AI Biweekly: 10 Bits from July W2 — W3
July 10th — Facebook Tests AR Adverts in Its News Feed
Facebook is working with a select group of advertisers to create augmented reality ads for its News Feed. When users activate an ad’s tap-to-try AR capability it can display for example how a pair of glasses would look on their face via the user’s webcam and screen. Facebook says it also intends to expand shopping support in Instagram Stories.
July 10th — NVIDIA Collaborates with Daimler and Bosch to Develop Robotaxi Fleets.
NVIDIA, Daimler and Bosch announce a partnership to develop on-call, fully automated and driverless taxis. The collaboration will draw on each company’s strengths: NVIDIA’s autonomous driving platform, Bosch expertise in vehicle hardware and systems, and Daimler vehicles known for their safety and quality control.
July 11th — IoT Cybersecurity Solutions Market Estimated to Hit $6B By 2023
A new study by Juniper Research projects the global IoT cybersecurity solutions market will triple, reaching US$6 billion by 2023. Increasing business risks and regulatory minimum standards will drive spending, with IoT smart energy security spending alone accounting for $1B of the projected market.
July 12th — Intel Announces Acquisition Plan for eASIC
Intel announces a plan to acquire semiconductor company eASIC to expand its portfolio to include structured ASICs for high-performance and power-constrained applications. EASIC is a structured ASICs provider based in Santa Clara. The acquisition is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2018 after closing conditions are met.
July 17th — Microsoft and GE Further Collaborate for IoT Launch
GE Digital will move its IIoT app development platform Predix onto Azure. Predix will now be better integrated with Microsoft Azure IoT and Azure Data and Analytics. GE Digital will also utilize Azure across its business for additional IT workloads and productivity tools.
July 17th — JP Morgan Chase Invests in AI Startup Volley
JP Morgan announces a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in San-Francisco-based startup Volley, which uses AI to help large enterprises generate employee training content. Volley says it will use the funding to double its team size to 40 over the next nine months. Financial institutions are turning to AI to help make better use of their growing datasets.
July 17th — Zoox Raises $500M for Autonomous Driving Development
Secretive autonomous driving startup Zoox has closed its latest financing round at US$500 million, raising its total valuation to US$3.2 billion. Zoox was founded four years ago with the goal of building an autonomous vehicle fleet from scratch. The company plans to release an all-electric and fully autonomous vehicle by 2020.
July 18th — AI Researchers Signing Pledge Against Autonomous Weapons
Thousands of AI researchers have signed a pledge to oppose lethal autonomous weapons, declaring that they will not participate in any development of robots that can identify and attack people without human oversight. Amongst the 2,400 signatories so far is Yoshua Bengio, top AI researcher at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. Bengio says if the pledge can shame companies that are building autonomous weapons, public opinion may swing against them.
July 19th — Landbot Raises $2.2M for Developing Anti-AI Chatbot
Spanish startup Landbot raises a US$2.2 million seed round for a chatbot that does not use AI technology. The investment was led by Nauta Capital, Bankinter and Encomenda Smart Capital. Launched in June 2017, Landbot deploys a strong fullscreen texting interface as a website navigation tool.
July 20th — John Snow Labs Introduces Impressive Spark NLP Library
John Snow Labs, a global data operations and AI company based in Delaware, USA, releases its Natural Language Understanding software Spark NLP. The Spark NLP library provides great code for named entity recognition, assertion status detection, and entity resolution. Spark NLP has already been highlighted by three AI industry conferences, and John Snow Labs issued 10 related releases in the first six months of 2018.
Author: Synced Industry Analyst Team | Editor: Michael Sarazen
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