CrowdFlower is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series D funding.
The round was led by Microsoft, with participation from Canvas Ventures and Trinity Ventures. The San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of $38 million, according to CrunchBase.
Startups applying machine learning algorithms to advertising, sales, and marketing were highlighted this quarter by Oracle’s acquisition of Tel Aviv-based cross-device advertising startup Crosswise for $50M.
Affectiva, a startup developing “emotion recognition technology” that can read people’s moods from their facial expressions captured in digital videos, raised $14 million in a Series D round of funding led by Fenox Venture Capital.
According to co-founder Rana el Kaliouby, the Waltham, Mass.-based company wants its technology to become the de facto means of adding emotional intelligence and empathy to any interactive product, and the best way for organizations to attain unvarnished insights about customers, patients or constituents.
The possibility that a malevolent artificial intelligence might pose a serious threat to humankind has become a hotly debated issue. Various high profile individuals from the physicist Stephen Hawking to the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk have warned of the danger.
Which is why the field of artificial intelligence safety is emerging as an important discipline. Computer scientists have begun to analyze the unintended consequences of poorly designed AI systems, of AI systems created with faulty ethical frameworks or ones that do not share human values.
El Gobierno Vasco ha aprobado el proyecto FATIMA que, dentro de la convocatoria ELKARTEK, lidera AOTEK, la unidad de I+D empresarial de Fagor Automation, en colaboración con los centros tecnológicos IDEKO y ETIC, y la Universidad de Mondragón.
Este proyecto se enmarca dentro del uso de las técnicas de Inteligencia Artificial o aprendizaje supervisado aplicado a grandes cantidades de datos, además no homogéneos, en lo que es el núcleo de las técnicas englobadas dentro del término BIG DATA.
El desarrollo de la inteligencia artificial cada vez está más presente en nuestras vidas y con el paso del tiempo su presencia irá en aumento gracias al impulso que actualmente están aportando los gigantes tecnológicos. Precisamente, ayer Facebook anunció oficialmente en su conferencia anual de desarrolladores F8 la llegada de los bots a Messenger, pero ¿qué es un bot y para qué sirve?, ¿cuándo surgieron?, ¿qué compañías los fabrica?, ¿podrán reemplazar a las aplicaciones de mensajería? ¿por qué se han puesto de actualidad?, etc.
More than 20 private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have been acquired in the last 3 years by corporate giants competing in the space, including Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook, Intel, and, more recently, Salesforce. There have been 4 major acquisitions already in 2016.k at financing trends, investors, and hot markets within the artificial intelligence ecosystem
Over 25 companies raised equity funding rounds in the last quarter. Deal activity was up 7x from Q1'11.
Deal activity in artificial intelligence has now hit record highs for two quarters straight.
Deal count had already leapt to 24 in Q4’15, ten more deals than the previous quarter. The trend continued in Q1’16, with deals reaching a 5-year quarterly high, and passing the 25-deal threshold.
However, total funding dropped 18% to $83M from $101M in Q4’15, when over 20 companies raised funds.
The field of artificial intelligence has experienced a striking spurt of progress in recent years, with software becoming much better at understanding images, speech, and new tasks such as how to play games. Now the company whose hardware has underpinned much of that progress has created a chip to keep it going.
A few years ago, a breakthrough in machine learning suddenly enabled computers to recognize objects shown in photographs with unprecedented—almost spooky—accuracy. The question now is whether machines can make another leap, by learning to make sense of what’s actually going on in such images.
