The U.S. freelancing economy is booming, according to a recent Upwork report, with more than a third of the American workforce carrying out some form of freelance work in the past 12 months. This reportedly created $1.2 trillion of economic value — 22% up on the previous year.While a number of factors may have contributed to this surge, including the COVID-19 crisis which has left many people out of work, this movement creates a lot of administrative work in terms of incorporating a new business, doing accounts, expenses, taxes, and all the rest. And this is why a new startup is launching out of stealth today backed by an impressive roster of investors to serve as an all-in-one back office for “businesses of one.”

French robotics startup Exotec has raised $90 million in a round of funding led by London-based VC firm 83North.Founded out of Lille in 2015, Exotec develops autonomous industrial robots called Skypods that can move horizontally and vertically, and travel at speeds of up to 9mph. The robots constitute part of a “goods-to-person” picking system designed to improve productivity and reduce strain and physical exertion in human warehouse workers.Ecommerce has boomed in 2020 due in large part to COVID-19, with online merchants seeing a 42% year-on-year increase in sales last month in the U.S. alone — data suggests that the global pandemic has led to an extra $107 billion in online sales since March. This surge in demand is good news for companies such as Exotec, which specialize in equipping large warehouses with the tools to pick and pack orders at scale.

Baidu today announced that it will seek to raise financing for its Smart Living Business (SLG), the internal group that maintains Baidu’s DuerOS voice platform and DuerOS-powered smart devices. Baidu expects a series A funding round valuing SLG at approximately RMB 20 billion ($2.9 billion) to close in Q4 2020 with definitive agreements from CPE, Baidu Capital, and IDG Capital. Baidu will hold super-voting rights in SLG and will continue to consolidate SLG’s financial results as a majority shareholder.The pandemic has supercharged voice platform usage, which was already on an upswing. According to a study by NPR and Edison Research, the percentage of voice-enabled device owners who use commands at least once a day rose between the beginning of 2020 and the start of April. Just over a third of smart speaker owners say they listen to more music, entertainment, and news from their devices than they did before, and owners report requesting an average of 10.8 tasks per week from their assistant this year compared with 9.4 different tasks in 2019.

The study, recently published in Nature Communications, shows the new technique can also overcome some of the challenges of current testing.Researchers demonstrated that an AI algorithm could be trained to classify COVID-19 pneumonia in computed tomography (CT) scans with up to 90 percent accuracy, as well as correctly identify positive cases 84 percent of the time and negative cases 93 percent of the time.CT scans offer a deeper insight into COVID-19 diagnosis and progression as compared to the often-used reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR, tests. These tests have high false negative rates, delays in processing and other challenges.Another benefit to CT scans is that they can detect COVID-19 in people without symptoms, in those who have early symptoms, during the height of the disease and after symptoms resolve.

During its Launch Night In event, which kicks off today at 11 a.m. Pacific (2 p.m. Eastern), Google is expected to launch new hardware across its product families. Leaks and premature sales spoiled some surprises — eagle-eyed buyers managed to snag Google’s new Chromecast from Home Depot, while Walmart’s mobile app leaked the specs of the Nest Audio smart speaker. Still, there’s a chance Google has an ace or two up its sleeve.Here’s what we expect to see during this afternoon’s livestream, which can be found here.It’s all but certain Google will announce two smartphones today: The Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G. The Pixel 5 is the follow-up to last year’s Pixel 4, while the Pixel 4a 5G is a 5G-compatible version of the Pixel 4a that launched in August.

In 2018, Google introduced accelerated linear algebra (XLA), an optimizing compiler that speeds up machine learning models’ operations by combining what used to be multiple kernels into one. (In this context, “kernels” refer to classes of algorithms for pattern analysis.) While XLA supports processor and graphics card hardware, it also runs on Google’s proprietary tensor processing units (TPUs), and it was instrumental in bringing TPU support to Facebook’s PyTorch AI and machine learning framework. As of today, PyTorch/XLA support for Cloud TPUs — Google’s managed TPU service — is now generally available, enabling PyTorch users to take advantage of TPUs using first-party integrations.

Arm today announced a suite of technologies intended to make it easier for autonomous car developers to bring their designs to market. According to the company, integrating three new processors onto a system-on-chip — the Arm Cortex-A78AE processor, Mali-G78AE graphics processor, and Mali-C71AE image signal processor — provides the power-efficient and safety-enabled processing required to achieve the potential of autonomous decision-making.While fully autonomous vehicles or driverless cars might be years away from commercial deployment, automation features built into advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) could help reduce the number of accidents by up to 40%. That’s critical, given that 94% of road traffic accidents occur due to human error, according to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and it’s perhaps why the global ADAS market is projected to grow from $27 billion in 2020 to $83 billion by 2030. (Arm estimates automation in automotive and industrial sectors will be an $8 billion silicon opportunity in 2030.)

Sometimes the light Kiana Caton is forced to use gives her a headache. On top of common concerns that come with taking a state bar exam — like whether you pass the test — Caton has to deal with challenges presented by facial recognition. She’s a Black woman, and facial recognition technology has a well-documented history of misidentifying women with melanin. Analysis by the federal government and independent research like the Gender Shades project has proved this repeatedly. The European Conference on Computer Vision also recently found algorithms don’t work as well on Black women as they do on other people.To ensure her skin tone doesn’t lead ExamSoft remote test monitoring software to raise red flags, Caton keeps a light shining directly on her face throughout the two-day process, a tactic she picked up from fellow law school graduates with dark skin.

One of the just-announced Pixels’ most intriguing features is Hold for Me, a Google Assistant-powered service that waits on hold when you call a retailer, utility, airline, or other business’ toll-free support number. When a human comes on the line and is ready to talk, Hold for Me — which will launch in preview in the U.S. in English before expanding to other regions and devices — notifies you with sound, vibration, and a prompt on your screen.It wasn’t immediately clear how Hold for Me worked, but Google responded to a list of VentureBeat’s questions in the hours following the event. According to a spokesperson, Hold for Me is powered by Google’s Duplex technology, which not only recognizes hold music but also understands the difference between a recorded message — for example, “Hello, thank you for waiting” — and a representative on the line. (That said, a support page admits Hold for Me’s detection accuracy might not remain high “in every situation”.) Google says it gathered feedback from a number of companies, including Dell and United, as well as from studies with customer support representatives to help design Hold for Me’s interactions.

Smart intercom maker ButterflyMX today raised $35 million in a growth equity round led by Volition Capital that brings its total raised to date to over $58 million. (Egis Capital, RiverPark Ventures, and Stifel Financial participated.) A company spokesperson said that the fresh capital will be used to expand into new markets, hire on 80 new employees by 2021, and introduce products that extend ButterflyMX’s intercom experience from the front door to the rest of the building.Contactless entry technology, which is anticipated to be an over $22 billion market by 2027, is experiencing growth during the pandemic despite evidence that infection by touch is rare. A recent CBRE survey of 203 companies found that roughly half are considering installing touchless technology as part of their plans to return to the office.

Amsterdam and Helsinki today launched AI registries to detail how each city government uses algorithms to deliver services, some of the first major cities in the world to do so. An AI Register for each city was introduced in beta today as part of the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit, organized in part by the European Commission and the city of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam registry currently features a handful of algorithms, but it will be extended to include all algorithms following the collection of feedback at the virtual conference to lay out a European vision of the future of the internet, according to a city official.Each algorithm cited in the registry lists datasets used to train a model, a description of how an algorithm is used, how humans utilize the prediction, and how algorithms were assessed for potential bias or risks. The registry also provides citizens a way to give feedback on algorithms their local government uses and the name, city department, and contact information for the person responsible for the responsible deployment of a particular algorithm. A complete algorithmic registry can empower citizens and give them a way to evaluate, examine, or question governments’ applications of AI.

Simbe Robotics, a developer of grocery store inventory robots, today announced it has inked a deal with Schnucks Markets to roll out robots to over 100 supermarkets across the U.S. In 15 Missouri and Illinois pilots during the pandemic, Simbe claims its robots have sped up inventory and replenishment by 14 times at Schnucks locations while minimizing the number of workers in the aisles, reducing out-of-stock incidents by 20%.Robots are coming for the grocery aisle, promising to save storeowners time by inventorying stock quickly and accurately. Research and Markets anticipates that the global brick-and-mortar automation market will be worth close to $18.9 million by 2023, which some analysts say could cut down on the billions of dollars in lost revenue traced to misplaced and erroneously priced items. Robots also have the benefit of promoting contactless, physically distant shopping and work environments. A July survey by researchers at Pompeu Fabra University found that over 195 different kinds of robots have been piloted in hospitals, health centers, airports, office buildings, and other public spaces since the start of the pandemic.

In a paper published last year in the journal Nature Communications, researchers at the City College of New York investigated the spread of fake news on Twitter in the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. elections. Drawing from a dataset of 171 million tweets sent by 11 million unique accounts, the team attempted to quantify the importance of tweets and top “news” spreaders, concluding that bots tweeted links to websites containing fake news at rates higher than any other group.This insight wasn’t new — the role bots play in disseminating false and misleading information was already well-established. Research by Indiana University scientists found that over a 10-month period between 2016 and 2017, bots targeted influential users through replies and mentions in order to surface untrue stories before they went viral. During the 2017 Catalan referendum for independence in Spain, bots generated and promoted violent content aimed at users calling for independence.

Coralogix, which analyzes software logs with AI, today announced $25 million in new funding and launched a real-time analytics solution that allows customers to pay according to data priority instead of volume. This allows them to get queries, alerts, and machine learning capabilities without using storage.About 50% of logging statements don’t include any information about critical things like variable state at the time of an error, according to GitHub and OverOps surveys. That may be why developers spend an estimated half of their time on troubleshooting and bug-fixing.San Francisco-based Coralogix, which was founded in 2014, provides AI analytics solutions for a host of software development challenges. Its suite automatically clusters log records back to their patterns and identifies connections among those patterns, forming baseline flows for comparison and future study. Scaling from hundreds to millions of logs — with integrations for popular languages and platforms like Docker, Python, Heroku, .NET, Kubernetes, and Java — Coralogix spotlights anomalies and affords developers access to a suite of identification, visualization, and remediation tools.

Once in a while, a young company will claim it has more experience than would be logical — a just-opened law firm might tout 60 years of legal experience, but actually consist of three people who have each practiced law for 20 years. The number “60” catches your eye and summarizes something, yet might leave you wondering whether to prefer one lawyer with 60 years of experience. There’s actually no universally correct answer; your choice should be based on the type of services you’re looking for. A single lawyer might be superb at certain tasks and not great at others, while three lawyers with solid experience could canvas a wider collection of subjects.If you understand that example, you also understand the challenge of evaluating AI chip performance using “TOPS,” a metric that means trillions of operations per second, or “tera operations per second.” Over the past few years, mobile and laptop chips have grown to include dedicated AI processors, typically measured by TOPS as an abstract measure of capability. Apple’s A14 Bionic brings 11 TOPS of “machine learning performance” to the new iPad Air tablet, while Qualcomm’s smartphone-ready Snapdragon 865 claims a faster AI processing speed of 15 TOPS.

In June, Google unveiled Smart Cleanup, a Google Sheets feature that taps AI to learn patterns and autocomplete data while surfacing formatting suggestions. Now, following a months-long beta, Smart Cleanup is today launching into general availability for all G Suite users.Smart Cleanup comes as Google looks to inject G Suite with more AI-powered functionality. Recently, the company added a feature that lets users ask natural language questions about data in spreadsheets, like “Which person has the top score?” and “What’s the sum of price by salesperson?” Google Meet earlier this year gained adaptive noise cancellation. And two years ago, Google rolled out Quick Access, a machine learning-powered tool that suggests files relevant to documents users are editing, to Sheets, Docs, and Slides.

Seismic, a startup developing a sales enablement and market orchestration platform, today raised $92 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion. (That’s up from a $1 billion valuation in December 2018.) A company spokesperson tells VentureBeat that the capital will be put toward international growth, mergers and acquisitions, and product R&D.Sales enablement is a market in the midst of healthy and sustained growth. The percent of organizations with a dedicated sales enablement person, program, or function nearly doubled between 2016 and 2018, according to CSO Insights. And in September 2018, Forrester Research reported that 54% of companies have or are in the process of implementing a sales enablement technology, with an additional 19% planning to do so or considering doing so in the next 12 to 18 months.

LinkedIn recently open-sourced GDMix, a framework that makes training AI personalization models ostensibly more efficient and less time-consuming. The Microsoft-owned company says it’s an improvement over LinkedIn’s previous release in the space — Photon ML — because it supports deep learning models.GDMix trains fixed effect and random effect models, two kinds of models used in search personalization and recommender systems. They’re normally challenging to train in isolation, but GDMix accelerates the process by breaking down large models into a global model (fixed effect) and many small models (random effects) and then solving them individually. This divide-and-conquer approach allows for swifter training of models with commodity hardware, according to LinkedIn, thus eliminating the need for specialized processors, memory, and networking equipment.

Radius Neighbors Classifier is a classification machine learning algorithm. It is an extension to the k-nearest neighbors algorithm that makes predictions using all examples in the radius of a new example rather than the k-closest neighbors. As such, the radius-based approach to selecting neighbors is more appropriate for sparse data, preventing examples that are far […]

As widely predicted, Google announced two smartphones during its Launch Night In today: The Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a (5G). The Pixel 5 is the follow-up to last year’s Pixel 4, while the Pixel 4a (5G) is a 5G-compatible version of the Pixel 4a that launched in August.Neither phone appears to introduce many AI-powered features that aren’t already available on existing Pixel devices. (Pixel hardware has historically been a showcase for Google’s AI innovations.) Instead, they seem aimed at nudging the lineup toward the midrange. Affordability is the focus rather than cutting-edge technology, along with the recognition that neither phone is likely to make a splash in a highly saturated market. Reportedly, Google plans to produce less than 1 million Pixel 5 smartphones this year; production could be as low as around 800,000 units for the 5G-capable Pixel 5.

Sendinblue, a marketing automation startup founded in 2012, today announced that it raised $160 million. A company spokesperson says it will be put toward accelerating Sendinblue’s go-to-market efforts as the company experiences growth during the pandemic.Lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders aimed at beating back the novel coronavirus have forced marketers to fully embrace digital. According to a report published by The CMO Survey, some 60.8% of respondents indicated they’ve “shifted resources to building customer-facing digital interfaces” and 56.2% transformed their businesses to focus on digital opportunities. Moreover, marketers reported increased openness among customers to new digital offerings introduced during the pandemic and greater perceived value in digital experiences.

Siren, a startup developing washable smart socks designed to help remotely monitor diabetes patients, today raised $9 million. According to CEO Ran Ma, the extension to Siren’s series B round will be used to grow the team and meet demand for its product and services.In response to the pandemic, companies like Current Health and Twistle have teamed up with health care providers to pilot at-home wellness-tracking platforms. ABI Research predicts that by 2025, spending on AI in health care and pharmaceuticals will increase by $1.5 billion as a result of the novel coronavirus.Ma studied biomedical engineering at Northwestern University’s Fineberg School of Medicine and worked with Siren’s founding team to develop the socks and foot monitoring systems that track issues related to inflammation, particularly in people with diabetes. Siren monitors foot temperature continuously at six key points, notifying wearers and their doctors via an app and text when it detects signs of inflammation.

Artificial intelligence is helping telecoms operators to boost the RAN capacity of their 4G networks by 15 percent. More people than ever are relying on telecoms networks to work, play, and stay connected during the pandemic. Operators are doing all they can to ensure their existing networks have enough capacity to cope with demand. Gorkem... Read more » The post AI is helping mobile operators to cope with pandemic demand appeared first on AI News.

Facial recognition models fail to recognize Black, Middle Eastern, and Latino people more often than those with lighter skin. That’s according to a study by researchers at Wichita State University, who benchmarked popular algorithms trained on datasets containing tens of thousands of facial images.While the study has limitations in that it investigated models that haven’t been fine-tuned for facial recognition, it adds to a growing body of evidence that facial recognition is susceptible to bias. A paper last fall by University of Colorado, Boulder researchers demonstrated that AI from Amazon, Clarifai, Microsoft, and others maintained accuracy rates above 95% for cisgender men and women but misidentified trans men as women 38% of the time. Independent benchmarks of major vendors’ systems by the Gender Shades project and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated that facial recognition technology exhibits racial and gender bias and have suggested that current facial recognition programs can be wildly inaccurate, misclassifying people upwards of 96% of the time.