WOMBO Launches Artificial Intelligence Lip Syncing App on Huawei AppGallery

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August 9, 2021

WOMBO Launches Artificial Intelligence Lip Syncing App on Huawei AppGallery

Canadian image manipulation mobile application WOMBO launches its artificial intelligence lip syncing app on Huawei AppGallery to enable Huawei smartphone users to use the application globally.

The application is capable of creating entertaining lip syncing videos using artificial intelligence technology. With this launch, Huawei users will now be able to create and share customized videos using the WOMBO mobile application.

The app has more than 10 million downloads on the Google PlayStore and is also available on Apple’s AppStore. WOMBO has become the fastest growing consumer mobile application in Canada.

The Chief Executive Officer of WOMBO, Ben Benkhin, said, “Seeing the joy and laughter that we’ve been able to give our users since March has been amazing, and we look forward to working with Huawei as we continue to grow our global footprint.”

He also mentioned that he is excited to increase the reach of WOMBO by collaborating with Huawei AppGallery. The application can also create deepfakes using its unique artificial intelligence algorithm.

The parent company of the app, WUMBO Studios, was founded by Akshat Jagga, Angad Arneja, Vivek Bhakta, Paul Pavel, and Ben Benkhin in the year 2020. Soon after the official launch of WOMBO in 2021, its popularity grew exponentially to make it the 32nd most downloaded mobile application in the world.

“Having already seen the potential of WOMBO, working with Huawei has been great to understand how we can take the joy it brings even further,” said Ben.
He also thanked Huawei officials for providing tremendous support during the onboarding process. Huawei AppGallery is the world’s third-largest app market. The collaboration would help WOMBO to reach a greater audience as Huawei has a market share of 4% in the smartphone industry.

Antengene and MindRank Collaborates for developing Difficult-to-Drug Molecular Targets

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Dipayan Mitra

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August 9, 2021

Antengene and MindRank Collaborates for developing Difficult to Drug Molecular Targets

China-based biopharmaceutical and biotechnology company Antengene announces its collaboration with artificial intelligence drug discovery platform developer MindRank to advance the development of difficult-to-drug molecular targets.

The collaboration is a long-term strategic partnership that would enable the companies to jointly conduct research and develop small molecule oncology drugs using best-in-class artificial intelligence technologies. Both the companies had collaborated earlier for the development of preclinical stage drug candidates.

With this partnership, Antegene plans to use MindRank’s Molecule Pro and Molecule Dance artificial intelligence platform for discovering and developing the highest quality drug candidates. Antegene has by far developed thirteen clinical and preclinical drug assets.

The Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Antegene, Dr. Jay Mei, said, “We are excited about this ground-breaking partnership with MindRank AI, established to accelerate our development of new therapies for difficult-to-drug targets. Antengene has built a pipeline of 13 assets over the past four years through both partnerships and in-house discovery.”

He further mentioned that he believes this partnership between the two industry leaders will enhance their in-house discovery capabilities and will be able to deliver effective therapeutics to patients across the globe.

Antegene was founded in Shanghai by Mei in the year 2016 and has received a total funding of $238 million in three rounds from Hillhouse Capital Group, Qiming Venture Partners, Boyu Capital, and many more. The firm specializes in developing and providing anti-cancer treatment to patients in Asia.

The founder and CEO of MindRank, Zhangming Niu, said, “We are very honored to be a strategic partner of Antengene, an industry-leader with robust R&D capabilities and a management team possessing experience in developing and commercializing some of the world’s best selling oncology drugs.”

He also added that this synergistic collaboration would enable them to develop more first-in-class oncology drugs for patients across the world.

NASSCOM Announces the Winners of its AI Game Changers Program

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Dipayan Mitra

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August 9, 2021

NASSCOM Announces the Winners of its AI Game Changers Program

The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) announces the winners of its AI Game Changer program at its Xperience AI virtual summit 2021.

NASSCOM had collaborated with industry leaders like Microsoft and Deloitte to introduce this unique program that would encourage the development of new artificial intelligence technologies to counter modern-day challenges that businesses face in India and promote artificial intelligence adoption in various industries.

The program launched under the ‘AI for India’ initiative received more than 300 applications from startups involved in various sectors like healthcare, entertainment, telecommunication, life science, and education.

The applicants had to submit their use case that was later scrutinized by a committee that was handpicked by NASSCOM. Three aspects were considered while deciding the winners, which include problem solving, solution innovation, and impact achieved.

President of NASSCOM, Debjani Ghosh, said, “Through the AI Game changers Programme, we look forward to bringing forth some of the most innovative and impactful AI-led ideas to recognize the efforts that will empower India to be a global innovation hub.”

She further added that she would like to congratulate the winners of the program for developing innovative artificial intelligence solutions that would help the country to compete globally in the field of technology.

The Information Technology, Electronics and Communications (ITE&C) department of the Telangana government secures the first position for its use-case, ‘Real-time crowd density estimation and monitoring using artificial intelligence.’

The President of Microsoft India, Anant Maheshwari, said during the virtual summit, “Cloud-led data and AI have a critical role in solving some of the country’s most vital challenges. The AI Game changers program has successfully created a platform that promotes homegrown AI-based innovation in the country.”

He also mentioned that he is amazed to see the mature and scalable artificial intelligence solutions developed by the Indian technology industry.

Google Launches Two New Datasets For Building Superior Conversational AI Models

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Ratan Kumar

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August 8, 2021

Google launches TimeDial and Disfl-QA datasets for making NLP models more natural. As natural conversations include interruptions and temporal relationships, it becomes complex for NLP models to engage in an interactive conversation.

While interruptions are interjections, repetitions, restarts, and corrections, the temporal relationships include relationships between events — whether an event precedes or follows another.

According to Google, natural language processing models struggle to deliver superior results when confronted with interruptions and temporal relationships. Over the years, the development of NLP models to overcome this challenge has lacked due to several reasons. One of the most prominent problems is the absence of datasets that represents natural conversations.

To address the pressing challenge in Conversational AI, developers and researchers can leverage the newly released datasets — TimeDial and Disfl-QA — by Google. While TimeDial is for temporal commonsense reasoning in dialogue, Disfl-QA focuses on contextual disfluencies.

With an annotated test set of over 1.1k dialogs, TimeDial will allow you to test language models’ capabilities for temporal reasoning. Even large language models like GPT-3 struggle with temporal reasoning, making it difficult to accomplish better NLP models.

“Disfl-QA is the first dataset containing contextual disfluencies in an information seeking setting, namely question answering over Wikipedia passages, with ~12k human annotated disfluent questions. These benchmark datasets are the first of their kind and show a significant gap between human performance and current state of the art NLP models,” mentioned Google’s researchers in a blog post.

AeroFarms Partners with Nokia to Develop Artificial Intelligence Plant Vision technology

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Dipayan Mitra

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August 7, 2021

AeroFarms Partners with Nokia to Develop Artificial Intelligence Plant Vision technology

Urban cleantech company AeroFarms announces that it has partnered with Nokia to develop next-generation artificial intelligence-powered plant vision technology.

With this partnership, the companies plan to build artificial intelligence-enabled technology that would increase plant yield using wireless networking systems, drones, and analytics solutions.

Nokia will provide its autonomous drone, private wireless network, and orchestration technologies to integrate it with AeroFarms’ machine vision agriculture-focused data platform.

This collaboration has enabled AeroFarms to develop groundbreaking new technology that would be able to produce the highest quality plants throughout the year. The companies now aim to deliver their services in various locations like Virginia, UAE, Abu Dhabi, and Danville.

Vice President of Integrated Solutions and Experience Research Lab at Nokia, Thierry Klein, said, “Nokia Bell Labs is driven to solve hard and impactful problems, and together with AeroFarms, we are building the ability to see and identify plant interactions at unprecedented levels. The fundamental technologies of this partnership are our strength, and vertical farming is just the beginning.”

AeroFarms is a New Jersey-based company founded by David Rosenberg, Ed Harwood, and Marc Oshima in the year 2004. The firm specializes in developing artificial intelligence-powered agricultural solutions to help urban farmers grow better crops and produce a higher yield.

AeroFarms has received a total funding of $238 million from investors like Abu Dhabi Investment Office, GSR Ventures, Ingka Group, and Meraas.

Chief Executive Officer of AeroFarms, David Rosenberg, said, “With Nokia Bell Labs, we have developed the next-generation system that can image every plant every day in a cost-effective way at scale. This level of detailed imaging and insights helps us be better farmers by monitoring our plant biology dynamically and allowing us to course-correct as needed to ensure the highest level of quality all year round.”

He further added that they are committed to developing technologies that would solve modern-day farming challenges.

Clevered Launches India’s First Artificial Intelligence Internship Program

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Dipayan Mitra

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August 6, 2021

Clevered Launches India’s First Artificial Intelligence Internship Program

Edtech company Clevered announces the launch of its new artificial intelligence internship program in India. This is the country’s first ever artificial intelligence internship program. It is a beneficial program to learn new skills that future jobs would require.

National Education Policy 2020 also encouraged the inclusion of artificial intelligence into the standard curriculum of schools. The internship program will offer adequate theoretical knowledge along with hands-on experience practical implementation of artificial intelligence technologies.

Clevered has collaborated with a senior researcher from Oxford University for designing this one of a kind program. It is a three months internship program that would have weekly interactive classes to teach students different aspects of artificial intelligence and its real-world applications.

Learners would get the opportunity to interact with world-renowned experts and researchers who would mold the learner’s mindset related to artificial intelligence that would help students to make better informed decisions regarding their careers.

Industry leaders from Microsoft and PwC will also be a part of this program as guest speakers. They will inform students about how artificial intelligence is actually used in their respective organizations.

The learners will also be informed about career opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Oxford University has also acknowledged this program to be very useful for students to explore future opportunities in artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, a seven-year-old child from UAE completed this artificial intelligence internship program becoming the youngest in the world to finish the course. Clevered will provide a letter of recommendation and certificate on completion of the course.

Dataiku Raises $400 Million in its Series E funding

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Dipayan Mitra

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August 6, 2021

United States-based artificial intelligence company Dataiku raises $400 million in its series E funding round led by Tiger Global. Other investors like ICONIQ Growth, FirstMark Capital, Battery Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and CapitalG participated in the funding round.

The new funding has increased Dataiku’s market valuation to over $4 billion. The company plans to use this funding to expand its client base of Everyday AI in different parts of the world.

Dataiku’s artificial intelligence platform enables businesses to analyze data and generate insights. The funding will also help Dataiku further improve its platform to provide better quality services to its customers.

Co-founder and CEO of Dataiku, Florian Douetteau, said, “Organizations that use Dataiku elevate their people – whether technical and working in code, or on the business side and low- or no-code – to extraordinary, arming them with the ability to make better day-to-day decisions with data.”

He further mentioned that the new funding proves that Everyday AI is the new future. The company is all set to provide artificial intelligence services to new businesses to make them realize its benefits.

Dataiku was founded in New York by Florian Douetteau, Clement Stenac, Marc Batty, and Thomas Cabrol in the year 2013. The company specializes in developing centralized artificial intelligence data platforms for businesses and has an industry-leading customer base of more than 450 companies, including Fox News Group, General Electronics, and Unilever.

John Curtius of Tiger Global said, “We’ve seen that executing an AI strategy in which data is a part of day-to-day operations can have a large-scale impact for organizations across sectors and sizes, and Dataiku is well-positioned to continue to help the enterprise realize this potential value given both the strength of their technology and the team.”

He also added that they are thrilled to be a part of Dataiku’s mission of systematizing data using artificial intelligence technologies. Earlier, Dataiku had raised $100 million in its series D funding round.

Philips to invest ₹300 crore in India and Hire 1500 new Employees

By

Dipayan Mitra

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August 6, 2021

Philips to invest ₹300 crore in India and Hire 1500 new Employees

Dutch multinational conglomerate company Philips announces that it plans to invest ₹300 core and hire 1500 new employees in India. This announcement was made by the CEO of Philips Global, Frans Van Houten.

He also mentioned that the company is planning to expand its facilities in Pune, India. After establishing its Innovation Center in Bengaluru, the company now wants to expand its operations in other cities like Chennai that would create new employment opportunities for Indian workers.

Van said, “I would mention the importance of our Innovation Centre in Bengaluru, where most of our software resources reside. We are also expanding our Global Business Services Hub in Chennai, so overall employment for Philips in India is strong. We have a current plan to expand employment by at least 1,500 people.”

The enterprise wants to use the massive talent pool of India to grow further and believes that India is a great market to be in. Van also mentioned that there is a huge possibility of growth in the local manufacturing industry as the country has a good workforce.

Leveraging the manufacturing potential, Philips will expand its Pune facility to increase its production capacity. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Philips had increased its manufacturing rate of critical care equipment like ventilators and monitors in the later quarters of 2020.

“On one hand, we saw critical and acute care rise rapidly, on the other, we saw the more conventional business for elective procedures go down,” said Van.

Last year, the company announced that it would invest ₹300 over three years to manufacture X-ray equipment, MRI components, and ultrasound machines in its Pune facility. Managing Director and Vice-chairman of Philips Indian subcontinent division, Daniel Mazon, said, “Covid-19 is not stopping us from our plans as we double down on our investments and focus on India.”

Robot uses Tactile Sign Language to enable Deaf and Blind Communicate

By

Dipayan Mitra

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August 6, 2021

Robot uses Tactile Sign Language to enable Deaf and Blind Communicate

A new robot uses human-like tactile sign language to enable deaf and blind individuals to communicate with others independently. This unique robot named Translational User Mechanism (TATUM) is developed by a bioengineering graduate student from Northeastern named Johnson.

Two deaf and blind individuals participated in the testing of this robot. The participants are also giving inputs and recommendations to Johnson for possible improvements that can be made to the robot.

Johnson pursued a course in sign language as a sophomore and also interacted with members of the deaf and blind community of Massachusetts to gather the required knowledge to develop this robot.

Deaf and blind individuals often need translators to be constantly present with them for interaction with others. But with this robot, they would be able to express themselves with their hand signs to society without the need of a human translator.

Johnson mentioned that she wanted to build a technology that would enable people dependent on American Signal Language to interpret and communicate with other individuals independently.

“When I was watching the interpreter sign, I asked, ‘How do you communicate without the interpreter?'” and the answer was simply, “‘We don’t,” said Johnson.

This unique robot will be extremely useful in places where individuals would want to have discussions in private, like at a doctor’s office or at home. Johnson is currently training the robot to fingerspell some basic words of the American Manual Alphabet system.

Johnsons aims to train this robot to the extent that it could connect to digital platforms like email, messengers, and social media to help differently-abled people connect with the world seamlessly. She is currently working with an assistant professor of bioengineering at Northeastern Chiara Bellini to develop TATUM.

Yellow.ai Raises $78 million in its Series C Funding Round

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Dipayan Mitra

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August 5, 2021

Yellow.ai Raises $78 million in its Series C Funding Round

Customer experience automation startup Yellow.ai raises $38 million in its series C funding led by WestBridge Capital. Other investors like Salesforce Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sapphire Ventures also participated in the Series C funding round of Yellow.ai.

With this new funding, the company plans to boost its expansion in the global market and capture more market share in the United States. The startup has also recruited seventy new skilled employees to work on its platform.

Earlier this year, The firm renamed itself from Yellow Messenger to Yellow.ai. Co-founder and CEO of Yellow.ai, Raghu Ravinutala, said, “Yellow.ai has broken out of the crowded virtual-assistant market with our automation-first with a human-assist model, to deliver a higher customer satisfaction and incremental revenue growth to our enterprise clients.”

He further added that they are prepared to become the global leader of customer experience automation as they are witnessing massive client expansion and increased revenue generation.

Yellow.ai is a California-based startup founded by Ankit Das, Jay Kishor Reddy, Raghu Ravinutala, and Rashid Khan in January 2016. The company specializes in developing customer experience automation platforms using natural language processing.

Yellow.ai’s product enables businesses to build personalized chatbots and voice bots. Yellow.ai has a customer base of more than 700 companies that are spread across 50 countries globally.

The firm has raised a total funding of $102 million till date. Company officials said that their client count increased after the outbreak of COVID-19 as most businesses were shifting towards a digital approach.

Founder of Westbridge Capital, Sumir Chadha, said, “What impressed us the most is the speed at which customers deployed yellow.ai for support automation and quickly scaled to commerce, HR, and other use-cases.” He also mentioned that pattern proves Yellow.ai’s capability of creating an impact across the board.