This week’s headlines in machine intelligence

Week of 20th July 2015

Research papers and thought leadership

• Interview with Gurjeet Singh, co-founder of Ayasdi, a company productising mathematical and machine learning algorithms for topological data analysis.
• Queen Mary University in London publish Sketch-a-Net that Beats Humans.
• Facebook AI Research and Xerox publish Deep Fishing: Gradient Features from Deep Nets.
• The Swiss AI lab introduce a new architecture designed to overcome the challenge of training very deep neural networks.

Market news (new products, ideas, fundraising)

• Meet Deep Genomics, a start-up bringing the power of deep learning to genomics.
• Flipkart Appoints Former Google Researcher To Head Image Sciences.
• Berg: Using artificial intelligence for drug discovery.
• Hitachi Developed Basic Artificial Intelligence Technology
  that Enables Logical Dialogue.
• Hyper Labs raises $10.9M from FirstMark Capital and High Line Venture Partners for their data science platform.
• Granular, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of farm management software and analytics tools, closed a $18.7M Series B financing.
• Rex Computing, a San Francisco-based fabless semiconductor startup, raised $1.25m in seed funding led by Founders Fund’s FF Science.
• DataFox, an platform for sourcing deals, comparing groups of companies, and monitoring technology sectors, raises $5M from Goldman Sachs.
• Austin startup Continuum Analytics to raise $24M Series A from General Catalyst to further their suite of big data analytics and visualisation tools.

Some fun stuff in AI and beyond

• M&C Saatchi install poster ads with cameras to measure engagement of passers-by (happy, sad or neutral) and adjust the creative in response.

Anything else catch your eye? Drop me a line on @nathanbenaich.

Playfair Capital is actively seeking out entrepreneurs building machine intelligence companies that change the way we live, work and play.