AIDOC Raises $110M to Expand AI-enabled Imaging Platform

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June 18, 2022

AIDOC: Series D funding round raises $110M for the AI-enabled imaging platform. In a series D round by TCV and Alpha Intelligence Capital, the company now lands a total of $250M. AIDOC’s platform would help the hospitals to handle their most persistent challenges like rising supply costs and the ever-changing economic environment.

We closed a $110 million series D—a huge milestone for us, with an important purpose! Future hospitals will be data-driven, requiring an intelligence layer. We're building that. Thanks to our investors, medical partners and all Aidocees! #healthcare https://t.co/EtqVgl8OE9
— Elad Walach (@elad_walach) June 16, 2022

The company came into existence in 2016 and provided AI-driven healthcare solutions to help medical specialists find acute anomalies in no time. Its products and services mainly assist radiologists in imaging. AIDOC’s products are FDA-cleared, the most recent of which is the software used to find and triage potential brain aneurysms in CT scans.

Besides radiology, it provides coordination software for cardiovascular care and stroke management.

The CEO, Elad Walach, said, “We are building the kind of breadth and depth in AI that is allowing hospitals to fundamentally change the way they do business and provide the solutions needed to successfully compete during these challenging times.”

Before the Series D funding round, AIDOC had already landed $56M in Series C last year in July. AIDOC used the investment to integrate more cross-specialty AI in imaging. The recent investment aims to ramp up the AI Care Platform continuum by covering hospital service lines and clinical workflows.

Walach said, “Aidoc is already the leading imaging AI platform, but with this new round of investment, our aim is to massively ramp up our AI Care Platform to cover both the various hospital medical service lines and the depth of integration into the clinical workflows, empowering hospitals to activate cross-specialty care teams and deliver the best quality of care in a scalable, efficient way to patients.”

Reddit to acquire machine learning platform Spell

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Sahil Pawar

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June 18, 2022

Reddit to acquire machine learning platform Spell

Reddit has announced that it plans to buy Spell, a platform for running machine learning experiments. The amount for which it is being bought is yet to be disclosed.

Founded by Serkan Piantino in 2016, Spell aims to provide a cloud computing solution that allows anyone to perform resource-intensive machine learning experiments without the high-end hardware which is usually necessary.

According to the website, Spell aims to be the best platform for developing robust, reliable, and safe software using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Reddit uses machine learning for personalized recommendations and the Discover Tab, introduced by the app last year. The company also uses AI technology for its targeted advertising and safety works.

Spell will close access to its new commercial customers throughout the acquisition. Some Spell team members will shift to Reddit and will work on machine learning projects of Reddit like customization of ad placements, defining contextual relevance, and keeping its communities safe.

In the announcement, Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat said that the Spell team is a great fit. Reddit is looking forward to seeing how its capabilities and talent help make Reddit simpler, richer, and more relevant.

Reddit’s acquisition aligns with its mission to ensure that any artificial intelligence the company undertakes is transparent and does not perpetuate bias. In a blog post, Spell said that it would provide Reddit with a platform that can better understand content, communities, and users.

Lightning AI Unveils an Open-source Platform and Raises $40M in Series B Funding

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Disha Chopra

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June 18, 2022

lighting ai platform raises $40M funding

The creator of PyTorch Lightning, Lightning AI, unveils its new open-source platform backed by $40M series B funding. The company is introducing the platform to offer a frictionless way to enhance its AI-powered products and services.

Lightning AI, previously known as Grid.ai, is serving as an “operating system” in the new era of accessibility in AI technology. The framework introduces a novel method to build AI-powered products in a unified manner that accelerates the deployment of AI across enterprise and academic use cases.

William Falcon, Co-founder and CEO of Lightning AI, “From day one, I wanted to reimagine the experience of building artificial intelligence beyond the current surfeit of tools and systems. Until now, there hasn’t been a way to build production-grade AI apps that takes into account the entire pipeline from development to production.”

Lightning AI is the result of strategic work in 2018 in the New York University CILVR Lab and Facebook AI Research. Falcon worked as a Ph.D. student alongside advisers Yann LeCun and Kyunghyun Cho to create the renowned PyTorch Lightning framework. The success and growth of the project led him to build a specific platform that focuses on widespread AI adoption.

The $40M series B funding brings the company to $58.6M. The investment will fuel further innovation in AI technology and research. The innovation and research will aim to lower the barriers to AI adoption, given the global AI market is skyrocketing.

Dr. Kristof Schum, Global Segment Leader of ML at Amazon Web Services, said, “We are excited about the development Lightning AI is leading by allowing AI-driven applications relevant to specific verticals come to life in a simple way. The partnership will bring further ease-of-use to customers and fit well with AWS’s industry, use-case and business problem driven approach.”

WEKA Unveils the WEKA 4, Fourth-gen Multi-cloud Platform for AI and Next-generation Workloads

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Disha Chopra

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June 18, 2022

WEKA is a multi-cloud data platform for AI-based working environments. It has recently announced the fourth generation of its software-based solutions. Calling it “WEKA 4”, the platform aims to deliver a new reality of running workloads anywhere without compromise.

The market has seen a seismic shift to cloud computing and shared working environments to harness the power of digital strategies with AI and ML. WEKA aims to process and manage scalable data for organizations seeking innovation and first-to-market results with AI and ML. The unveiling of the fourth generation will deliver hyper-scale integrations to run previously impossible workloads in the cloud of the user’s choice.

You may have heard, #WEKA4 was announced yesterday.

Check out the blog for the full scoop.https://t.co/LH69LvNuxU
— WEKA (@WekaIO) June 16, 2022

Other capabilities that WEKA 4 introduces:

A Unified multi-cloud platform: The new release integrates with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Series (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It gives a unified deployment alternative that performs irrespective of the location.

Entirely Restructured User Interface: WEKA 4 improves the ease of use and simplifies day-to-day tasks. It streamlines recurrent operations in multi-tenant environments for better scale management.

Top-of-the-line Economics: WEKA 4 offers three overlapping methods to optimize their workloads for availability, costs, scale-tiering, a new choice of capacity, NVMe drives, and cloud object storage.

Enhanced Multi-Protocol Assistance: WEKA 4 habituates Sever Message Block (SMB) and NFSv4 for higher performance windows workloads. It allows the user to substitute many legacy systems with a single zero-copy and zero-tuning WEKA deployment.

Pricing Options for New Software Packages: WEKA 4 simplifies users’ buying experience. It has released four new packages aligned to primary use cases with an option of consumption-based pricing and a subscription.

Liran Zvibel, Co-founder and chief executive officer at WEKA, said, “Hyperscale public clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI can provide the requisite agility and economies of scale needed to fuel these critical transformations and innovation engines, but the WEKA Data Platform is the key to unlocking that value for AI/ML workloads in hybrid and now multi-cloud environments. WEKA can uniquely help enterprises to avoid cloud lock-in and run their businesses with unparalleled economics.”

TSA selects Pangiam’s AI solution to improve Airport Security

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 18, 2022

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of the United States selects transport security services providing company Pangiam’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solution to improve airport security.

Officials claim that the new AI-driven accessible screening technology has the potential to revolutionize airline security throughout the world.

In December 2021, the Transportation Security Administration’s Innovation Task Force (ITF) released a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for transportation security solutions to find innovative ideas that are thoroughly reviewed and subsequently presented in a live operational environment.

Pangiam has partnered with Google Cloud to initiate its Project Dartmouth. The project employs artificial intelligence and pattern analysis tools to process and analyze massive volumes of data in real-time to discover potentially forbidden goods in carry-on luggage.

TSA’s System Integration Facility (TSIF), a 128,000-square-foot facility that acts as a testing ground for state-of-the-art technology for prospective adoption at airport security checkpoints, will kick off the first phase of Project DARTMOUTH experiments.

Alexis Long, Product Director, Pangiam, said, “As TSA and other security agencies adopt 3D Computed Tomography (CT), this application of AI represents a potentially transformative leap in aviation security, making air travel safer and more consistent while allowing TSA’s highly trained officers to focus on bags that pose the greatest risk.”

Long further added that their goal is to use AI and computer vision technologies to improve security by giving TSA and security officers powerful tools to detect prohibitive items that could pose a threat to aviation security. This is a significant step toward establishing a new security standard with global implications.

Machine learning specialization by Andrew Ng now available on Coursera

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Sahil Pawar

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June 17, 2022

new Machine learning specialization by Andrew Ng on Coursera

The new Machine Learning Specialization by the co-founder of Coursera and Google Brain Andrew Ng is now available on Coursera. The course is offered by DeepLearning.Al and Stanford Online.

In three beginner-friendly courses, the Specialization will focus on the fundamentals of machine learning and provide practical experience in building and training models using Python.

Unlike the previous editions of the course, which required more math knowledge, this new Machine Learning Specialization is designed to be more accessible for first-time learners.

The new Machine Learning Specialization course covers core artificial intelligence principles through an intuitive visual method. The updated curriculum involves all the essential and relevant topics related to machine learning.

The course has multiple subjects like deep learning, neural networks, deep neural networks, and many other related topics.

Stanford and DeepLearning.ai are jointly offering the course to impart critical knowledge and skills related to machine learning to learners. The course aims to help learners build careers in the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry.

Click here to enroll.

Snowflake to bring Python to its Data Cloud platform

By

Sahil Pawar

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June 17, 2022

Snowflake, a cloud computing-based data warehousing company, has announced its plans to bring the computer programming language Python to the forefront of its Data Cloud platform. The platform will be upgraded to extend support for the programming language.

At Snowflake Summit, an annual user conference, the database company announced the expansion of its developer framework, Snowpark. This expansion will give users easy access to many open-source Python packages and libraries.

Snowflake introduced Snowpark in January 2021 and pushed the service to general availability earlier this year. The objective of Snowpark was to provide developers with a simple and efficient way to program data in their language of choice.

Snowflake also announced a series of related upgrades currently under development to supplement the rollout of Snowpark for Python. These include native integration with Streamlit and other facilities designed to facilitate developing and deploying machine learning products written in Python.

Moreover, the firm also announced a private preview for a new service that allows customers to access stored data in on-premise servers from within the Snowflake ecosystem. This will enable organizations to benefit from a cloud-based platform free from the hassle of data migration.

Christian Kleinerman, senior vice-president of product at Snowflake said that the company is investing in Python to make it easier for data scientists, engineers, and application developers to build even more in the Data Cloud without governance trade-offs.

He added that the company’s latest innovations are extending the value of their customers’ data-driven ecosystems, enabling them more access to data and new ways to develop in Snowflake. He added that these capabilities change how teams experiment, iterate, and collaborate with data to drive value.

Bhavishya: The AI-supported Pension Portal to Ease Pension Release

By

Disha Chopra

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June 17, 2022

The Department of Pension and Pensioners’ Welfare will soon entail Bhavishya in order to seamlessly track, process, contact, and disburse pensions for older people. Bhavishya is an AI-supported portal that will send automatic alerts to citizens.

The portal will provide a continuous contact service for pensioners across the country. It will also enable the users to give their input and post grievances. Bhavishya’s launch was mandated back in January 2017 for all central government departments. It will now be available in several ministries and departments.

The goal is to ensure payments for all retirement dues and pension payment orders (PPOs) to retiring staff on the day of retirement. To get closer to this goal, the system will provide online tracking of pension sanctions and payment processes. Given the services, people can also submit the forms for processing pensions on the portal.

Other features offered by the AI-pension portal: Bhavishya also provides integration with Digilocker, being the first to use the PUSH technology of the latter. It is fully Web Responsive, and pensioners can access it via mobiles, tablets, or other devices. Document security offered by the portal is also enhanced to ensure that Bhavishya stores all the documents in the database, not a file system.

Dr. Jitendra Singh, a beneficiary of Bhavishya, claims the portal is in line with PM Narendra Modi’s motto of “Ease of Living” for all. He insisted pension reforms are not only for governance but also for positive societal responses. He also ensured the AI-driven platform would be end-to-end encrypted. The encryption would follow government transparency, service delivery, and digitization guidelines.

UAE to deploy AI to improve Weather Forecasts

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 17, 2022

The National Center of Meteorology (NCM) of UAE announces its plans to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to improve weather forecasts.

NCM has begun working on its newest project to increase rainfall, employing artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance rainfall forecasts. The project’s primary goal is to construct an AI research and operations testbed in the UAE.

The program will be led by Dr. Luca Delle Monache, deputy director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E).

To find the best cloud seeding timings and locations, an AI framework will be built that will leverage satellite observations, ground-based weather radar data, rain gauges, and numerical weather forecast estimations.

The director of NCM and president of the Regional Association II (Asia) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Dr. Abdulla Al Mandous, said, “Through strengthening partnerships with top international research institutions and key stakeholders in rain enhancement research, the Center is scaling up its response to the growing water stress challenges worldwide.”

He further added that such initiatives would aid them in developing creative solutions and contributing new information for the benefit of individuals in water-scarce and dry places that require freshwater resources.

The team will assist operational rainfall enhancement programs using AI algorithms to generate significantly improved weather forecasts by leveraging ground-based and spaceborne data sets and operational numerical weather prediction products used in cloud seeding operations.

“An advanced deep learning algorithm will be designed to learn from thousands of examples drawn from historical data and effectively extract and extrapolate inputs and the required cloud features needed to predict new cloud formations that could be seeded,” mentioned lead researcher Dr. Luca Delle Monache.

Paige to deploy AI-based Biomarker Test for Advanced Bladder Cancer

By

Dipayan Mitra

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June 17, 2022

Digital diagnostics company Paige announces its plans to deploy a one-of-a-kind artificial intelligence (AI)-powered biomarker test for advanced bladder cancer in clinical settings.

Paige is collaborating with Janssen Research & Development to carry out this project. Janssen Research & Development will assess the ability of a hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-based, AI-powered biomarker test to predict the presence of specific, actionable alterations in the fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) genes in patients with advanced urothelial cancer.

The tests will be conducted on patients with advanced urothelial cancer, also known as bladder cancer. The test is the world’s most unique test in terms of predicting the presence of actionable genetic changes. Paige’s Platform is now being used in clinical trials by Janssen to screen for FGFR gene changes in adult patients with advanced urothelial carcinoma.

President and Chief Business Officer at Paige, Jill Stefanelli, said, “We are excited to mark a new chapter in deploying Janssen’s AI technology in a clinical setting to efficiently detect biomarkers, in this case, some rare gene mutations and fusions.”

Jill further added that they will make its capabilities broadly accessible in support of the clinical development of targeted and other kinds of therapeutic medications, along with patient identification for future biomarker and drug development initiatives, now that their Paige Platform has been deployed globally.

United States-based leading digital diagnostics company Paige was founded by David Klimstra, Norman Selby, Peter Schüffler, and Thomas Fuchs in 2018. Paige specializes in building computational pathology tools that help patients and their care teams make better-educated treatment decisions. The company’s light platform was designed with pathologists in mind to provide a simple user experience, reduce IT strain and expenses, and ensure patient safety and data protection.