retrain.ai, one of the most promising startups of 2022: Globes

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December 16, 2022

retrain.ai, the leading talent intelligence platform, has been selected as one of the Globe’s most promising Israeli startups of 2022, nominated by Israel’s premier venture capital firms on Thursday. The company retrain.ai helps train your enterprise to attract, hire, retain employees and upskill your workforce powered by artificial intelligence and real-time labor market data.

retrain.ai also reported closing an additional $14 million investment round led by AI-focused Radical Ventures, raising their total funding to $34M. Other investors like Square Peg, Hertz Ventures, .406 Ventures, Schusterman Family Investments, TechAviv, and Splunk Ventures also participated in the round.

Globes is Israel’s number one economic newspaper, which published the list of 10 promising companies based on leading global investment funds in the Israeli high-tech market. It analyzed about 4000 tech companies, out of which retrain.ai was recognized for its cutting-edge AI technology and capabilities to help people gain in-demand, emerging skills necessary for a productive career.

The Co-founder and CEO, Dr. Shay David, Retrain.ai, mentioned that the company is highly honored to be recognized by Globes among all the other thousands of techs surveyed. Radical’s investment in retrain.ai will encourage immediate value and growth in the international market, where retrain.ai will help millions of people find jobs.

Biochemists Present AlphaFill, an Upgraded Version of AlphaFold for Protein Folding

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Disha Chopra

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December 16, 2022

Biochemists from the Netherlands’ Cancer Institute have presented AlphaFill, an upgraded version of DeepMind’s AlphaFold, a protein sequencing and folding model. AlphaFill is an algorithm that predicts protein structures by transplanting missing ions and molecules from previously determined protein sequences and structures.

The building blocks of life forms, Proteins, can be thought of as a ribbon of amino acids that wraps up into a knot of complicated twists and turns. Because amino acids are naturally flexible, a typical protein can assume an estimated 10 to the power of 300 different configurations. DeepMind claimed that it had predicted more than 200 million proteins using AlphaFold.

Following the footsteps, Meta released another protein folding and sequencing model called ESMFold, which is known to work approximately 60x faster than AlphaFold. However, none of the currently available models provide small molecule coordinates for structure or function.

While AlphaFold and ESMFold models almost perfectly predict domain structures, they are less accurate in predicting flexible protein areas like loops or intrinsically disordered regions. AlphaFill is able to cover these gaps by filling the ‘missing’ elements of a protein structure.

To validate its function, AlphaFill, for protein folding, was compared to other experimental structures to generate a databank called the AlphaFill databank. The repository aims to assist scientists in developing more hypotheses for protein folding.
You can read more about the algorithm in the research paper.

Donald Trump Launches $99 Digital Trading Card NFTs Minted on Polygon

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Disha Chopra

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December 16, 2022

Former US President Donald Trump has launched a US$99 digital trading card NFT collection via his social media website Truth Social. The NFT collection will have over 45,000 fantasy NFTs minted on Polygon and features images similar to collectible baseball cards.

Shares of Digital World acquisition saw a 10% surge after Trump’s teaser of a major announcement. The major announcement was supposed to collect shareholder votes for the merger of Digital World (a special-purpose acquisition company) with Trump’s Truth Social. But as the announcement turned out to be the launch of US$99 digital NFTs, it failed to gin up the excitement.

Trump posted on Truth Social, “These limited edition cards (Donald Trump NFTs) feature amazing ART of my Life & Career! Collect all of your favorite Trump Digital Trading Cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting…“ He added that these cards, priced only at US$99, would make a fabulous Christmas gift.

The NFT cards can be purchased from here, and the collectors who purchase the Trump trading cards will automatically enter a “sweepstakes” to receive experiences with Trump. These may include a zoom call, a dinner in Miami, or cocktails at Mar-a-Lago.

Accenture Becomes an Inaugural Member of the Corporate Affiliate Program at Stanford for Human-Centered AI

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Disha Chopra

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December 16, 2022

Accenture Member of Corporate Affiliate Program at Stanford

Accenture announced that it has become an inaugural member of the Corporate Affiliate Program at Stanford Institute for human-centered artificial intelligence (HAI). The center focuses on building a responsible AI-driven future and will help Accenture advance its commitment to the domain.

The HAI Corporate Affiliate Program will provide opportunities for member companies to work closely with Stanford faculty and students to find solutions compatible with AI, policy, industry, and education.

Fei-Fei Li, co-director of the institute, said, “I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the fruit of the AI research projects envisioned and engaging Accenture’s ecosystem in HAI’s critical mission relating to education and human-centered AI.”

Accenture is a global cloud and technology leader who embraces the power of change and works to add value in more than 40 industries in over 120 countries. With almost 721,000 people onboard, it offers unmatched experience, strategy, and consulting services via its network of advanced technology and intelligent operations centers.

With HAI membership at Stanford, it will sponsor a number of academic research initiatives focusing on AI trust and safety in the first year of the program. Additionally, it will collaborate with graduate students at the beginning of Stanford’s winter term to conduct ethical AI-focused research.

Protect AI Raises $13.3m in Seed Funding to Develop Tools That Protect AI Systems

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Disha Chopra

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December 16, 2022

Protect AI, an AI-driven security company, raised over US$13.3m in a seed funding round co-led by Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures. The expanded investment will be used for product development and enhancing customer engagement with Protect AI’s security solutions.

Protect AI is one of the few security companies focusing entirely on developing security tools for AI systems and machine learning models that prevent malicious attacks and exploits. Its product line intends to assist developers in locating and resolving security flaws at various machine learning life cycle phases.

Ian Swanson, CEO of Protect AI, said that as AI advances and is applied to newer use cases, organizations require more robust security systems to recognize and combat threats surrounding their machine learning code. He added, “We have researched and uncovered unique exploits and provide tools to reduce risk inherent in [machine learning] pipelines.”

There is no evidence of an increase in the intensity and frequency of AI cyberattacks, but Swanson believes that prevention is the key, as the predictions say otherwise. He said many code security solutions are incompatible with open-source coding environments like Jupyter Notebooks.

These vulnerabilities arise due to a lack of innovation on the part of security service providers, and Protect AI covers this gap. The company’s first product, NB Defense, is a security plugin designed for Jupyter Notebook. NB Defense scans Jupyter notebooks for any threats and provides workaround suggestions.

According to Swanson, Protect AI seed funding will be used to work with prominent AI development tools such as Amazon SageMaker, Azure ML, and Google Vertex AI Workbench in addition to Jupyter Notebooks.

Accenture invests in BehaVR for innovation in digital wellness using VR

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Sahil Pawar

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December 15, 2022

Accenture has invested in BehaVR, which is a leading innovator in virtual reality (VR) digital therapeutics and digital wellness experiences.

Recently, BehaVR merged with OxfordVR, which is a leader in science-based VR treatments for severe mental illnesses and a spin-out of Oxford University.

The newly combined entity will provide comprehensive, VR-based cross-acuity therapeutic interventions for mental health. The part of a digital therapeutics market is expected to exceed $13B by 2027, according to Accenture.

Through its proprietary delivery platform for creating, operating, and validating digital therapeutics solutions, the BehaVR platform facilitates personalized experiences that are adapted in real-time based on biometrics, protocols, and machine learning models.

Healthcare leaders expect virtual reality and the metaverse to positively impact the future of care, according to the Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision 2022 report, which explains how more meaningful, tailored experiences can further humanize healthcare.

BehaVR is now part of Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program that connects emerging technology startups with the Global 2000 to fill strategic innovation gaps.

Meta sued for allowing hateful posts from Ethiopia on Facebook

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Sahil Pawar

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December 15, 2022

A lawsuit accusing Meta Platforms of allowing violent and hateful posts from Ethiopia on Facebook has been filed by two Ethiopian researchers and the Kenyan rights group called the Katiba Institute.

The lawsuit alleges that Facebook’s recommendations systems amplified hateful posts in Ethiopia, including many more before the murder of one of the researchers’ father in 2021.

The plaintiffs are demanding Meta to take emergency steps to remove violent content, create restitution funds of about $2 bn for victims of violence incited on Facebook, and increase moderation staff in Nairobi.

Among the plaintiffs is Abrham Meareg, whose father was killed after Facebook posts were published in October 2021 referring to him using ethnic slurs.

The lawsuit said that Meta failed to exercise reasonable caution in training its algorithms to identify inappropriate posts and in hiring its staff to monitor content for the languages allowed by its regional moderation hub present in Nairobi.

According to Meta spokesperson Erin McPike, the hate speech and incitement to violence were against the rules of Facebook and Instagram.

Microsoft’s new Industry Data for Society Partnership

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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December 15, 2022

Microsoft launched a new Industry Data for Society Partnership (IDSP) last week along with seven more companies, including LinkedIn, Github, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Northumbrian Water Group, UK Power Networks, and R2 Factory.

The IDSP partnership consists of the below objectives.

To open private sector data or provide easy access to data to solve social problems inclusively.
To share information and knowledge to use open data for social purposes effectively.
To invest in skilling a large number of professionals to use open data for society effectively.
To protect the privacy of individuals in all of the above objectives.

The IDSP can bring other organizations with expertise in solving social problems. The GovLab’s Data Program and the Open Data Institute will be partnership affiliates to the IDSP for providing its guidance and expertise.

Companies collaborating with IDSP will launch a Data for Local Environments Challenge with the Open Data Institute. In this challenge, the participants can use publicly available datasets, shared datasets, and curated datasets from private sectors. They will learn how experts use these datasets to improve their local environment. Registration for the challenge will be open in 2023.

The IDSP will also strengthen connections between industry and public sectors, which will help researchers and students to improve their work. It will associate with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the United States of National Committee for CODATA to organize a summit that will bring together students, government, industry, and non-profit research organizations to work together across disciplines and use the strength of organizations to solve real-world problems.

Andrew Ng announces a new math course for machine learning and data science

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Manjiri Gaikwad

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December 15, 2022

Andrew Ng, a recognized AI scientist and the founder of deep learning.ai, announces a new math course for machine learning and data science specialization. The course is a beginner-friendly specialization for learners to master the fundamental mathematical toolkit of machine learning, such as linear algebra, calculus, probability, and statistics.

With the course, learners can get a better understanding of machine learning algorithms and learn to tune algorithms for custom implementations. The course will highlight the statistical techniques that can give a better understanding of data and algorithms. Skills in the new course can help learners to solve machine learning interview questions and get their dream jobs.

The course is created in partnership with Luis Serrano, a well-known AI scientist and a YouTuber. He is the author of the book Grokking Machine Learning. With the help of approachable lessons and hands-on exercises, learners will master the mathematical concepts in the course.

The new course is suitable for anyone who wants to learn the basics mathematics skillset required to build machine learning models and data science projects. Learners need to know high school-level mathematics and a basic understanding of machine learning concepts as a prerequisite. The course will be live in January 2023.

The Netherlands is the most metaverse ready country, says study

By

Sahil Pawar

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December 15, 2022

The Netherlands most metaverse ready country

According to a new study by an internet and telephone service researcher, Uswitch, the Netherlands is the most metaverse-ready country with the highest hospitable conditions to cater to such technology.

Uswitch looked at several factors, such as fixed broadband speeds, broadband package prices, the prices of high technology exports, and the number of blockchain financial startups, to determine which countries possess the capacity to embrace the metaverse.

According to the study, the Netherlands possesses one of the highest average fixed broadband speeds of 106.51 Mbps. Last year, the country also produced about $6,000 of high-technology exports per capita.

Switzerland, Lithuania, Malta, and France are the countries ranked after The Netherlands. All these five countries are known for growing interest in the emerging Web3 spaces. Malta has been a longtime blockchain and crypto hub.

Two crucial players in the metaverse development space, the United Kingdom and the United States were ranked 7th and 12th, respectively. Despite the recent upheaval in the Web3 space, the development of the metaverse continues to push forward.