BOSTON, MA – June 2, 2016 – Neurala, Inc., a creator of artificial intelligence, deep learning software for robots, drones, self-driving cars, toys, consumer electronics, and smart devices (ioT), today announced that it has completed a 1.2-million round of financing lead by the fund run by well-known venture capitalist Tim Draper, Draper Associates Investments, LLC, and by Haiyin Capital, a Beijing-based venture capital firm. This second round of financing brings the total external investment in Neurala to 2 million. Haiyin Capital is a new investor in Neurala. The firm actively invests worldwide in technology teams whose innovations are, in their opinion, poised for global impact. In addition to their financial investment in Neurala, Haiyin will provide access to its network of OEM and technology companies in China.

A team out of Waseda University in Japan has unveiled some pretty cool images from the first half of the 20th century, given new depth with full colorization thanks to an artificial intelligence. Unlike colorizing black and white photos using software, which can be a lengthy process of repeated cleaning and coloring – this AI samples similar photos and applies those colors and tones to the photo at hand. So, for example, if you have an old black and white photo of your grandparent's house – and that house is still standing today – you can take a photo of it and the AI will learn how to color the old photo based on the tones and levels from the modern day one. Similarly, if you have an old photo of an area or people that don't exist, the program can still learn and adapt those colors from similarly colored images. The more photos and images it has to pull from, the greater detail and true to color matching it will be able to provide.

Lee Se-dol, the 33-year-old South Korean who is the 18 time world champion of Go, finally beat Google's artificial intelligence program. It marks his first win in the ongoing challenge. Since the AI already won three games in the five-game series, a series which is taking place in Seoul, the victory is already secured; however, the final matches are still being played out. It is hoped that these games will help the Google team get some valuable insights into how well the program functions. And it seems that people like knowing that humanity can put up a good show in the face of artificial intelligence.

Just about half a year ago, HTC realised that its yet-to-be-launched Vive VR product was going to hit the market without an experience good enough to convince consumers to try virtual reality. So it turned to a group of its own employees, and spun them out into an independent entity whose mission it was to build the next great game for the Vive. This, in addition to committing a 100 million fund in April to grow VR startups around the world. The head of HTC's internal startup, Fantahorn, is River Ho, a senior manager within HTC who had been at the company for four years. Prior to that, he had spent more than a decade as a games producer and designer at different Taiwanese games studios.

As I detailed back in November in Sharp: A Cautionary Tale, the former electronics giant Sharp (OTCPK:SHCAY; OTCPK:SHCAF) has seen better days. Over the past several years, Sharp's financial statements have been like a disaster zone of its own making. Predictably, Sharp's most recent and final full year performance statement was also disastrous. The strength of the yen1 and weakness of the global economy will continue to make sure of that. However, on March 30th, 2016, after state-sponsored Japan Display Inc. (OTC:JPDYY) of the Innovation Network Group failed to make a competing offering, Hon Hai/Foxconn Technology Group (OTC:HNHAF; OTC:HNHAY; OTC:FXCOF) finalized a much talked-about deal to acquire a 66% stake in Sharp - priced at 3.5 billion2, about 2.75 billion less than its original offer but 1.22 billion higher than Sharp's market cap at the time of the purchase.

The recent killing of the Taliban Chieftain, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, by a drone inside the Pakistan province of Baluchistan, is a striking reminder that we have entered a futuristic world where war is waged by flying killer robots and that we have witnessed a massive leap forward in the history of human conflict. Given that war accelerates history and the Islamic world is incapable of producing the cell phones on which its Islamists plot to kill us, the mullah's death by drone reminds us of immutable laws governing the fall of civilizations. Declining civilizations will always face superior firepower from ascending civilizations because sovereignty is only temporarily uncontested. The U.S. agency that conducts drone warfare worldwide, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was constituted in 2002 and has grown ten-fold since its inception. Staffed by both the CIA and military, it now operates in super-secret locations across the globe.

Honda Motor Co. said Thursday that subsidiary Honda R&D Co. plans to establish a research and development base specializing in artificial intelligence in the Akasaka district of Tokyo in September. The major automaker will consolidate almost all of its AI-related R&D activities in the nation into the new base, called Honda R&D Innovation Lab Tokyo. Honda aims to speed up the development of robots and autonomous driving technologies, which it hopes to put into practical use on expressways in 2020. Honda R&D, in the city of Wako, Saitama Prefecture, is known for developing the Asimo humanoid robot. Honda believes that having an AI base in central Tokyo will make it easier for the company to cooperate with universities and other institutions, as well as information and technology companies.

If you want to get under Diane Bryant's skin these days, just ask her about GPUs. The head of Intel's powerful data center group was at Computex in Taipei this week, in part to explain how the company's latest Xeon Phi processor is a good fit for machine learning. Machine learning is the process by which companies like Google and Facebook train software to get better at performing AI tasks including computer vision and understanding natural language. It's key to improving all kinds of online services: Google said recently that it's rethinking everything it does around machine learning. "It's a big opportunity, and there will be a hockey stick where every business will be using machine learning," she said in an interview.

Japan's Mouse Computer has developed add-on biometric sensors that will bring Windows Hello to any PC running Windows 10. Windows Hello is Microsoft's biometric security system. It allows users to dump passwords for facial or fingerprint recognition, but only on PCs that have the correct hardware. Many new PCs do, but generations of older machines that can run Windows 10 don't have the infrared camera or fingerprint sensors that are required. That's where the new add-on peripherals come in.

People often get stuck when they are asked to improve the performance of existing predictive models. What usually they do is try different algorithms and check their results. But often they end up not improving the model. Here are some of the steps you can take to boost your existing models. The question is when we should ask for more data?