco, for $125 million (£97m). MindMeld offers what is described as a unique AI platform which ‘enables customers to build intelligent and human-like conversational interfaces for any application or device’ – in other words, enabling more natural conversation with voice and chat assistants. “At Cisco, we believe that AI and machine learning will play an...

15 May 2017 | M&A

Most Britons want AI to support at least part of their current job, survey finds

A new survey commissioned by the UC EXPO event has revealed that 85% of UK residents polled want artificial intelligence (AI) to support at least part of their current job. Almost half of these individuals (44%) want AI technology to do all of their job, leaving them to simply manage the AI system, while 10% say they are already working with AI technology. An additional 38% expect to be working alongside AI within the next two years. This uptake of AI technology is likely to be in the...

9 May 2017 | Bots