Accenture acquires Ergo to expand Data and AI Capabilities

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April 25, 2022

Global professional services providing company Accenture announces that it has acquired Argentina-based information technology company Ergo to expand its data and artificial intelligence capabilities.

Neither company revealed any information regarding the valuation of this recently signed acquisition deal. As a part of the acquisition, Ergo’s team of 200 data experts will join Accenture Cloud First’s Data & AI division.

Accenture’s Cloud First capabilities will be expanded to support data-driven transformations for clients in the Hispanic South American market, including Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.

Global Lead for Accenture Cloud First, Karthik Narain, said, “Almost every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created by humans and machines across the cloud continuum at the edge, on the internet, and in data centers. Cloud is the place where all this data gains accessibility and scale. Cloud’s advanced data & AI tools empower companies to transform data into intellectual capital like never before.”

He further added that Accenture would provide more resources to help clients acquire insights into where to focus their transformation for the most value and how data may support improved decision-making during the transformation process due to its acquisition of Ergo.

Argentinian data-centered business Ergo was founded in 2004. The firm specializes in integrating data and AI across the enterprise and creates a trusted single source of insights by combining technology expertise and customer-focused advice. Ergo uses human-centric design principles to provide data solutions that help businesses make better decisions.

“Joining the Accenture Cloud First team will enable us to scale our data-led experience for major worldwide clients to achieve better business outcomes, faster – from improving how they work, how they serve customers, and how they differentiate through new products and services,” said CEO of Ergo, Ariel Güelmos.

Tesla Robotaxis to launch in 2024, says Elon Musk

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 24, 2022

CEO of Tesla Elon Musk reveals that the company plans to launch its electric Robotaxis in 2024, focusing on economic rides.

Musk said that Tesla is going to provide “by far the lowest cost per that customers have ever experienced.”

Tesla wants to begin mass production of self-driving taxis in 2024, as per news sources. This development was mentioned by Musk during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday.

According to the CEO, the car will have a lower cost per mile than a subsidized bus ticket. He believes that the unnamed robotaxi car will be a significant driver of Tesla’s growth in the end.

“We are also working on a new vehicle that I alluded to at the Giga Texas opening, which is a dedicated robotaxi. It is going to be highly optimized for autonomy – meaning it will not have steering wheels or pedals,” said Musk.

He further added that there are a few other ideas around it that he thinks are interesting, but it’s primarily tuned to reach the lowest completely considered cost per mile or kilometer when everything is taken into account.

The robotaxis will be extensively optimized for autonomy, which means it will be devoid of a steering wheel and pedals. Reports claim that the robotaxi will be powered by the same self-driving technology used in Tesla’s Model S, Model 3, Model X, and Model Y vehicles. Musk said that Tesla currently plans to unveil the robotaxi to the public by 2023 and start mass producing it in 2024.

Apart from Tesla, many other companies have begun testing fully autonomous taxis in various parts of the United States. Recently, Alphabet’s self-driving technology developing subsidiary Waymo showcased its new autonomous driving tech in the streets of San Francisco. Waymo’s new technology allows the company’s robotaxis to operate autonomously without the need for any human intervention or driver on board.

Moreover, Waymo, along with General Motors’ Cruise, also received permits to charge fares for their autonomous vehicles taxi service in California.

Porsche to accept Payments in Crypto for its Cars

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 23, 2022

BitPay, a crypto payment service provider, announces that Porsche Towson, a Porsche dealer serving the Baltimore area in the United States, has begun taking cryptocurrency payments for their cars.

Multiple cryptocurrencies, including Shiba Inu, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin, can now be used to purchase Porche’s sports cars.

Turn your #crypto into precious metal at Porsche Towson. Now accepting Crypto as payment for vehicle purchases. Learn more: https://t.co/g5eD13Y7tS #Porsche #crypto #bitcoin #doge #shib pic.twitter.com/Yj3yO3iIyK
— BitPay (@BitPay) April 19, 2022

Bitpay mentioned in a tweet, “Turn your #crypto into precious metal at Porsche Towson. Now accepting Crypto as payment for vehicle purchases.”

Ferdinand Porsche founded Porsche, a German premium automobile manufacturer, in 1931. The brand is best known for its high-powered sports cars that come with powerful engines and high quality.

The Porsche Towson dealership, which announced that it would accept cryptos as payments, offers a large range of Porsche automobiles, both new and used, in a variety of configurations.

Last year, Bots Inc, a Puerto Rican digital business, also enabled local dealerships to accept Dogecoin payments for pre-owned Tesla Inc vehicles.

Cryptocurrencies are gaining immense popularity across the globe for their technology and decentralized nature.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the CEO of Tesla, recently hinted that he might integrate Dogecoin payment methods into Twitter. Musk has always been a supporter of decentralized cryptocurrencies and has earlier also accepted payments via Bitcoin for Tesla, but the service was terminated.

However, Tesla announced that it plans to accept Dogecoin at its Supercharging station located in Santa Monica, United States.

Tech Mahindra to create 1000 Jobs in the United Kingdom

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 22, 2022

Technology company Tech Mahindra announced that it plans to create over 1000 jobs in the United Kingdom and create new revenue streams.

At Tech Mahindra’s Makers Lab in Milton Keynes, the company will collaborate with a top UK academic and research institute to co-innovate.

Makers Lab is a research and development center that collaborates with companies, partner firms, research institutes, universities, and start-ups to develop solutions and services.

Tech Mahindra’s collaboration with academics and research institutes will allow the company to create more jobs and create an ecosystem of interns and scholars to push AI and Data Science advances.

This development was revealed during British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to India, where he proposed a new UK-India collaboration on artificial intelligence. The newly announced program intends to boost both countries’ innovation and economy while also leveraging the power of new technology to address global concerns.

MD and CEO of Tech Mahindra, CP Gurnani, said, “Innovations and applications of Artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly transform the productivity and create revenue streams for businesses in the UK. Tech Mahindra aims to bring out the best solutions powered by next-gen technologies for industries to solve specific challenges.”

He further added that they are also committed to investing in the areas where they do business, and programs like these help future technologists in the UK and around the world find work.
Earlier this year, Tech Mahindra partnered with conversational artificial intelligence company Yellow.ai to provide an enhanced experience to its customers. The partnership would help Tech Mahindra to transform enterprise customer experiences with conversational AI.

Mutiny raises $50 million in Series B Funding Round

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 22, 2022

Personalized advertising and marketing services providing company Mutiny raises $50 million in its recently held series B funding round led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners.

Multiple other investors such as Sequoia Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Uncork Capital also participated in Mutiny’s latest funding round.

According to the company, it wants to use the capital to further help businesses grow their revenue using Mutiny’s solution.

Customer acquisition is a critical job involved in any business, and companies send a hefty sum of money to pool in new customers. Mutiny offers a no-code platform that integrates with the company’s existing data and website and employs artificial intelligence to provide hundreds of distinct versions of the site to various users.

Mutiny automates a company’s growth engineering efforts, allowing any company to convert marketing spending into revenue without hiring staff extensively.

Olivia Nottebohm, Chief Revenue Officer at Notion (a customer of Mutiny), said, “After seeing Mutiny increase our conversion rate from paid ads by up to 60%, we quickly expanded Mutiny to the rest of our website. Mutiny has been a great partner for Notion as we continue to grow globally.”

She further added that Mutiny had enabled Notion to increase its online spending by allowing the team to quickly create better web experiences without the need for engineers.

United States-based technology company Mutiny was founded by Jaleh Rezaei and Nikhil Mathew in 2018. The company’s no-code platform helps its clients increase their revenue by eliminating the need for hiring engineers and data scientists to build more relevant, higher-converting experiences for different customer segments.

Many industry-leading companies like Notion, Snowflake, Qualtrics, Dropbox, Carta, and Brex use Mutiny’s solution to increase their business.

Co-founder and CEO of Mutiny, Jaleh Rezaei, said, “Growing revenue from digital channels has quickly become a board-level concern for private and public companies.” He also mentioned that they are delighted to welcome the new investors, whose funds will allow them to accelerate their roadmap and make significant technological investments.

Amazon introduces $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 22, 2022

Amazon $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund

Global technology giant Amazon announces the launch of its new $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund initiative.

Amazon will invest the announced funds in logistics and robotics startups to improve supply chain, fulfillment, and logistics innovation in the industry.

Over the last decade, the global eCommerce industry has witnessed a massive surge in demand, for which some of the credit goes to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Therefore, this new development is a step for Amazon toward bringing in innovative methods to improve the consumer and employee experience.

According to Amazon, the funds will be invested in companies that envision solutions that progressively boost delivery speed while also improving the experience of warehouse and logistics workers.

Startups using wearable technologies to enhance fulfillment center safety and robotics technologies are among the first companies to receive money from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund.

Vice President of Worldwide Corporate Development at Amazon, Alex Ceballos Encarnacion, said, “We see an opportunity to look beyond our own experience and empower companies that are developing emerging technologies in customer fulfillment operations, logistics, and the supply chain.”

He further added that they are delighted to help progress these technologies as online shopping becomes even more vital to individuals who are looking for more convenience and time savings, whether their investment helps companies expand or leads them to partner with Amazon, or both.

Amazon’s first batch of investments was made in companies like Modjoul, Vimaan, Agility Robotics, Bionic Hive, and Mantis Robotics. The company stated that it has no defined investment size goals or a deadline for deploying the $1 billion promised to the fund.

“With our scale, Amazon is committed to investing in companies that will ignite innovation in emerging technologies that can help improve employee experiences and safety while seamlessly coexisting with workforces across the supply chain, logistics, and other industries,” added Ceballos.

Apple to launch AI-powered Message Scanning feature for Child Safety in UK

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 22, 2022

Apple announces that it plans to launch a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered scanning feature in the UK to detect abusive content for child safety.

The feature can automatically recognize and blurs sexually explicit photographs sent to young users via Apple’s Messages app.

I mage Source

Apple said that the feature uses on-device artificial intelligence to ensure privacy, with all interventions processed on-device without contacting Apple or anyone else. Apple had introduced the same feature in the United States last year.

The “communication safety in Messages” feature allows parents to enable alerts for their children’s iPhones. If a child receives a photo with the setting switched on that contains nudity, the photo will be blurred, and the child will be cautioned that it may contain sensitive content and directed to resources from child safety organizations.

In contrast, when a child tries to send such content, the feature encourages the user not to send the images with an additional option of messaging a grown-up. However, it has been mentioned by Apple that it would not send alerts to parents without the child’s consent. Multiple Apple devices running on iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, and macOS will support this AI feature.

Apple, in a statement, said, “Messages analyzes image attachments and determines if a photo contains nudity while maintaining the end-to-end encryption of the messages.” The statement further mentioned that the technology is designed to ensure that no evidence of nudity detection ever leaves the device and that Apple does not have access to the messages.

The feature will soon be rolled out via a software update.

Absci opens new Research lab in New York City

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 21, 2022

Artificial intelligence-powered drug & target discovery company Absci announces the opening of its new research lab located on the 43rd floor of Carnegie Hall Tower in New York City, United States.

The launch of the research center is a part of the company’s efforts to expand its drug discovery capabilities. This new development comes after the company announced its collaboration with NVIDIA and its breakthroughs for in silico antibody lead optimization.

As a hub for Absci’s AI research, the AAIR Lab will build on these recent achievements and continue to expand the nature and scope of therapeutic protein design.

According to the company, its AAIR Lab will help expand Absci’s Denovium Engine AI platform and implement its machine learning pipeline for predicting therapeutic protein sequences and cell line designs to optimize medication candidates for desired properties.

Co-founder and CEO of Absci, Sean McClain, said, “Absci’s expansion into one of the geographic hearts of AI research marks an exciting milestone for our team and brings us closer to our vision for de novo drug and cell line design entirely in silico.”

Sean further added that they are excited to tap into the region’s strong talent pool as they use game-changing technology to provide better pharmaceuticals to patients faster, all while collaborating in a gorgeous setting just steps from Central Park.

United States-based drug research company Absci was founded by Seam McClain in 2011. The organization is best known for developing the Integrated Drug Creation Platform, which uses a single efficient procedure to find novel drug targets, uncover ideal biotherapeutic candidates, and establish cell lines to manufacture them.

“I’m thrilled to be building out our New York-based AI group, which will join our existing multinational team of world-class AI experts as we make strides to accelerate drug discovery with the speed and scale of computation,” said Joshua Meier, Lead AI Scientist at Absci.

StoryFile launches AI-powered ALS Educational Platform for Public

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 21, 2022

Technology company StoryFile announces the launch of the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI)-powered educational platform dedicated to supporting patients suffering from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Using crowd-sourced stories, ‘how-to’ information sharing, and more, the AI platform will provide ALS patients with access to life-improving tools.

StoryFile will cover topics that are critical to independent living but are often nuanced and confusing, like how to use chair lifts, toilet risers, feeding tubes, assisted talking technology, as well as real-life knowledge about how the disease progresses, loss of mobility, body changes, and maintaining intimacy and family connections with rapid physical deterioration.

“The purpose of this resource is to make access to trusted information – and real-world tips and advice – more quickly available to those with ALS so they can spend the precious time they have on what is most important: family,” said Eric Weinbrenner, founder of grassroots ALS nonprofit Paint For A Cure.

Over 200 questions on Weinbrenner’s shifting experiences with ALS were addressed by Weinbrenner and his carers in phase one of the resource, along with more than 3 hours of interactive interviews with Dr. Todd Levine, an ALS expert, and neurologist based in Scottsdale.

The collaboration of StoryFile and Paint for a Cure will also allow them to make story-sharing technology available to ALS families so they may share their stories with their own families and the broader ALS community. This vision of both entities will be made possible using video storytelling technology.

United States-based proprietary storytelling solution providing company StoryFile was founded by Ceci Chan, Heather Smith, Sam Gustman, and Stephen Smith in 2017. The startup specializes in offering a user-led voice-activated technology-powered platform that provides an intimate and natural conversational video interactive experience to users.

“People living with ALS can quickly ask questions and receive trusted answers from Eric and others in a way that feels personal, as opposed to navigating multiple websites and internet searches to try and find out the answers they’re looking for,” said Chief Creative Officer at StoryFile, Ari Palitz.

Amazon releases 51-language dataset for language understanding

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Dipayan Mitra

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April 21, 2022

Amazon releases dataset language understanding

Amazon released an open-source speech dataset called MASSIVE that supports 51 languages, encouraging developers to create more third-party Alexa apps and services.

This is a step for Amazon towards the company’s goal of making voice assistant Alexa available to diverse people in their local languages. Currently, Alexa supports languages like English, Hindi, Spanish, German, Portuguese, French, Japanese, and Arabic.

Developers will now be able to create multilingual natural-language understanding (MMNLU), a paradigm in which a single machine learning model can parse and understand inputs from many typologically diverse languages.

The MASSIVE dataset enables models to learn shared representations of utterances with the same intents regardless of language, allowing for cross-linguistic training on NLU tasks.

According to Amazon, the model can transfer knowledge from languages with vast amounts of training data to those with limited training data by learning a shared data representation that crosses languages.

Along with MASSIVE, Amazon is also releasing open-source code that shows how to do multilingual NLU modeling and allows practitioners to re-create the baseline results for intent classification and slot filling reported in the company’s research.

Vice President of Alexa AI, Natural Understanding at Amazon, Prem Natarajan, said, “We are very excited to share this large multilingual dataset with the worldwide language research community,”

He further added that they anticipate that by sharing this dataset, researchers from all over the world will be able to make new advancements in multilingual language understanding, hence expanding the availability and reach of conversational AI systems.

Additionally, Amazon is also launching a new competition using the MASSIVE dataset called Massively Multilingual NLU 2022 (MMNLU-22). The Massively Multilingual NLU 2022 workshop will be held in conjunction with EMNLP 2022 on December 7 or 8, offline and online, in Abu Dhabi.