Monthly Archives: June 2017

Either I’m Paranoid Or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s AI Is Cheating – Kotaku

Posted: June 6, 2017 at 6:15 am

Theres no question that the Mario Karts AI is a big cheater. Anyone who plays the game has probably noticed how the computer-controlled racers tend to catch up to you no matter what and always have an item in hand during the races final moments. But what advantages, exactly, do the robot racers get in comparison to their human opponents? The question has become relevant once more with the new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the Switch, in which the artificial intelligence appears to have snapped the rules of fair play in two. Or it could all be a matter of psychology, as some experts have argued.

Ive been trying to unlock every last vehicle and accessory in Deluxe. As I plowed through, I played against a lot of AI competitors. As I played, I planned to earn all three stars for every single prize cup in every level, which you can only achieve through first-place finishes. Heres the thing, though: that Mario Kart AI really doesnt want a lowly human like me to place first.

I mean, sure, human competitors dont want me to win, either. But, I swear, the AI racers in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe appear to ignore the other AI drivers and save their items just for me. Ive seen robot racers hold onto a red shell for ages, only to toss it my way as soon as I finally try to pass them.

It feels personal.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, people who played Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart: Double Dash noticed that the AI had the ability to speed up after falling far behind. It was easy to spot this rubber-band effect in action in those games. More recent Mario Karts have gotten more subtle about providing a helping hand to AI racers. When Mario Kart 8 came out for the Wii U in 2014, some players noticed that the AI was using classic shortcuts on tracks. A computer controlled Mario or Bowser or whoever would use a speed boost right before cutting across a grassy inlet. Human players have done this for years, but AI racers never seemed smart enough to do it before MK8.

Some Mario Kart 8 players have also noticed that the computers speed varies based on how fast the human player goes at the outset of the race. For example, if you hang back and wait for several seconds at the start of a race, your AI opponents will go slower throughout the rest of their laps. Once you finally head out, youll easily be able to outrun them, as this video shows:

That seems only fair, though, right? If you were a bad player, youd be grateful for the AIs rubber-band speed alterations, since it would allow you to catch up and feel like a contender.

With the new version of 8, something seems to be going on with how the computer racers use items. Or its my imagination. Somethings up, though. Heres the deal:

As usual with Mario Kart, item drops in MK8D become less and less useful the longer you stay in the first position. Youll pick up a lot of low-value items like coins and bananas. Every now and then, youll get the best defensive item of all: the Super Horn, which can knock out a Blue Shell if you time it right. MK8D brings back two legacy items from earlier in the series: the Cape Feather and the Boo. That pesky little ghost is a great get for your opponents, because the Boo can steal items. If youre in first, you might have to waste your Super Horn on an incoming Boo, thereby leaving yourself open to a shell takedown. If youre doing well, youre not supposed to get these items, but guess who does get these items when youre doing well?

The higher in speed you go in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the more petty the AI gets and the luckier it seems to get with items. Its easy enough to place first in every 50cc and 100cc level and clean up plenty of stars and coins in the process, although the AIs anti-human opportunism will still stick out to you in these early tracks. The 150cc tracks, however? Youll have to get mighty clever in order to beat the AI in those stages. Youll hit the final few turns before crossing the third laps finish line and, somehow, the second-place AI rival will have a Boo and a shell. As soon as you get knocked back to second, youre screwed, because every other AI next in line has also been saving their items for you, and as soon as youre in striking distance, they deploy the shell onslaught. Its as though the robot racers know that theres just one human in the running and theyve got it in for her.

Nintendo didnt respond to my asking if the item distribution in MK8D offers any advantage to the AI racers. I have no proof that my AI rival always gets the Lightning Strike, the Boo, and/or a shell in the final lap. And perhaps its just my imagination, anyway. Perhaps, as a human player, Im biased against robot racers because I feel like theyve got a one-up on me.

Could it all be in my mind?

If a human competitor in Mario Kart gets an amazing item, I chalk that up to the games internal probability and I blame myself for not having a more precise banana-throwing accuracy. But if the computer gets great items? Well, that feels like the game is cheating. The computer is part of the game! It has more information than I do! The AI Mario has a car phone with a direct line to Nintendo and he can get any item he wants!

This episode of Game Psych, which zooms in on Mario Kart 8 Deluxes item distribution, subscribes to the theory that MK8Ds AI racers do indeed get better items, but that this is part of the games attempt to balance out human racers ability to problem-solve and find counter strategies:

According to Game Psych, the computer deserves better items: Humans are better drivers than AIs in Mario Kart. Humans can pull off moves AIs never will. To keep up with the humans, the AI drivers have to rely on the power items they receive from boxes, and that makes them feel cheap or unfair.

Even if thats true, its a delicate balance to strike. If the AIs items are too good, then the game swings back to feeling unfair again. I want to feel challenged, sure, but I dont want to feel like earning three stars in each race is impossible.

Other game developers have discussed this problem with designing AI competitors before. Take Civilization lead creator Sid Meier, who gave a talk at GDC in 2010 titled The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong). In the talk, he explained that players want the AI to feel like a human competitor, but that if the AI is too good, the human opponent will suspect the robot peeked behind the curtain.

I rewatched several of my replays to find more definitive proof that the AI players tend to gang up on me. I can only observe what the robots do when theyre close to me, but you know what? They totally hate me. They aim their items at me whenever possible. However, I did notice one instance when AI players too far down the track to identify lobbed shells at one another. So I guess the robots do fight when Im not in shooting distance, but if they can see me, they do all they can to take me out.

But lets look at it from the robots perspective, shall we? Im an unfair opponent myself! I have the ability to drag a banana behind me or save a Super Horn for the perfect moment. Ive got those killer benefits that come with being human: creativity and unpredictability.

Philip Tan, creative director for the MIT Game Lab, described this phenomenon to Compete as an example of how players can do things against AI that AI cant do to players, and players dont consider that cheating. Although the AI has become increasingly humanlike since Mario Kart 8, having gained more drifting and shortcut capabilitiesthe robot racers still cant match my cleverness with counter-items and blocking. If they could, then perhaps they wouldnt need the extra Boo and Lightning Bolt drops. Not that I can prove theyre getting more Boos and Lightning Bolts, because I cant, but come on. They totally are.

Tan also remarked that players rarely notice when AI racers attack other AI racers, which my own experiences have borne out. Ive listed plenty of moments here when the AI racers seemed to gang up on me, but the rest of the time, I pay them no mind because Im focused on my own strategies and racing. I only notice the AI behavior when it affects me.

Above all, I remember the times that the AI felt unfair the most. Those moments stick out the most in my mind.

I dont think about all the races that I won with no trouble. After all, those races were perfectly fair.

See the rest here:

Either I'm Paranoid Or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's AI Is Cheating - Kotaku

Posted in Ai | Comments Off on Either I’m Paranoid Or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s AI Is Cheating – Kotaku

AI Influencer Andrew Ng Plans The Next Stage In His Extraordinary Career – Forbes

Posted: at 6:15 am


Forbes
AI Influencer Andrew Ng Plans The Next Stage In His Extraordinary Career
Forbes
Andrew Ng is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic of artificial intelligence. He founded and led the Google Brain project which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University's main ...

Continued here:

AI Influencer Andrew Ng Plans The Next Stage In His Extraordinary Career - Forbes

Posted in Ai | Comments Off on AI Influencer Andrew Ng Plans The Next Stage In His Extraordinary Career – Forbes

Watch Google’s Igor Markov explain how to avoid the AI apocalypse – VentureBeat

Posted: at 6:15 am

An attack by artificial intelligence on humans, said Google software engineerand University of Michigan professor Igor Markov, would be sort of like when the Black Plague hit Europe in the 14th century, killing up to 50percent of the population.

Virus particles were very small and there were no microscopes or notion of infectious diseases, there was no explanation, so the disease spread for many years, killed a lot of people, and at the end no one understood what happened, he said. This would be illustrative of what you might expect if a superintelligent AI would attack. You would not know precisely whats going on, there would be huge problems, and you would be almost helpless.

Rather than devising technological solutions, in a recent talk about how to keepsuperintelligent AI from harming humans, Markov looked to lessons from ancient history.

Markov joined sci-fi author David Brin and other influential names in the artificial intelligence community Friday at The AI Conference in San Francisco.

One lesson fromearly humans that could help in the fight againstAI: make friends. Domesticate AI the same way Homo sapiens turned wolves into their protectors and friends.

If you are worried about potential threats, then try to use some of them for protection or try to adapt or domesticate those threats. So you might develop a friendly AI that would protect you from malicious AI or track unauthorized accesses, he said.

Markovbegan and ended his presentationby calling himself an amateur and saying he doesnt have all the answers, but he also said he has been thinking about ways to prevent an AI takeover for more than a year.He now believes the most important way for humans to prevent the rise of malicious AIis to put in a series of physical world restraints.

The bottom line here is that intelligence either hostile or friendly would be limited by physical resources, and we need to think about physical resources if we want to limit such attacks, he said. We absolutely need to control access to energy sources of all kinds, and we need to be very careful about physical and network security of critical infrastructure because if that is not taken care of, then disasters can obviously happen.

Calling upon a background in hardware design, Markov suggested steps be taken to separate powerful systems and have deficiencies built in to act as a kill switch, because if superintelligent AI ever arises, it will likely be by accident.

He also implores thatlimits be placed on self repair, replication, or improvement of AI, and urges that specific scenarios be considered, such as a nuclear weapons attack or use of biological weapons.

Generally, each agent, each part of your AI ecosystem needs to be designed with some weakness. You dont want agents to be able to take over everything, right? So you would control agents through these weaknesses and separation of powers, he said. In the discipline of electronic hardware design, we use obstruction hierarchies. We go from transistors to CPUs to data centers, and each level typically has a well-defined function, so if youre looking at this from the perspective of security, if you are defending against something, you would want to limit or regulate every level, and you would want the same type of limitations for AI.

Markovs presentation relies on predictions made by Ray Kurzweil, who believes that in a decade, virtual reality will be indistinguishable from real life, after which computers will surpass humans. Then, through augmentation, humans will become more machine-like until we reach the Singularity.

Markov also pointed out that there is a range ofopinions on malicious AI. Stephen Hawking believes AI will eventually supersede humankind, telling the BBC, The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

In contrast, former Baidu AI head Andrew Ng said last year that people should be as concerned about malicious AI as they are about overpopulation on Mars.

View original post here:

Watch Google's Igor Markov explain how to avoid the AI apocalypse - VentureBeat

Posted in Ai | Comments Off on Watch Google’s Igor Markov explain how to avoid the AI apocalypse – VentureBeat

GSA exploring blockchain, artificial intelligence as new digital services pilots – FederalNewsRadio.com

Posted: at 6:15 am

The General Services Administration is piloting a federal blockchain pilot initiative this summer.

Its part of anongoing effort from GSAs emerging citizen technology program to bring agencies togetherto discuss business cases and best practices for piloting and eventuallyadopting new artificial intelligence and advancingtechnologies.

Weve started talking with agencies [and] working with companies, [and] weve started just listening and going around and starting to identify those business cases and those needs that the distributed ledger systems that block chain provides and those technologies provide can impact government, Justin Herman, the lead for the emerging citizen technology program at GSAs Technology Transformation Service,said in an interview with Federal News Radio.

Agencies are beginning to explore blockchain, a shared digital ledger of sorts that can record financial transactions or essentially anything of value. But so far, agencies have only begun to explore it in pockets, and they havent been talking with each other about their discoveries, Herman said.

GSAs Federal Acquisition Service and the State Departments Office of Global Partnerships will hold a forum on the topic this summer. The goal, Herman said,is to begin discussing how and where it might be appropriate to engage with the blockchain industry.

Herman said GSA wants toclearly articulate its business cases to industry. He sees rapid development pilots as the way forward for agencies to start exploring blockchain and other emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence.

GSA is already working with about 30 agencies to explore how they can integrate their public data into artificial intelligence smart assistance devices such as Amazon Alexa,Microsoft Cortona, Google Assistant and IBM Watson.

Its part of GSAs no wrong door approach to digital government services, Herman said.

Whether you make a phone call to the government which millions of people do, tens of millions of people do whether you fill out a web form, whether you Tweet, whether you use a chat bot or Amazon Alexa or something thats installed directly in the system, there is no wrong way for a citizen to make a query and try to access their services, he said during a June 1 panel discussion at the IBM Government Analytics Forum in Washington.

Herman and GSA hope that members of the public willask their smart assistance devices the same questions they might typically call toask a customer service representative at the IRS or Social Security Administration, for example.

Eventually, agencies may be able to reach even more citizens with these technologies, Herman said.

Check out Federal News Radio's latest podcasts.

We knew that [there] were these consumer available products that were the tipping point of creating more self-service, efficient public services, he said. Theres also opportunities to make them more accessiblefor persons with disabilities. Theres the ability to open them up in new ways that put the interaction in the hands of the citizens and not so reliant on the bureaucracy to do it for them.

GSA is pushing these 30 agencies to use existing data to conduct short pilots on smart assistance technologies.

Herman said the short-term goal is to develop a governmentwide compliance framework, which agencies would be able to use to implement their own programs in the future.

These arent programs unto themselves, hesaid of the agency pilots. Its just a month or two to be able to test something out, put together some proofs of concept that willthen allow us to identify the privacy resources, the performance metrics [and] all those components that agencies need in order to responsibly adopt these emerging technologies.

And Herman sees an even bigger potential for artificial intelligence technology in the federal space.

There [are] already calls for us to then start piloting to revolutionize the federal workforce itself, from how we do business with customers, how we do business with citizens and how we work together, he said. This truly is a tipping point. Its beyond the tipping point.Its here.

View original post here:

GSA exploring blockchain, artificial intelligence as new digital services pilots - FederalNewsRadio.com

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Comments Off on GSA exploring blockchain, artificial intelligence as new digital services pilots – FederalNewsRadio.com

Inside the bizarre human job of being a face for artificial intelligence – Quartz

Posted: at 6:15 am


Quartz
Inside the bizarre human job of being a face for artificial intelligence
Quartz
Hayes says she didn't realize she had become the face of an artificial intelligence until about a year after the first version of Amelia launched in 2014. She knew something was different about the modeling job when she showed up to the photo shoot and ...

Read this article:

Inside the bizarre human job of being a face for artificial intelligence - Quartz

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Comments Off on Inside the bizarre human job of being a face for artificial intelligence – Quartz

Early Stage: Artificial intelligence vs. fake news – The Mercury News

Posted: at 6:15 am

Startup of the week:

What it is: NewsBotAI, a Facebook Messenger bot built by two UC Berkeley students

What it does:Detects fake news

Why its cool:Made-up and misleading news reports with political agendas floodedsocial media during the recent presidential election,and continue to cause controversy months later some critics have gone so far as tosuggest fake news helped get President Donald Trump elected. Facebook recently rolled outnewfact-checkingmechanisms and ways to flag fake news on the site, but at least one study found those safeguards so far have been ineffective.

Thats where NewsBot comes in.The chat bot uses artificial intelligence to spot fake news, but it also can decipher political biases in legitimate news stories and outlets. To use it, you just send the chat bot a link to a news article and wait for its reply.

NewsBots creator,Ash Bhat, says he also wants his bot to help restorepeoples trust in the reputable news outlets that have been tarnished by the fake news controversy.

It seemed to work as intended when I tested it out. When I sent NewsBot a link to a Dc Gazette article titled Another person investigating the Clintons turns up dead, it warned me that site tends to publish fake news (a verdict it accompanied with a sad-face emoji). When I fed it a Breitbart story titled Hillary Clinton adds DNC to list of groups she blames for election defeat, it ranked the story as legitimate, but right-leaning. The bot ranked the validity of mercurynews.com as generally high. And when I fed it threestories Id written about Trumps travel ban, it ranked them as center, moderate with a slight left bias and left-leaning possibly because the last article included several strongly worded quotes from tech leaders opposed to the travel ban.

Where it stands: NewsBot launched in April and already has several thousand daily users. Bhat says the bot is 85 percent accurate, and is getting better every day.

Only in Silicon Valley:

With so many high-tech fitness trackers on the market, these days it seems like we barely have use for the traditional bathroom scale.

San Francisco-based ShapeScale hopes to change that. The company makes asmart scalethat uses 3-D scanning technology to calculate not just your weight, but your body fat percentage, body composition and the measurements of each body part. Step onto the scale and a robotic arm revolves around you, taking hundreds of pictures that are then stitched together to create a 3-D image of your body. The scale connects to an app where you can see the image, which also indicates where youve been gaining or losing fat, and where youve been adding muscle.

You can preorder the device at shapescale.com for $299.99, plus a $9.99 monthly subscription.

Run the numbers:

Ever sent a text message you wished you could take back? Youre not the only one. More than 70 percent of people have done the same thing, according to a recent study of 1,000 American mobile users sponsored by On Second Thought, an app that lets you edit or delete mistaken text messages after sending them. According to the study, 39 percent of respondents upset someone close to them with a bad text, and 16 percent were bullied or faced professional consequences as a result. And 58 percent knew immediately after pressing send that they had made a mistake.

Quotable:

Hillary Clinton spoke last week at tech blog Recodes Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes. When asked whether Twitter has been good or bad for society, she said:

I think it has become victimized by deliberate efforts to shape the conversation, and push it towards conspiracies, lies, false information. And I think its the same problem that Facebook faces, that when you try to be all things to all people and you try to open up your platform so that people can come in, and you want to be influential because you expect people will actually tune you in and read and watch what you have, what do you do to try and contain the weaponization and manipulation of that information? I dont think we know yet.

More here:

Early Stage: Artificial intelligence vs. fake news - The Mercury News

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Comments Off on Early Stage: Artificial intelligence vs. fake news – The Mercury News

Amazon Web Services’ Swami Sivasubramanian on the future of AI in the cloud – GeekWire

Posted: at 6:15 am

Its pretty clear that the next big battleground for public cloud providers will involve artificial intelligence. Just as companies like Amazon Web Services made it possible for ten-person startups to take advantage of world-class computing infrastructure, so too will the big cloud providers compete to provide artificial intelligence expertise to companies that cant afford to duplicate the advanced machine-learning research already underway.

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon AI, is one of the key drivers of AI research for AWS. Cloud rivals like Google and Microsoft have signaled quite clearly that they will attempt to compete for the cloud workloads of the future by pushing the envelope of AI and machine-learning research and abstracting that effort for their cloud customers, and AWS must at least match those efforts to stay on top.

Sivasubramian will be talking about Amazons work in this area at our Cloud Tech Summit this Wednesday in Bellevue, and I recently caught up with him to get a preview of his talk.

In your own personal view, what is the single most exciting component of artificial intelligence research that will blossom over the next five years? Why?

We are entering a golden age of AI and machine learning. We believe AI will revolutionize almost all aspects of technology making it easier to do things that take considerable time and effort today like product fulfillment, logistics, personalization, language understanding, and computer vision, to big forward-looking ideas like self-driving cars.

If you see what is driving this revolution, it is not just the underlying deep learning algorithms that power these AI systems. In fact, some of the classic neural networks have been around for decades. At AWS, we believe the combination of these algorithms, access for cheap ways to store information, process and query data (to train these algorithms), and access to specialized compute infrastructure (e.g., GPU infrastructure, custom ASICs) that can run these algorithms efficiently have spurred the AI revolution.

We believe cloud has spurred a lot of researchers to innovate and experiment on new algorithms in deep learning and you will see more advances in reinforcement learning, auto tuning of models across a wide variety of domains.

What is the greatest obstacle to the widespread adoption of AI research in everyday products?

Today, building these machine learning models for products requires specialized skills with deep Ph.D. level expertise in machine learning. To a large extent, this is one of the primary blockers for broad AI adoption. However, this is changing. There is a broad awareness about the benefits AI can deliver and we have seen various companies making their technologies available in the form of cloud services and open source software to developers.

How do you feel about AI skeptics: not those who deny AI will ever make an impact, but those who believe it will have more of a negative impact on society than a positive impact?

History shows that new technology innovation benefits society and delivers a positive impact to society at large. We believe that AI technology can have a huge positive impact on the world, making jobs less physically demanding and freeing humans to focus on the things that make us unique.

What are the most important infrastructure components that are driving AI research today? What tools (hardware or software) are you lacking that you really wish you had?

AWS is investing in all layers of the stack from core deep learning frameworks (such as Apache MXNet, Caffe, Caffe2, TensorFlow), machine learning platforms, AI application services (such as Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and Amazon Rekognition). We have heavily invested in optimizing these deep learning frameworks on our compute instance families like GPU and CPU driven instances by working with partners like NVIDIA and Intel.

We are entering the golden age of machine learning that we believe will transform various aspects of technology and products. So, the question is not what we are lacking? It is more which is the best platform for developers to build these AI models? This is where we believe AWS with its breadth of offerings in storage, database, analytics, and compute infrastructure coupled with AI offerings can nurture and accelerate AI research and enable more developers to build real-world AI applications.

More here:

Amazon Web Services' Swami Sivasubramanian on the future of AI in the cloud - GeekWire

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Comments Off on Amazon Web Services’ Swami Sivasubramanian on the future of AI in the cloud – GeekWire

Apple is going large on artificial intelligence at WWDC today – Fast Company

Posted: at 6:15 am

As they traveled across America last year, it seems Donald Trump's children saw not only potential voters, but also potential customers.

After years of spinning out hotels laden with gold leaf and marble, Trump Hotels is launching a hospitality brand positioned for a different kind of clientele. At Trump Tower tonight, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., along with Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger, announced the launch of a mid-market hotel chain called American Idea. The new franchisea big departure from the flagship, luxury Trump Hotels and the company's planned upmarket second brand, Scionwill launch with three locations in the Mississippi Delta area. The three-star rooms will range from $80 to $120 a night.

"I'm sure it's going to haunt me, but we kind of look at [the new brand] as flea market chic," said Danziger during the announcement event. "It means that in any given city, there's history," he said, explaining that the decor of each hotel will reflect the heritage and ephemera of its local community.

The younger Trumps said they got the idea to launch the new hotel brand as they traveled the country with their father during the campaign. "There's a market here that we've been missing our entire lives," said Donald Trump Jr. during the announcement event.

By creating a hotel brand for third- and even fourth-tier American cities, Trump Hotels appears to be attempting to avoid headwinds facing the company's other brands. For example, Trump Hotels' international expansion has been curtailed by conflict of interest concerns. "When the president became the president, we said we're not going to do anything internationally. So that kind of forced me into [saying] we're going to be a domestic brand," said Danziger in an interview with Fast Company.

President Trump and his family have been accused on various occasions of viewing their move into politics as a business and branding opportunity. Certainly the theme of the new franchise falls in line with the U.S.A.-first attitude of Trump's campaign, which championed the American yesteryear. During the election, Mississippi swung for Trump.

[Photo: Ruth Reader 2017] AM

Read this article:

Apple is going large on artificial intelligence at WWDC today - Fast Company

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Comments Off on Apple is going large on artificial intelligence at WWDC today – Fast Company

How Artificial Intelligence Has Become the Hottest Investment Destination – Entrepreneur

Posted: at 6:15 am

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Artificial intelligence is drawing major investments this year with many Indian start-ups and tech giants betting big on this technology to break into the market.

Tech companies are looking forward to new opportunities in AI to transform their daily operations. With the ongoing global competition in AI and companies racing for it, theres much hype around this technology. This year the tech industry has witnessed significant push for AI with investments in this technology related start-ups and companies reaching to new heights.

Lets take a look at the investment trends in this domain in 2017 and the major investments made.

Niki.ai

An Economic Times report stated that Ratan Tata-backed, AI-based conversational chatbot Niki.ai has raised funding this year from a German multinational software corporation SAP.

The Bengaluru-based start-up was founded in May 2015 by 4 IIT Kharagpur graduates Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Shishir Modi and Nitin Babel. The company also raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Unilazer Ventures, a Mumbai-based VC firm founded by Ronnie Screwvala, in October 2015. This was followed by another seed funding round by Ratan Tata in May 2016.

Absentia Virtual Reality Private Limited

Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence and virtual reality start-up Absentia raised $1.2 million (INR 8 crore) funding in Pre-series A Funding round this year.

The funding was raised from venture capital firm Exfinity Venture Partners, whose founding parts are T.V Mohandas Pai, Deepak Ghaisas, Girish Paranjpe and V. Balakrishnan.

The start-up is developing an AI engine Norah AI that allows developers to stretch the boundaries of human imagination, creativity and expression through strategic inbuilt tools on the layers of deep learning and procedural interactive content design.

QorQL

Digital Payment player Paytm has invested an undisclosed amount in Noida-based online health tech start-up QorQL, which uses artificial intelligence and big data to improve a doctors productivity, care quality, and patient experience.

QorQL was launched in 2015 by Sanjay Singh and Dr. Shalini Singh.The start-up basically offers two solutions Qcare and Qhealth. Qcare involves a service where doctors can access patient health data and manage clinics with the help of a few clicks of the mouse. Qhealth, on the other hand, tracks health data, vitals and schedules.

Innefu Labs

Delhi-based AI start-up Innefu Labs raised $ 2 million Series A funding from IndiaNivesh venture capital fund. Innefu, founded in 2011 by Tarun Wig and Abhishek Sharma, is a research oriented information- security consulting group that specializes in meeting the information security needs of the consumer via specialized products and services.

It serves diverse industry verticals and the prominent among them are Law Enforcement, BFSI, BPOs/KPOs, E-commerce, IT/ITES, Education, Telecom etc. The start-up will primarily use funds to enhance its AI platform for predictive intelligence and facial biometrics.The start-up will utilize funds to enhance its cyber security solutions related topredictive intelligence and biometric authentication.

A self confessed Bollywood Lover, Travel junkie and Food Evangelist.I like travelling and I believe it is very important to take ones mind off the daily monotony .

View post:

How Artificial Intelligence Has Become the Hottest Investment Destination - Entrepreneur

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Comments Off on How Artificial Intelligence Has Become the Hottest Investment Destination – Entrepreneur

Toronto welcoming artificial intelligence company back from Silicon Valley – CBC.ca

Posted: at 6:15 am

An artificial intelligence company that uses computers, not lawyers, to sift through thousands of legal documents in search of key information is moving part of its operations to Toronto.

ROSS Intelligence co-founder Andrew Arruda calls opening a research and development centre here a "no brainer."

Arruda, one of the University of Toronto graduates who founded the company, was back on campus Monday to announce the news, calling the city "the hub of artificial intelligence development."

While the company's headquarters remain in San Francisco, "Toronto is where we always knew we had to be," Arruda told a crowd who gathered on campus for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

ROSS co-founder Andrew Arruda recounted starting the project in an unheated basement on the U of T campus. Now, the company is based in San Francisco. (CBC)

Last month, the university launched its new Vector Institute, which is aiming to bring the A.I. field's top minds to Toronto, and keep them there. Meanwhile, Mayor John Tory, on hand for the event, said he's hoping to lure more tech companies here.

"We want to be home to disruptive technologies," he said.

Tory also joked that he wished the A.I. researcher existed when he was working as a lawyer.

Arruda never met the mayor while his team was working on the project in an unheated basement of a "student housing house," but their paths crossed recently when Tory was doing a trade mission in Silicon Valley, where ROSS Intelligence had moved to be part of the well-known Y Combinator program for start-up businesses.

Tory said he believes the company made the move to take advantage of the city's "massive" talent pool.

"I've had companies tell me there is no other place on Earth they can find smart, educated people from a diverse a series of backgrounds that help them do their business internationally ... and I think that's the main factor," he said.

While both Tory and Arruda spoke at length about diversity, both down played concerns about tightening immigration rules in the U.S.

"It's always a factor," Arruda said following the announcement, but more so it's about "returning to the forefront of A.I. research and that's happening right here."

Tory said the city's legal department could use A.I. in the future, however Arruda said that will have to wait as the technology hasn't learned Canadian law yet.

Follow this link:

Toronto welcoming artificial intelligence company back from Silicon Valley - CBC.ca

Posted in Artificial Intelligence | Comments Off on Toronto welcoming artificial intelligence company back from Silicon Valley – CBC.ca