Conversational artificial intelligence has rapidly smartened and scaled since chatbots first entered mainstream social media in 2016. The first few iterations of chatbots on Facebook Messenger were simple, enabling restaurant reservations, flower deliveries, and other structured calls to action. Now,…
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Percepto raises $45 million for robots that inspect critical infrastructure
Autonomous inspection solutions company Percepto today announced a $45 million round. The funds come as Percepto pivots from drone-based products to general robotics-driven inspections incorporating third-party platforms like Boston Dynamics’ Spot. According to a report from Technavio, the inspection robot…
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Forter raises $125 million at a $1.3 billion valuation to combat ecommerce fraud with AI
Forter, an automated fraud detection platform for ecommerce, has raised $125 million in a series E round of funding valuing the company at more than $1.3 billion. The raise comes in a year that has seen ecommerce transactions surge due…
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Stanford and Carnegie Mellon find race and age bias in mobility data that drives COVID-19 policy
Smartphone-based mobility data has played a major role in responses to the pandemic. Describing the movement of millions of people, location information from Google, Apple, and others has been used to analyze the effectiveness of social distancing polices and probe…
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Google’s Tree Canopy Lab taps AI to help cities plan tree-planting projects
Google today announced the launch of Tree Canopy Lab for Los Angeles, a tool that combines AI and aerial imagery to help cities see their current tree canopy coverage and plan future tree-planting projects. Google says that Tree Canopy Lab,…
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In 2021, off-the-shelf datasets will be on the rise for AI model development
Presented by Appen If there’s one thing that companies large and small can agree on, it’s that deploying effective artificial intelligence (AI) is challenging. Not every organization has the funds, specialized teams, and annotators required for a large-scale AI deployment,…
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InterVenn Biosciences raises $34 million to accelerate cancer test development with AI
InterVenn Biosciences, a startup developing a platform for precision medicine, today raised $34 million in venture capital financing. The startup says it’ll put the proceeds toward accelerating its go-to-market, expansion, and ongoing product R&D efforts. Mass spectrometry, a technique that…
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Google updates COVID-19 forecasting models with longer time horizons and new regions
In August, in partnership with the Harvard Global Health Institute, Google launched a set of models — the COVID-19 Public Forecasts — that provide projections of COVID-19 cases, deaths, ICU utilization, ventilator availability, and other metrics for U.S. counties and states. Today,…
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Facebook’s redoubled AI efforts won’t stop the spread of harmful content
Facebook says it’s using AI to prioritize potentially problematic posts for human moderators to review as it works to more quickly remove content that violates its community guidelines. The social media giant previously leveraged machine learning models to proactively take…
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Amazon shifts some Alexa and Rekognition computing to its own Inferentia chip
(Reuters) — Amazon.com on Thursday said it shifted part of the computing for its Alexa voice assistant to its own custom-designed chips, aiming to make the work faster and cheaper while moving it away from chips supplied by Nvidia. When…
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Escooter startup Voi uses AI to detect pedestrians and sidewalks
European electric scooter startup Voi is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to enable its vehicles to detect pedestrians and sidewalks, a move designed to ingratiate itself to municipalities worried about chaotic micromobility schemes. Escooter (and ebike) sales have surged throughout…
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Researchers claim AI algorithm uses heart rate and motion data to predict age, sex, and more
How much information about a person’s behavior can you ascertain from a wearable device? Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Alan Turing Institute sought to investigate this in a study involving over 280,000 hours of wrist accelerometer and wearable…
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