Daily Archives: June 8, 2017

AI and Robotics Lead to US Business Growth; Skilled Talent Needed – GoodCall News (blog)

Posted: June 8, 2017 at 11:11 pm

CareersTech Posted By Terri Williams on June 8, 2017 at 7:05 am

U.S. companies believe that an increase in artificial intelligence and robotics is good for business, according to a new Randstad Sourceright Talent Trends survey. Responses from C-suite and human capital leaders reveal the following:

While companies have been criticized for increasing their use of automation, its actually a good business decision for companies that want to remain competitive. Jim Guerrera is the managing director of SC Novi, an affiliate of MRINetwork, a search consulting firm specializing in recruiting for the automotive, industrial and automation sectors. An increase in AI and robotics will definitely increase productivity and corporate profits, especially in the manufacturing sector, Guerrera tells GoodCall. Companies that do not go all in on automation will be phased out over time, as the automated factories will far out produce those that are not automated.

Making the move to automation isnt cheap, but its well worth the return on investment. Even though it is an expensive capital cost, the way these machines are built today, they will be able to last for several years, off-setting the large upfront capital outlays, Guerrera explains.

However, he says, The work cannot be done with robots alone American manufacturers need skilled and technical workers to operate these facilities.

So, why do Americans in general, and American workers in particular, believe that AI and robotics will take their jobs instead of increase hiring? Hary Bottka, global concepts leader at Randstad Sourceright, tells GoodCall, There has been a lot of focus in the media on the loss of jobs in the U.S., in particular, that certain jobs are moving overseas and are not being replaced.

And since this was a key issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Bottka believes it is still fresh in the minds of the American public.

AI and robotics are a natural next threat, as technology will displace certain job profiles in the coming years. But, Bottka says the survey reveals that these advances in technology will actually create jobs while also changing the skills required by many organizations.

Chris Nicholson is the CEO of Skymind, the company behind Deeplearning4j, a deep learning tool for Java that is used for everything from fraud/anomaly detection to image recognition to predictive analytics.

Nicholson tells GoodCall that many workers may be displaced. Displacement is a good term to explain whats happening, because it implies moving from one job to another. But he admits, Who gains and who loses? Its not always the same people. Bottka agrees that technology will not completely phase out jobs. In reality, technology is producing more of a shift in jobs requiring new skills, as compared to a complete loss of job opportunities for workers.

However, it would be nave to think that companies are not considering employee-related costs when deciding to increase their use of AI and robotics. The rise of health care costs in the U.S. only adds to the desire for plants to get automated, because less overall workers means less overall healthcare expenses, Guerrera explains. And there are other productivity benefits such as the ease and ability of the robots to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year in addition to manufacturing locally, so U.S. manufacturers will be able to greatly reduce their supply chain costs.

As a result, some fears of American workers may be justified. Especially workers who lack the skills to move into other areas.

You cant automate everything, and when companies want to sell their products, they will hire more administrative and sales people, so other roles are growing, Nicholson says. We need to try to get some of the displaced workers into these roles.

He also advises workers to be open to moving to another city or state. A lot of people feel trapped in a local job market, but there are places where the local economy is really healthy and robust but again, this may entail moving to another part of the country.

In fact, Bottka reveals that one of the primary concerns of C-suite and HR leaders is the inability to find the talent they need for some of the new roles created by AI and robotics.

Thats because some of the new roles will require more advanced training. Randstad provides Recruitment Process Outsourcing services to some of its clients, and Bottka says theres definitely been a shift in the types of jobs clients need. Roles such as application developers, service technicians, and hardware or software specialists are now in demand in organizations that traditionally have hired labor to fulfill more manual roles, Bottka explains.

It may be comforting to know that robots are incapable of replacing all U.S. jobs. American manufacturers need skilled and technical workers to operate these facilities, Guerrera says.

But he warns that it wont look anything like the manufacturing work force from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Instead of a plant filled with general manual labor workers and only some skilled workers, the plants will be filled with mostly skilled technical workers, albeit a far lower number of overall employees.

Guerrera describes some of the most in-demand positions:

In addition, Guerrera says that since machines do occasionally break down, workers with general maintenance skills are also needed. Skilled field service personnel and maintenance engineers will be paramount to a top performing automated manufacturing facility because these individuals will perform the important tasks of keeping the machines running.

But manufacturing is just one of the industries looking to increase automation. Bottka and Nicholson warn that employees in other areas should also step up their game. Workers and potential workers must be aware of the skills gaps in the market and tailor their interests, studies and training to prepare themselves to be in a position to fill the these gaps, Bottka says. Specific skills are in limited supply, so there is a need for the existing workforce, as well as incoming workers, to choose an education and training curriculum that prepares them for these jobs.

Nicholson agrees that learning new skills is crucial. A lot of skills are hard to automate, like people skills, where youre dealing with people and helping them. He mentions nurses, therapists, counselors, teachers, and managers as jobs that are difficult to automate. Robots cant provide healthcare; jobs that are people-centric and where you need to need to establish a relationship are pretty safe bets.

Terri Williams Terri Williams graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her education, career, and business articles have been featured on Yahoo! Education, U.S. News & World Report, The Houston Chronicle, and in the print edition of USA Today Special Edition. Terri is also a contributing author to "A Practical Guide to Digital Journalism Ethics," a book published by the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy at Loyola University Chicago.

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Robots’ role in humanity to be a core topic at TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics – TechCrunch

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Robots' role in humanity to be a core topic at TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics
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At least since Isaac Asimov posited the Three Law of Robotics, many have wondered whether robots would ultimately help or harm humanity. Or maybe do a little of both. Humanity still has time to shape the answer to that question, and we're pleased to ...

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Under Armour launches its first customisable shoes – just-style.com (subscription)

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Models available for customising include theCurry 1, Highlight, and ClutchFit Force 3.0

Athletic wear maker Under Armour has launched a new platform allowing consumers to customise its athletic shoes by uploading their own images and selecting prints and colours.

The beta launch of UA Icon, which will see the first footwear shipped mid-July, has been in the works for some time. Customers can upload pictures or other images on Under Armour's website, shrink or expand them, and select the position where they will appear on the footwear.

Models available for customising include theCurry 1, Highlight, and ClutchFit Force 3.0.

"We're giving you the power to really let your imagination run wildbut how is your UA Icon going to fit into the rest ofthe stuff you're wearing? Whether you rep your team or black it out, keep your closet in mind," Under Armour's website reads.

Under Armour's new customisation platform prices the Curry One at US$160, Highlight at $160 and the ClutchFit Force 3.0 at $250.

However, the company notes: "Ourcapacity is a bit limited right now and we can only make a limited number of shoes a day. Be sure to save yourdesigns by sharing themwith yourself. All orders placed at this time will start shipping mid-July."

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Virtual reality: Welsh firms increasingly using VR tech – BBC News – BBC News

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Virtual reality: Welsh firms increasingly using VR tech - BBC News
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It has been more traditionally associated with the games industry, but businesses are increasingly switching on to the benefits of virtual reality. With the cost of ...

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Tackling Tech: A Virtual Reality Check for NFL Fans – Patriots.com

Posted: at 11:10 pm

True virtual reality has quickly captured the imagination of content owners, tech vendors and fans. However, capturing and holding the attention of fans with an immersive experience does have its challenges .Those who seek to redefine pro sports viewing will need to overcome core tech and network infrastructure obstacles.

Last week alone, the MLB and NBA announced deals with VR vendors to deliver a weekly game of the week to fans in virtual reality. The NFL last year provided game highlights and an original series in VR on-demand but has yet to stream live content such as game casts

The NFL worked with NextVR to create highlights and commentary packages available after three games last season. Source: NextVR

VR's promise to provide immersive, super high-resolution images from advanced cameras of live sports can spell trouble for bandwidth pipes to the home. Tech vendors are feverishly working to find ways to deliver more content using advanced streaming methods and encoding over current broadband pipes. Read

Long-used for online gaming, virtual reality promises to put sports fans front and center in the game without being at the game. VR calls this immersion, with "experiences" ranging from a single camera view to watching the action through a number of cameras placed at different vantage points in the venue. Individuals need the prescribed vendor's headset and to download the accompanying app to their smartphone to get going.

Virtual reality becomes real for a young Tom Brady fan. Source: Patriots.com

"I don't think the home has the bandwidth to handle live VR so it would have to be on demand," said one NFL source. That was the league's approach last year when it partnered with vendor NextVR to produce short highlights packages for on-demand access (as in after the game concluded). It also partnered with Google to co-create a nine-part original series in VR and available on demand. Read

Unlike other sports leagues, the NFL has to date, focused squarely on short-form content creation for use after games conclude or with the VR series, at any time via video-on-demand systems.

The NFL and NextVR last season created a series of postgame experiences available on demand. Source: NextVR

When asked if the Now Fun League would continue the projects for the upcoming season, the answer was a bit unclear and lacked detail, but seemed hopeful in terms of continued work and interest in VR.

"The short answer is we liked what we saw across our VR partnerships last year and will look to continue to do more this year to build an NFL VR presence, develop internal capabilities, and test fan interest," commented one league spokesperson.

Pro sports leagues and others have used Intel Corp.'s Voke VR camera to capture captivating content. Intel last week signed a three-year deal with Major League Baseball to do a game of the week in VR. Source: Intel.

The content capture devices, such as VR cameras from Voke, which was bought by Intel last year, and NextVR have already shot live sports action for streaming. It's how that precious payload is delivered to fans that has received little public attention Read

"Live football presents very different challenges from other sports when it comes to a live VR production so we'll continue to test until we feel we have a quality product for our fans," the spokesperson added.

One league source predicted VR streaming of live games is years away, unless a VR company or network paid a huge sum of money for the right to deliver a live NFL football game. Read

While the present is full of talk and marketing opportunities, the NFL has taken what appears to be a more measured and cautious approach with virtual reality. Instead of teaming to broadcast live games on VR, the league last November partnered with NextVR to help create a post-game experience for fans that was available on demand not long after three select games concluded.

The "experiences" were to be about 10 minutes long from the chosen sites and include a combo of expert commentary and game highlights. For each production, press materials said, "NextVR will work alongside the award-winning team from NFL Films, utilizing their experience and access to deploy NextVR's virtual reality cameras throughout each stadium to capture immersive views of NFL action like never before."

The league understands well that virtual reality is a rapidly evolving technology. "This is a great opportunity for the NFL to continue experimenting with the capabilities and distribution of VR experiences," said William Deng, Director, Media Strategy and Business Development at the NFL. Read

Also last season, the NFL produced its first original VR series - a nine-part undertaking it created for launch on YouTube using Google Daydream's headset.The league was quick to say at the announcement last November that the focus here is promotional.

Vishal Shah, the NFL's senior VP of digital media, said of the undertaking when it was announced: "We want to get better acquainted with the technology, the platform, the content we can actually create and how our fans are engaging in the content and viewing it."

NFL Films, an asset other pro leagues lack, produced the 5- to 10-minute episodes which covered players, coaches, executives, cheerleaders and fans

The NFL worked with Google is staff and equipment for the series. Important to note is that the league and Google teamed to develop, and is helping the NFL develop the app for the Daydream View platform. Read

In its quarterly State of the Internet report, Content Delivery Network (CDN) kingpin Akamai Technologies, Inc. reported gains in Internet connection bandwidth capacity. The average bandwidth to homes rose to 18.7 megabits/sec, for the first quarter of this year, while peak bandwidth rose to 86.5 megabits/sec.

Canada finished behind global leader U.S. with an average of 16.2 megabits/sec, and a peak of 78.7 megabits/sec, according to the comprehensive Akamai report.

Intel produces 3-, 5- and 8-megabit virtual reality streams for Major League Baseball, according to CTO of Intel Sports Group, Jay Sankar. "These bit rates are well within reach of a significant number of homes and the experience is good with LTE as well."

The streams also include features including a picture-in-picture of a zoomed in pitcher batter view, stats, scores, and more, according to Sankar.

The VR undertaking also has adaptive bit rate streaming (ABR) tech at its disposal in the app. It has long been used with the delivery of live video over public networks because it enables the switching between bit rates based on the available bandwidth at the time. Capacity is known to fluctuate on the Internet. Read

Conspicuously absent from materials/public discussion/ is any mention of network infrastructure needed to deliver live, multi-hour VR streams to a potentially huge audience. Some ask if networks can survive.

"True VR is super bandwidth intensive and doesn't tolerate latency (delay)," explained Teresa Mastrangelo, Founder of Broadbandtrends LLC, a network infrastructure and service provider market analysis and consulting firm in Norfolk, VA. "Only a small percentage of homes already have the Internet connection needed to handle this experience."

"What's uncertain is whether or not service providers will be willing to spend to upgrade their infrastructure for an application that may prove to be of high value to consumers," she added. "It's a bit of a Catch-22 situation today."

Service providers may be facing spending on data center hubs, optical transport connections, storage and more data centers close to the network edge. Caching tech and products toward the edge could help provide an improved viewing experience, especially for non-live VR content.

The NFL's on demand approach with short-duration (minutes) streams would impose less strain on network and require less service provider network infrastructure spending. Service providers would likely focus on adding storage so the VR programming can be located closer to viewers for a better user experience. Read

As virtual reality is an emerging technology and thus a work-in-progress. The preferred price is free, be it for streams of live games or for on-demand content. While this helps attract fans to the experiences, it's not clear when we will see an actual revenue model in this space.

Models discussed include pay-per-view, inclusion in existing league streaming subscription services and a standalone subscription fee for VR content.

The fan focused NFL's thinking here is clear as day. The NFL's Shah said at the announcement of the nine - part VR series last November: "the project underscores that it's still early in the VR game - with the league tapping the tech as a promotional fan-engagement vehicle, rather than a revenue driver." Read

There is no race to a finish line when it comes to sports leagues deploying virtual reality. Determining how to provide interested fans the optimal user experience they have been shown and heard about is job one. Achieving this lofty goal with a revenue plan would be even better.

For these milestones to be reached all members of the virtual reality ecosystem need to focus on ensuring the necessary network infrastructure and embedded technologies are in place to handle the top-rate delivery of VR streams and what should be a resulting vertical increase in fan demand.

Stay tuned.

Bob Wallace is a technology journalist with over 30 years of experience explaining how new services, apps, consumer electronic devices and video sources are reshaping the wide world of sports. Wallace has specific expertise in explaining how and why advances in technology redefine the way sports teams interact with their partners and fans. He's the Founder of Fast Forward Thinking LLC. Read

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E3 2017: Video Games, Virtual Reality, Entertainment News – Investor’s Business Daily

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XAutoplay: On | OffThree-day video game nirvana E3, otherwise known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo, kicks off Tuesday, June 13. Expect a slew of announcements from console makers and publishers like Microsoft (MSFT), Nintendo (NTDOY), Activision Blizzard (ATVI) and Sony (SNY) plus a first-ever appearance and live streaming by social media and virtual reality pioneer Facebook (FB).

Investor's Business Daily will have the latest E3 news and product demos right from the show flooras thousands of video game professionals and this year, members of the public flock to the Los Angeles Convention Center.

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HTC’s Viveport subscription adds over 75 new virtual reality titles – TechRadar

Posted: at 11:10 pm

HTCs Viveport subscription service launched in April, and HTC has now announced that it has doubled the number of virtual reality titles on offer.

For a monthly fee of 6.99/$6.99/AU$9.99 you can choose five virtual reality apps or games from a curated list to download and install, which is a handy way to test out a range virtual reality games and experiences which are often quite short.

With the inclusion of 75 new titles - bringing the total number of VR titles available on the service to over 150 - the subscription looks like even better value for money, especially if youve been struggling to find games to play.

Included in the new range of VR games and experiences are ROM: Extraction, Knockout League, Overkill, Cosmic Trip, and Sairento VR. A number of the games and apps that have just been added to Viveport weren't available outside of Asia until now.

Rikard Steiber, President of Viveport at HTC Vive, said that we are doubling the number of available titles to over 150 with new bestsellers and a wide range of content available in the West for the first time. We want to offer VR developers the most ways to monetise their content, and they now have an additional channel to reach new audiences and generate more revenue.

We spoke to Stieber about how Viveport was doing, and while he couldnt give us specific numbers, he said that there was a healthy conversion from the free 30 day trial.

While we were excited to hear that the HTC Vive is coming to Macs earlier this week at WWDC, Stieber told us that we have no announcement to make at the moment about Viveport coming to Mac, though he assured us that Mac is a key audience.

He also explained how our ambition is to be platform agnostic so we may see the Viveport service become available for more VR platforms, such as Google Cardboard, in the future.

If you want to check out the range of VR titles, head over to the Viveport subscription website to try a 30 day free trial.

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Watch Out: You’re in Ai Weiwei’s Surveillance Zone – The New York … – New York Times

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Surveillance images from overhead cameras are projected on the floor as part of Hansel & Gretel, an installation at the Park Avenue Armory created by Ai ...
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DeepMind Shows AI Has Trouble Seeing Homer Simpson’s Actions – IEEE Spectrum

Posted: at 11:10 pm

The best artificial intelligence still has trouble visually recognizing many of Homer Simpsons favorite behaviors such as drinking beer, eating chips, eating doughnuts, yawning, and the occasional face-plant. Those findings from DeepMind, the pioneering London-based AI lab, also suggest the motive behind why DeepMind has created a huge new dataset of YouTube clips to help train AI on identifying human actions in videos that go well beyond Mmm, doughnuts or Doh!

The most popular AI used by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other companies beyond Silicon Valley is based on deep learning algorithms that can learn to identify patterns in huge amounts of data. Over time, such algorithms can become much better at a wide variety of tasks such as translating between English and Chinese for Google Translateor automatically recognizing the faces of friends in Facebook photos.But even the most finely tuned deep learning relies on having lots of quality data to learn from.To help improve AIscapability to recognizehuman actions in motion,DeepMind has unveiled itsKinetics dataset consisting of 300,000 video clips and 400 human action classes.

AI systems are now very good at recognizing objects in images, but still have trouble making sense of videos, says aDeepMind spokesperson.One of the main reasons for this is that the research community has so far lacked a large, high-quality video dataset.

DeepMind enlisted the help of online workers through Amazons Mechanical Turk service to help correctly identify and label the actions inthousands of YouTube clips. Each of the 400 human action classes in the Kinetics dataset has at least 400 video clips, with each clip lasting around 10 seconds and taken from separate YouTube videos. More details can be found in a DeepMind paper on the arXiv preprint server.

The new Kinetics dataset seems likely to represent a new benchmark for training datasets intended to improve AI computer vision for video. It has far more video clips and action classes than the HMDB-51 and UCF-101 datasets that previously formed the benchmarks for the research community. DeepMind also made a point of ensuring it had a diverse datasetone that did not include multiple clips from the same YouTube videos.

Tech giants such as Googlea sister company to DeepMind under the umbrella Alphabet grouparguably have the best access to large amounts of video data that could prove helpful in training AI. Alphabets ownership of YouTube, the incredibly popular, online, video-streaming service, does not hurt either. But other companies and independent research groups must rely on publicly available datasets to train their deep learning algorithms.

Early training and testing with the Kinetics dataset showed some intriguing results. For example, deep learning algorithms showed accuracies of 80percent or greater in classifying actions such as playing tennis, crawling baby, presenting weather forecast, cutting watermelon, and bowling. But the classification accuracy dropped to around 20 percent or less for the Homer Simpson actions, including slapping and headbutting, and an assortment of other actions such as making a cake, tossing coin and fixing hair.

AI faces special challenges with classifying actions such as eating because it may not be able to accurately identify the specific food being consumedespecially if the hot dog or burger is already partially consumed or appears very small within the overall video. Dancing classes and actions focused on a specific part of the body can also prove tricky. Some actions also occur fairly quickly and are only visible for a small number of frames within a video clip, according to a DeepMind spokesperson.

DeepMind also wanted to see if the new Kinetics dataset has enough gender balance to allow for accurate AI training. Past cases have shown how imbalanced training datasets can lead to deep learning algorithms performing worse at recognizing the faces of certain ethnic groups. Researchers have also shown how such algorithms can pick up gender and racial biases from language.

A preliminary study showed that the new Kinetics dataset seems to fairly balanced. DeepMind researchers found that no single gender dominated within 340 out of the 400 action classesor else it was not possible to determine gender in those actions. Those action classes that did end up gender imbalanced included YouTube clips of actionssuch as shaving beard or dunking basketball (mostly male) and filling eyebrows or cheerleading (mostly female).

But even action classes that had gender imbalance did not show much evidence of classifier bias. This means that even the Kinetics action classes featuring mostly male participantssuch as playing poker or hammer throwdid not seem to bias AI to the point where the deep learning algorithms had trouble recognizing female participants performing the same actions.

DeepMind hopes that outside researchers can help suggest new human action classes for the Kinetics dataset. Any improvements may enable AI trained on Kinetics to better recognize both the most elegant of actions and the clumsier moments in videos that lead people to say doh! In turn, that could lead to new generations of computer software and robots with the capacity to recognize what all those crazy humans are doing on YouTube or in other video clips.

Video understanding represents a significant challenge for the research community, and we are in the very early stages with this, according to the DeepMind spokesperson. Any real-world applications are still a really long way off, but you can see potential in areas such as medicine, for example, aiding the diagnosis of heart problems in echocardiograms.

IEEE Spectrums general technology blog, featuring news, analysis, and opinions about engineering, consumer electronics, and technology and society, from the editorial staff and freelance contributors.

Sign up for the Tech Alert newsletter and receive ground-breaking technology and science news from IEEE Spectrum every Thursday.

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Startup Paves Easier Path to AI – Multichannel News

Posted: at 11:10 pm

Implementing artificial intelligence systems can be technically challenging and expensive, but it doesnt have to be.

So says DimensionalMechanics, a startup based in Bellevue, Wash., that claims to have a developed a platform that can put A.I. within reach of a wide range of companies, with an initial focus on those in the media and entertainment industry.

The goal is to lower that technology and economic bar in a way that makes A.I. more accessible to organizations without requiring them to have a technical background in areas such as deep learning and machine learning, company CEO and co-founder Rajeev Dutt, said, noting that many are also looking for A.I. solutions that are not just affordable but customizable as well.

To help achieve some of those goals, DimensionalMechanics has introduced NeoPulse AI Studio, a set of applications based on the companys underlying framework that, it says, can help businesses and other organizations rapidly create and design customized A.I. solutions. That product complements the companys pre-built AI models in areas such as image and video analysis and recommendations systems.

The company, which has raised $6.7 million and intends to raise a B round this fall, is also getting a boost into the media and entertainment world through a strategic alliance with GrayMeta, a company that specializes in automated metadata collection, curation and search.

GrayMeta, which counts ABC, AMC, CBS, Deluxe, DirecTV, Disney, HBO, NBCUniversal and Showtime among its clients, is also the first to offer NeoPulse AI to the media and entertainment sector, DimensionalMechanics said.

Dutt said the media, entertainment and advertising industries are among the biggest producers and consumers of data, providing a proving ground for a lot of machine learning technologies.

Some use-case examples include a photo-ranking system that was trained using 2 million images to determine which ones might make an ad or news article more likely to grab attention or drive and maximize traffic. The technology is also being used to help editors analyze and write headlines that can improve click rates.

On the video side, the company also provides A.I. solutions to drive recommendations.

DimensionalMechanics has carved out a set of business models, including cloud software for independent developers, on-premises solutions that can simulate the cloud-based system while keeping a companys data close to the vest, as well as a way for partners to resell and monetize their A.I. models through the NeoPulse AI Store.

Theres a fairly broad range of applications, Dutt said.

Founded in 2015, DimensionalMechanics currently has 11 employees.

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