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Coveo Reaches Unicorn Status; Spotting Wildfires; Developing Ways to Detect Deepfakes
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Coveo Solutions CEO Louis Tetu says, “We’re not in this to exit, we’re in this to build.” PHOTO: CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Coveo reaches unicorn status. Enterprise and data analytics software startup Coveo Solutions Inc. is the latest artificial-intelligence unicorn. It raised $227 million in new funding, bringing its valuation to more than $1 billion, reports WSJ’s Marc Vartabedian. Coveo is looking to grow its personalization and
recommendations platform, which, among other things, uses AI to cater search functions to specific customers. Omers Growth Equity, part of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, led the equity round. Coveo wasn’t the only AI company to reach unicorn status this week. On Tuesday, Riskified Ltd., a data-security company, received $165 million in a funding round that pushed its valuation to more than $1 billion. AI startups continue to draw investor interest. In just the third quarter of this year, they raised $4.3 billion of venture capital across 140 deals, up from $2.8 billion over 125 deals in the same period a year ago, according to a PwC/CB
Insights MoneyTree report.
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A firefighter drags a hose to battle a grass fire on East Cypress Road in Knightsen, Calif., on Oct. 27, 2019. PHOTO: JOSE CARLOS FAJARDO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Using AI to spot early signs of wildfires. Artificial intelligence has been used to predict storm and earthquake damage and to identify locations likely to be hardest hit. Now an AI company in San Francisco called Chooch is working with state agencies, researchers and others to create a tool to scan satellite images to detect wildfires in their earliest stages, the Washington Post reports. “To locate fires, Chooch AI is training its AI to rely on infrared technology to identify heat and smoke, the latter of which can be pinpointed on an acre-by-acre basis,” according to the Post. Like other AI-based early warning tools, the Chooch system would give authorities and emergency
personnel more time to respond, saving lives and property.
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Snapdocs raises $25 million for real-estate tech. The San Francisco-based startup will use the money to further improve artificial intelligence on its mortgage processing platform, Marc Vartabedian writes for WSJ Pro. Snapdocs provides software that enables the various parties involved in arranging a mortgage to interact, with the goal of simplifying the process. Some of the company’s offerings use AI technology to perform tasks such as scanning documents for errors. Snapdocs’ new Series B round was led by F-Prime Capital, while previous investors Sequoia Capital, Freestyle Capital and Founders Fund returned for the new round.
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40 Million
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The number of GitHub developers, whose ranks are expanding with the growth of data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning repositories, reports ZDNet.
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Detecting deepfakes. A number of tools are being readied to combat deepfakes. UC Berkeley, working with the U.S. military, was expected this week to come out with a tool that allows the media and political campaigns to scan videos to see if they’ve been altered, reports the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, VentureBeat reports that researchers at George Washington University, Amazon AWS AI, and a startup called AdVerifai say they developed an AI model that can classify misleading speech.
With the Presidential election coming next year, there’s a sense of urgency for tools that can identify doctored content. “The deepfakes problem is expanding,” Lindsay Gorman, a fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy think tank, told the Los Angeles Times. “There is no reason to think they won’t be used in this election.”
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Facebook detailed a new machine-learning algorithm that uses raw audio to enhance speech recognition. (VentureBeat)
Uber is looking for a new track near Pittsburgh to test autonomous vehicles. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Surgery, event planning, and fashion design are among the jobs robots can’t do yet. (PBS)
Neural Magic, a startup that developed a method to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs, raised $15 million in seed funding. (TechCrunch)
Untether AI, a chip startup, raised $29 million. (VentureBeat)
Nvidia said its new AI chips topped a series of benchmark tests. (Reuters)
Early adopters of health-care AI report seeing success in predicting readmissions and unnecessary emergency department visits. (FierceHealthcare)
Kohl’s is looking to use machine learning for digital media buying. (Ad Age)
Teradyne, a maker semiconductor test-equipment, is establishing itself as a robot powerhouse. (Barron’s)
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“If facial-recognition algorithms tend to be used against minorities, and emotion-recognition algorithms tend to leave out people who are non-neurotypical, should we build these at all?”
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— Janelle Shane, a research scientist and author of the book “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place,” in an interview with PC Magazine.
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