Vertical farming company Bowery Farming today announced the close of a $90 million funding round. The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with participation from Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.Bowery has opened two growing facilities near its headquarters in the New York area since the company began operations in February 2017.  The funding announced today will be used to open new facilities in additional not-yet-named cities by the end of 2019 and to support advances in company tech and innovation.Bowery produces pesticide-free produce that is used at Whole Foods, New York City restaurants, and Sweetgreen, a vegetarian franchise restaurant that closed a $200 million funding round last month....

More than a million people are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, and in the U.S., approximately one in nine men will develop prostate cancer in their lifetime, according to the National Cancer Institute. Unfortunately, it tends to be problematic from a treatment perspective — it’s frequently non-aggressive, making it difficult to determine which, if any, procedures might be necessary.Encouragingly, an international team of European researchers from the University of Copenhagen, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, and other leading institutions have made progress in developing a computer model that can differentiate between aggressive and non-aggressive prostate cancer cases based on certain genes. They describe their work — which is currently being implemented in an unnamed clinic in Germany — in the December 10 edition of the journal Cancer Cell....

Nvidia has set six new records for how fast an AI model can be trained using a predetermined group of datasets.MLPerf is a benchmark suite of tests created by prominent companies in the space to standardize and provide guidelines for how to measure AI training and inference speed. MLPerf is often used to share the speed of commercially available cloud computing services, mobile devices, or hardware in server hardware stacks.Companies who contributed to the creation of MLPerf include Google, Nvidia, Baidu, and supercomputer maker Cray.Nvidia set records for image classification with ResNet-50 version 1.5 on the ImageNet dataset, object instance segmentation, object detection, non-recurrent translation, recurrent translation, and recommendation systems....

Vector, Anki’s playful robot companion, will soon speak Alexa’s language. The San Francisco startup today announced that that integration with Amazon’s assistant will arrive in an update slated for Monday, December 17, alongside other new “interactive experiences.”Alexa on Vector is triggered with a voice command — “Alexa” — that queues up the assistant for requests. It affords access to the full range of Alexa’s capabilities, including compatibility with 20,000 smart home devices and the more than 50,000 third-party apps in the Alexa Skills Store — in addition, of course, to things like reminders, search queries, shopping list additions, and song requests.As for the aforementioned experiences, here’s what’s coming down the pipeline:...

Microsoft today launched a new web analytics product in beta. Clarity is designed to help developers understand user behavior at scale, including why users struggle, where they run into issues, and why they abandon a website.The web analytics space has seen quite a bit of movement over the past two years. Google Optimize 360, the company’s A/B testing tool, launched out of beta in March 2017. The suite includes a free version, Google Optimize, while Optimizely, the previous leader in web analytics, killed off its free product earlier this year.Microsoft wanted to offer its own take at A/B experimentation, noting that “while A/B experiments allow developers to see when their key metrics are moving, the primary drawback is the lack of visibility into why the metrics moved in any given direction.” Clarity’s main differentiator is a feature called Session Replay, which lets developers view a user’s page impression including interactions such as mouse movement, touch gestures, click events, and so on....

Fraud detection startup Inscribe today announced the close of a $3 million funding round.Inscribe uses a combination of natural language processing and computer vision to scan documents sent to lenders and insurance companies to catch fraudulent activity in documents like pay stubs, bank statements, and tax forms.The money will be used to grow the company and its engineering ranks. As a result, an office will be opened in Dublin, Ireland, cofounder and CEO Ronan Burke told VentureBeat in a phone interview. Inscribe currently has four employees.Computer vision may flag documents based on their appearance resembling free online templates, dark web forgeries, or even based on the font used or color of a document....

A group of European researchers are coming together in a bid to advance AI research over fears the continent will fall behind. The initiative will be called the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and was launched on 6th December at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) meeting in Montreal, Canada. Almost 200 […] The post European AI researchers form group over falling behind fears appeared first on AI News.

Computer vision is infiltrating just about every industry — to bring analytics to retailers’ shelves, identify early signs of Alzheimer’s, and even help security cameras identify weapons.Then there is ImpactVision, which is leveraging machine learning and hyperspectral imaging, a technique that combines spectroscopy and computer vision, to automatically assess the quality of food in factories and elsewhere.The San Francisco-based startup previously raised around $1.6 million in funding, and today it’s lifting the lid on another $1.3 million in a round led by transport and logistics giant Maersk. Participants in the round include the Yield Lab, Acre Venture Partners, AgFunder, and Xandex Ventures. A spokesperson told VentureBeat that the fresh funds will be used to “accelerate product development” and grow the company’s sales and engineering teams....

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an artificially intelligence (AI) system that can isolate small, nearly transparent imperfections in poorly-lit images to reproduce objects. In a blog post today published by MIT News, they describe a deep neural network — layered mathematical functions loosely mimicking the behavior of neurons in the brain — to erase away target artifacts from grainy pictures of images.George Barbastathis, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, believes it might have applications in medicine.“In the lab, if you blast biological cells with light, you burn them, and there is nothing left to image,” he told MIT News. “When it comes to X-ray imaging, if you expose a patient to X-rays, you increase the danger they may get cancer. What we’re doing here is, you can get the same image quality, but with a lower exposure to the patient. And in biology, you can reduce the damage to biological specimens when you want to sample them.”...

It seems nary a week goes by without a breach that compromises millions of personal files. On Monday, Google revealed that it will shut down its social network, Google+, months earlier than initially planned after the profiles of tens of millions were inadvertently exposed. In September, Facebook revealed that hackers had gained access to data belonging to 50 million people. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. The problem is troublingly widespread — according to the Ponemon Institute, 54 percent of companies experienced one or more successful attacks this year.The stats are enough to frighten anyone away from cloud storage, and they’re one of the reasons Pantas Sutardja, cofounder and ex-CTO at chipmaking giant Marvell, pursued a business focused on securing personal data. His San Jose startup — Latticework — emerged from stealth this summer, with 100 employees and an in-house hybrid cloud infrastructure dubbed LatticeNest. With $13 million in seed funding from Tyche Partners and individual strategic investors, the company is now gearing up to launch its first product: Amber, a smart storage platform with artificially intelligent features....

AtScale today announced the close of a $50 million funding round to incorporate more machine learning into its data management service. The company helps businesses draw data from on-premise and cloud servers to break down silos, pool datasets, and connect business intelligence tools.AtScale also helps companies access data from data warehouses and online analytical processing (OLAP) systems, pulling data from services like AWS Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and Microsoft Azure SQL Data.“People want to move to the cloud for reasons we all know, but there are practical inhibitors for the global 2000, meaning all of the data management and architectures that they’ve built,” Lynch said. “That’s the real opportunity for us in the market. We can bring big data workloads to the cloud because we eliminate the friction.”...

Real-time transit can be a real dilemma for municipalities that lack digital infrastructure. Things like routes, timing, and asset management are challenging to optimize without a computerized backbone to move the necessary pieces — or busses, as the case may be — into place. Moreover, with the number of heavy-duty transit buses expected to surpass 57,700 in countries like China by 2022, they aren’t likely to get easier anytime soon.That’s where Optibus comes in. The four-year-old Tel Aviv startup took three years to develop the artificial intelligence (AI) that underlies its core product: a web-based transit operations solution that helps plan and schedule the movements of drivers and vehicles, in the process reducing costs by up to 15 percent. The company today announced that it’s raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners with a strategic investment by Alibaba....

Method could illuminate features of biological tissues in low-exposure images.

The long-term goal of the overall field of research is to design intelligent machines capable of changing their behavior to enhance human trust in them. The new models were developed in research led by assistant professor Neera Jain and associate professor Tahira Reid, in Purdue University's School of Mechanical Engineering."Intelligent machines, and more broadly, intelligent systems are becoming increasingly common in the everyday lives of humans," Jain said. "As humans are increasingly required to interact with intelligent systems, trust becomes an important factor for synergistic interactions."For example, aircraft pilots and industrial workers routinely interact with automated systems. Humans will sometimes override these intelligent machines unnecessarily if they think the system is faltering....

Over the last few decades, the unprecedented pace of technological progress has allowed us to upgrade and modernize much of our infrastructure and solve many long-standing logistical problems. For example, Babylon Health’s AI-driven smartphone app is helping assess and prioritize 1.2 million patients in North London, electronic transfers allow us to instantly send money nearly anywhere in the world, and, over the last 20 years, GPS has revolutionized  how we navigate, how we track and ship goods, and how we regulate traffic.However, exponential growth comes with its own set of hurdles that must be navigated. The foremost issue is that it’s exceedingly difficult to predict how various technologies will evolve. As a result, it becomes challenging to plan for the future and ensure that the necessary safety features are in place....