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#436977 The Top 100 AI Startups Out There Now, ...
New drug therapies for a range of chronic diseases. Defenses against various cyber attacks. Technologies to make cities work smarter. Weather and wildfire forecasts that boost safety and reduce risk. And commercial efforts to monetize so-called deepfakes.
What do all these disparate efforts have in common? They’re some of the solutions that the world’s most promising artificial intelligence startups are pursuing.
Data research firm CB Insights released its much-anticipated fourth annual list of the top 100 AI startups earlier this month. The New York-based company has become one of the go-to sources for emerging technology trends, especially in the startup scene.
About 10 years ago, it developed its own algorithm to assess the health of private companies using publicly-available information and non-traditional signals (think social media sentiment, for example) thanks to more than $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation.
It uses that algorithm-generated data from what it calls a company’s Mosaic score—pulling together information on market trends, money, and momentum—along with other details ranging from patent activity to the latest news analysis to identify the best of the best.
“Our final list of companies is a mix of startups at various stages of R&D and product commercialization,” said Deepashri Varadharajanis, a lead analyst at CB Insights, during a recent presentation on the most prominent trends among the 2020 AI 100 startups.
About 10 companies on the list are among the world’s most valuable AI startups. For instance, there’s San Francisco-based Faire, which has raised at least $266 million since it was founded just three years ago. The company offers a wholesale marketplace that uses machine learning to match local retailers with goods that are predicted to sell well in their specific location.
Image courtesy of CB Insights
Funding for AI in Healthcare
Another startup valued at more than $1 billion, referred to as a unicorn in venture capital speak, is Butterfly Network, a company on the East Coast that has figured out a way to turn a smartphone phone into an ultrasound machine. Backed by $350 million in private investments, Butterfly Network uses AI to power the platform’s diagnostics. A more modestly funded San Francisco startup called Eko is doing something similar for stethoscopes.
In fact, there are more than a dozen AI healthcare startups on this year’s AI 100 list, representing the most companies of any industry on the list. In total, investors poured about $4 billion into AI healthcare startups last year, according to CB Insights, out of a record $26.6 billion raised by all private AI companies in 2019. Since 2014, more than 4,300 AI startups in 80 countries have raised about $83 billion.
One of the most intensive areas remains drug discovery, where companies unleash algorithms to screen potential drug candidates at an unprecedented speed and breadth that was impossible just a few years ago. It has led to the discovery of a new antibiotic to fight superbugs. There’s even a chance AI could help fight the coronavirus pandemic.
There are several AI drug discovery startups among the AI 100: San Francisco-based Atomwise claims its deep convolutional neural network, AtomNet, screens more than 100 million compounds each day. Cyclica is an AI drug discovery company in Toronto that just announced it would apply its platform to identify and develop novel cannabinoid-inspired drugs for neuropsychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder and anxiety.
And then there’s OWKIN out of New York City, a startup that uses a type of machine learning called federated learning. Backed by Google, the company’s AI platform helps train algorithms without sharing the necessary patient data required to provide the sort of valuable insights researchers need for designing new drugs or even selecting the right populations for clinical trials.
Keeping Cyber Networks Healthy
Privacy and data security are the focus of a number of AI cybersecurity startups, as hackers attempt to leverage artificial intelligence to launch sophisticated attacks while also trying to fool the AI-powered systems rapidly coming online.
“I think this is an interesting field because it’s a bit of a cat and mouse game,” noted Varadharajanis. “As your cyber defenses get smarter, your cyber attacks get even smarter, and so it’s a constant game of who’s going to match the other in terms of tech capabilities.”
Few AI cybersecurity startups match Silicon Valley-based SentinelOne in terms of private capital. The company has raised more than $400 million, with a valuation of $1.1 billion following a $200 million Series E earlier this year. The company’s platform automates what’s called endpoint security, referring to laptops, phones, and other devices at the “end” of a centralized network.
Fellow AI 100 cybersecurity companies include Blue Hexagon, which protects the “edge” of the network against malware, and Abnormal Security, which stops targeted email attacks, both out of San Francisco. Just down the coast in Los Angeles is Obsidian Security, a startup offering cybersecurity for cloud services.
Deepfakes Get a Friendly Makeover
Deepfakes of videos and other types of AI-manipulated media where faces or voices are synthesized in order to fool viewers or listeners has been a different type of ongoing cybersecurity risk. However, some firms are swapping malicious intent for benign marketing and entertainment purposes.
Now anyone can be a supermodel thanks to Superpersonal, a London-based AI startup that has figured out a way to seamlessly swap a user’s face onto a fashionista modeling the latest threads on the catwalk. The most obvious use case is for shoppers to see how they will look in a particular outfit before taking the plunge on a plunging neckline.
Another British company called Synthesia helps users create videos where a talking head will deliver a customized speech or even talk in a different language. The startup’s claim to fame was releasing a campaign video for the NGO Malaria Must Die showing soccer star David Becham speak in nine different languages.
There’s also a Seattle-based company, Wellsaid Labs, which uses AI to produce voice-over narration where users can choose from a library of digital voices with human pitch, emphasis, and intonation. Because every narrator sounds just a little bit smarter with a British accent.
AI Helps Make Smart Cities Smarter
Speaking of smarter: A handful of AI 100 startups are helping create the smart city of the future, where a digital web of sensors, devices, and cloud-based analytics ensure that nobody is ever stuck in traffic again or without an umbrella at the wrong time. At least that’s the dream.
A couple of them are directly connected to Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, which focuses on tech solutions to improve urban design. A company called Replica was spun out just last year. It’s sort of SimCity for urban planning. The San Francisco startup uses location data from mobile phones to understand how people behave and travel throughout a typical day in the city. Those insights can then help city governments, for example, make better decisions about infrastructure development.
Denver-area startup AMP Robotics gets into the nitty gritty details of recycling by training robots on how to recycle trash, since humans have largely failed to do the job. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that only about 30 percent of waste is recycled.
Some people might complain that weather forecasters don’t even do that well when trying to predict the weather. An Israeli AI startup, ClimaCell, claims it can forecast rain block by block. While the company taps the usual satellite and ground-based sources to create weather models, it has developed algorithms to analyze how precipitation and other conditions affect signals in cellular networks. By analyzing changes in microwave signals between cellular towers, the platform can predict the type and intensity of the precipitation down to street level.
And those are just some of the highlights of what some of the world’s most promising AI startups are doing.
“You have companies optimizing mining operations, warehouse logistics, insurance, workflows, and even working on bringing AI solutions to designing printed circuit boards,” Varadharajanis said. “So a lot of creative ways in which companies are applying AI to solve different issues in different industries.”
Image Credit: Butterfly Network Continue reading
#436462 Robotic Exoskeletons, Like This One, Are ...
When you imagine an exoskeleton, chances are it might look a bit like the Guardian XO from Sarcos Robotics. The XO is literally a robot you wear (or maybe, it wears you). The suit’s powered limbs sense your movements and match their position to yours with little latency to give you effortless superstrength and endurance—lifting 200 pounds will feel like 10.
A vision of robots and humankind working together in harmony. Now, isn’t that nice?
Of course, there isn’t anything terribly novel about an exoskeleton. We’ve seen plenty of concepts and demonstrations in the last decade. These include light exoskeletons tailored to industrial settings—some of which are being tested out by the likes of Honda—and healthcare exoskeletons that support the elderly or folks with disabilities.
Full-body powered robotic exoskeletons are a bit rarer, which makes the Sarcos suit pretty cool to look at. But like all things in robotics, practicality matters as much as vision. It’s worth asking: Will anyone buy and use the thing? Is it more than a concept video?
Sarcos thinks so, and they’re excited about it. “If you were to ask the question, what does 30 years and $300 million look like,” Sarcos CEO, Ben Wolff, told IEEE Spectrum, “you’re going to see it downstairs.”
The XO appears to check a few key boxes. For one, it’s user friendly. According to Sarcos, it only takes a few minutes for the uninitiated to strap in and get up to speed. Feeling comfortable doing work with the suit takes a few hours. This is thanks to a high degree of sensor-based automation that allows the robot to seamlessly match its user’s movements.
The XO can also operate for more than a few minutes. It has two hours of battery life, and with spares on hand, it can go all day. The batteries are hot-swappable, meaning you can replace a drained battery with a new one without shutting the system down.
The suit is aimed at manufacturing, where workers are regularly moving heavy stuff around. Additionally, Wolff told CNET, the suit could see military use. But that doesn’t mean Avatar-style combat. The XO, Wolff said, is primarily about logistics (lifting and moving heavy loads) and isn’t designed to be armored, so it won’t likely see the front lines.
The system will set customers back $100,000 a year to rent, which sounds like a lot, but for industrial or military purposes, the six-figure rental may not deter would-be customers if the suit proves itself a useful bit of equipment. (And it’s reasonable to imagine the price coming down as the technology becomes more commonplace and competitors arrive.)
Sarcos got into exoskeletons a couple decades ago and was originally funded by the military (like many robotics endeavors). Videos hit YouTube as long ago as 2008, but after announcing the company was taking orders for the XO earlier this year, Sarcos says they’ll deliver the first alpha units in January, which is a notable milestone.
Broadly, robotics has advanced a lot in recent years. YouTube sensations like Boston Dynamics have regularly earned millions of views (and inevitably, headlines stoking robot fear). They went from tethered treadmill sessions to untethered backflips off boxes. While today’s robots really are vastly superior to their ancestors, they’ve struggled to prove themselves useful. A counterpoint to flashy YouTube videos, the DARPA Robotics Challenge gave birth to another meme altogether. Robots falling over. Often and awkwardly.
This year marks some of the first commercial fruits of a few decades’ research. Boston Dynamics recently started offering its robot dog, Spot, to select customers in 2019. Whether this proves to be a headline-worthy flash in the pan or something sustainable remains to be seen. But between robots with more autonomy and exoskeletons like the XO, the exoskeleton variety will likely be easier to make more practical for various uses.
Whereas autonomous robots require highly advanced automation to navigate uncertain and ever-changing conditions—automation which, at the moment, remains largely elusive (though the likes of Google are pairing the latest AI with robots to tackle the problem)—an exoskeleton mainly requires physical automation. The really hard bits, like navigating and recognizing and interacting with objects, are outsourced to its human operator.
As it turns out, for today’s robots the best AI is still us. We may yet get chipper automatons like Rosy the Robot, but until then, for complicated applications, we’ll strap into our mechs for their strength and endurance, and they’ll wear us for our brains.
Image Credit: Sarcos Robotics Continue reading
#436165 Video Friday: DJI’s Mavic Mini Is ...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
DJI’s new Mavic Mini looks like a pretty great drone for US $400 ($500 for a combo with more accessories): It’s tiny, flies for 30 minutes, and will do what you need as far as pictures and video (although not a whole lot more).
DJI seems to have put a bunch of effort into making the drone 249 grams, 1 gram under what’s required for FAA registration. That means you save $5 and a few minutes of your time, but that does not mean you don’t have to follow the FAA’s rules and regulations governing drone use.
[ DJI ]
Don’t panic, but Clearpath and HEBI Robotics have armed the Jackal:
After locking eyes across a crowded room at ICRA 2019, Clearpath Robotics and HEBI Robotics basked in that warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with starting a new and exciting relationship. Over a conference hall coffee, they learned that the two companies have many overlapping interests. The most compelling was the realization that customers across a variety of industries are hunting for an elusive true love of their own – a robust but compact robotic platform combined with a long reach manipulator for remote inspection tasks.
After ICRA concluded, Arron Griffiths, Application Engineer at Clearpath, and Matthew Tesch, Software Engineer at HEBI, kept in touch and decided there had been enough magic in the air to warrant further exploration. A couple of months later, Matthew arrived at Clearpath to formally introduce the HEBI’s X-Series Arm to Clearpath’s Jackal UGV. It was love.
[ Clearpath ]
Thanks Dave!
I’m really not a fan of the people-carrying drones, but heavy lift cargo drones seem like a more okay idea.
Volocopter, the pioneer in Urban Air Mobility, presented the demonstrator of its VoloDrone. This marks Volocopters expansion into the logistics, agriculture, infrastructure and public services industry. The VoloDrone is an unmanned, fully electric, heavy-lift utility drone capable of carrying a payload of 200 kg (440 lbs) up to 40 km (25 miles). With a standardized payload attachment, VoloDrone can serve a great variety of purposes from transporting boxes, to liquids, to equipment and beyond. It can be remotely piloted or flown in automated mode on pre-set routes.
[ Volocopter ]
JAY is a mobile service robot that projects a display on the floor and plays sound with its speaker. By playing sounds and videos, it provides visual and audio entertainment in various places such as exhibition halls, airports, hotels, department stores and more.
[ Rainbow Robotics ]
The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Virtual Tunnel Circuit concluded this week—it was the same idea as the physical challenge that took place in August, just with a lot less IRL dirt.
The awards ceremony and team presentations are in this next video, and we’ll have more on this once we get back from IROS.
[ DARPA SubT ]
NASA is sending a mobile robot to the south pole of the Moon to get a close-up view of the location and concentration of water ice in the region and for the first time ever, actually sample the water ice at the same pole where the first woman and next man will land in 2024 under the Artemis program.
About the size of a golf cart, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, will roam several miles, using its four science instruments — including a 1-meter drill — to sample various soil environments. Planned for delivery in December 2022, VIPER will collect about 100 days of data that will be used to inform development of the first global water resource maps of the Moon.
[ NASA ]
Happy Halloween from HEBI Robotics!
[ HEBI ]
Happy Halloween from Soft Robotics!
[ Soft Robotics ]
Halloween must be really, really confusing for autonomous cars.
[ Waymo ]
Once a year at Halloween, hardworking JPL engineers put their skills to the test in a highly competitive pumpkin carving contest. The result: A pumpkin gently landed on the Moon, its retrorockets smoldering, while across the room a Nemo-inspired pumpkin explored the sub-surface ocean of Jupiter moon Europa. Suffice to say that when the scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory compete in a pumpkin-carving contest, the solar system’s the limit. Take a look at some of the masterpieces from 2019.
Now in its ninth year, the contest gives teams only one hour to carve and decorate their pumpkin though they can prepare non-pumpkin materials – like backgrounds, sound effects and motorized parts – ahead of time.
[ JPL ]
The online autonomous navigation and semantic mapping experiment presented [below] is conducted with the Cassie Blue bipedal robot at the University of Michigan. The sensors attached to the robot include an IMU, a 32-beam LiDAR and an RGB-D camera. The whole online process runs in real-time on a Jetson Xavier and a laptop with an i7 processor.
[ BPL ]
Misty II is now available to anyone who wants one, and she’s on sale for a mere $2900.
[ Misty ]
We leveraged LIDAR-based slam, in conjunction with our specialized relative localization sensor UVDAR to perform a de-centralized, communication-free swarm flight without the units knowing their absolute locations. The swarming and obstacle avoidance control is based on a modified Boids-like algorithm, while the whole swarm is controlled by directing a selected leader unit.
[ MRS ]
The MallARD robot is an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV), designed for the monitoring and inspection of wet storage facilities for example spent fuel pools or wet silos. The MallARD is holonomic, uses a LiDAR for localisation and features a robust trajectory tracking controller.
The University of Manchester’s researcher Dr Keir Groves designed and built the autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) for the challenge which came in the top three of the second round in Nov 2017. The MallARD went on to compete in a final 3rd round where it was deployed in a spent fuel pond at a nuclear power plant in Finland by the IAEA, along with two other entries. The MallARD came second overall, in November 2018.
[ RNE ]
Thanks Jennifer!
I sometimes get the sense that in the robotic grasping and manipulation world, suction cups are kinda seen as cheating at times. But, their nature allows you to do some pretty interesting things.
More clever octopus footage please.
[ CMU ]
A Personal, At-Home Teacher For Playful Learning: From academic topics to child-friendly news bulletins, fun facts and more, Miko 2 is packed with relevant and freshly updated content specially designed by educationists and child-specialists. Your little one won’t even realize they’re learning.
As we point out pretty much every time we post a video like this, keep in mind that you’re seeing a heavily edited version of a hypothetical best case scenario for how this robot can function. And things like “creating a relationship that they can then learn how to form with their peers” is almost certainly overselling things. But at $300 (shipping included), this may be a decent robot as long as your expectations are appropriately calibrated.
[ Miko ]
ICRA 2018 plenary talk by Rodney Brooks: “Robots and People: the Research Challenge.”
[ IEEE RAS ]
ICRA-X 2018 talk by Ron Arkin: “Lethal Autonomous Robots and the Plight of the Noncombatant.”
[ IEEE RAS ]
On the most recent episode of the AI Podcast, Lex Fridman interviews Garry Kasparov.
[ AI Podcast ] Continue reading