What's New In ML #4
Lyft's self-driving cars, detecting Parkinson's disease from breathing patterns, making air conditioners 10x better, self-taught AI, generating protein sequences, startup funding news
Hello friends,
Welcome to the 4th edition of What’s New In ML on Infinite Curiosity. The goal of this segment is to help you stay updated on what’s happening in the world of ML, AI, and Data. We’ll talk about real-world applications, cutting edge research, startups, and everything else that’s moving this field forward.
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Let’s dive in
APPLICATIONS AND RESEARCH
Lyft launches self-driving car Service in Las Vegas
Lyft has teamed up with Motional to launch a self-driving car service in Las Vegas. It does come with a few caveats though. Most important being that two safety drivers will ride along in each of Lyft’s driverless cars. They will take control of the car if something goes wrong. Read more
AI model can detect Parkinson's disease from breathing patterns
Researchers at MIT keep doing amazingly useful things. They have now developed a device that can detect the presence of Parkinson's disease. It's one of the fastest-growing neurological diseases in the world. The device uses a neural network to assess whether someone has Parkinson's from their breathing patterns that occur while sleeping. Read more
Hyperganic is using AI to make air conditioners 10x more efficient
The energy spent on cooling indoor spaces has tripled since 1990. And it's going to triple again by 2050. That's a lot of energy consumption! A company called Hyperganic is using AI to design new heat exchangers. These heat exchangers can be 3D-printed in metal. These new AC units will be 10 times more efficient than what we have in the market. Read more
Self-Taught AI shows similarities to how the brain works
Computational neuroscientists are starting to explore neural networks that have been trained with little or no human-labeled data. This is called self-supervised learning. And it allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters and what doesn't. The researchers have observed that this self-taught AI learns just like how our brain learns. If these observations hold true, it's a strong indication that our brains require self-supervised learning in some form to function. Read more
Using NLP techniques to generate protein sequences
To an AI system, human speech is similar enough to protein structure. This has led to research teams using NLP to generate protein structures. Researchers at Bayreuth University in Germany describe ProtGPT2, a language model based on OpenAI's GPT-2. They use it to generate novel protein sequences based on the principles of natural ones. They have used it to train a model to learn the protein language, generate stable proteins, and explore dark regions of the protein space. Read more
STARTUP FUNDING
EvaBot Raises $8.3M Series A led by Comcast Ventures for its AI gifting assistant
Explo raises $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures for its customer facing analytics solution
Sync Computing raises $15.5M Series A led by Costanoa Ventures for its cloud infrastructure optimization solution
Omni raises $17.5M led by Redpoint for its cloud powered BI solution
Keen Technologies raises $20M led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to go after AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
BigPanda raises $20M Series E extension from UBS Next and Wells Fargo for its AIOps product
Modulate raises $30M Series A round led by Lakestar for its voice moderation product
Pliops raises $100M Series D led by Koch Disruptive Technologies for its data processors for cloud and enterprise data centers
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