Lifeboat Foundation

GUANGZHOU, China — Baidu has raised money for its artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor business at a valuation of $2 billion, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.

It comes as the Chinese search giant looks to diversify its revenue streams.

The funding round was led by CPE, a Chinese asset management and private equity firm, the person said. Venture capital companies IDG and Legend Capital were also involved. A fund under Chinese investment company Oriza Holdings also participated in the round.

The internet of things boom in the enterprise is driving edge computng, and a pilot program in Texas will focus on processing data at scale.

At microscopic scales, picking, placing, collecting, and arranging objects is a persistent challenge. Advances in nanotechnology mean that there are ever more complex things we’d like to build at those sizes, but tools for moving their component parts are lacking.

Now, new research from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science shows how simple, microscopic robots, remotely driven by magnetic fields, can use capillary forces to manipulate objects floating at an oil-water interface.

This system was demonstrated in a study published in the journal Applied Physics Letters on January 28, 2020.

STUTTGART, Germany — NATO and its member nations have formally agreed upon how the alliance should target and coordinate investments in emerging and disruptive technology, or EDT, with plans to release artificial intelligence and data strategies by the summer of 2021.

In recent years the alliance has publicly declared its need to focus on so-called EDTs, and identified seven science and technology areas that are of direct interest. Now, the NATO enterprise and representatives of its 30 member states have endorsed a strategy that shows how the alliance can both foster these technologies — through stronger relationships with innovation hubs and specific funding mechanisms — and protect EDT investments from outside influence and export issues.

NATO will eventually develop individual strategies for each of the seven science and technology areas — artificial intelligence, data and computing, autonomy, quantum-enabled technologies, biotechnology, hypersonic technology, and space. But for the near future, the priority is AI and data, said David van Weel, NATO’s assistant secretary general for emerging security challenges.

The idea of using light for computation is far from new, dating back to the 1950s. But electronic computing proved more practical to develop and commercialize. In the 1980s, Bell Labs tried to create a general purpose light-based chip, but it failed due to the difficulty of building a working optical transistor.

Lightmatter says its chips can be dropped into an existing data center and work with most major AI software. Later this year the company plans to launch a new technology for connecting chips, including those made by other companies, using its photonic technology. Light is widely used to shuttle information between computers, using fiber-optic cables.

Harris argues that AI will hit a wall in the next few years because of rising costs and energy use, and because of engineering constraints on the horizon. As engineers try to cram more transistors into a chip to speed up performance, chips may get too hot to manage.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GSbaqCe747Q

In a world-first, a tattoo artist remotely needled a tattoo into a person in real-time using a 5G-powered robotic arm. Read it here.

Sherpa, a startup from Bilbao, Spain that was an early mover in building a voice-based digital assistant and predictive search for Spanish-speaking audiences, has raised some more funding to double down on a newer focus for the startup: building out privacy-first AI services for enterprise customers.

The company has closed $8.5 million, funding that Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, Sherpa’s founder and CEO, said it will be using to continue building out a privacy-focused machine learning platform based on a federated learning model alongside its existing conversational AI and search services. Early users of the service have included the Spanish public health services, which were using the platform to analyse information about COVID-19 cases to predict demand and capacity in emergency rooms around the country.

Continue reading “Sherpa raises $8.5M to expand from conversational AI to B2B privacy-first federated learning services” »

The world’s first remote tattoo was completed by a 5G-powered robotic arm fitted with a tiny needle.

Tattoo artist Wes Thomas drew the design on a mannequin arm while a robot in another location copied his motions on Dutch actress Stijn Fransen’s wrist.

Continue reading “World’s first remote tattoo is completed by a robotic arm” »

Managers of the ImageNet data set paved the way for advances in deep learning. Now they’ve taken a big step to protect people’s privacy.