Germany

Trying out different behaviours is one of the classic learning methods. Success or failure decides which behaviour is adopted. This principle can be transferred to the world of robots. At the Institute for Intelligent Process Automation and Robotics of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Robot Learning Group (ROLE) focuses on various aspects of machine learning. The scientists are investigating how robots can learn to solve tasks by trying them out independently.

As in just about every area of the health and fitness market, technology is increasingly infiltrating yoga, with startups and investors pushing to capitalize on the $80 billion market. Last year, Germany-based Asana Rebel raised more than $17 million from notable backers that include Greycroft to grow its virtual yoga platform, while New York's Mirror has raised sizable funding rounds for a connected mirror that delivers virtual fitness classes, such as yoga and Pilates. Zenia recently entered the fray with a mobile app that leverages machine learning, computer vision, and motion tracking with the promise of helping improve your yoga poses. The company calls it "the world's first AI-powered yoga assistant," and plans to expand its technology to cover all areas of health and fitness. Zenia was officially founded out of Belarus in May of this year by software engineer Alexey Kurov, and the company has secured an undisclosed investment from such notable backers as Misha Lyalin, CEO and chair of Russia-based game developer Zeptolab, and Bulba Ventures, a Belarusian venture capital (VC) firm that invests in AI startups.

Cardiff-based Talent Ticker, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Recruitment Market Intelligence platform, has completed a £1.5m seed funding round through Venture Investment and Business Angels. Having launched the live platform in June 2019, Talent Ticker has landed a large enterprise client list of recruitment agencies across the UK, United States and Germany. This seed funding will allow Talent Ticker to further develop their machine learning technology and hire more R&D, Sales & Customer Success staff in their Welsh head office. With 110,000 people employed in the £35.7bn UK recruitment industry, recruitment technology is set to become a major growth sector.

Katja Bühler is an Area Coordinator for Complex Systems and Head of the Biomedical Image Informatics Group at the Vienna based Virtual Reality and Visualisation Research Centre VRVis. Before joining VRVis in 2002, she worked as assistant professor at the Institute for Computer Graphics and Algorithms at Vienna University of Technology, where she still acts as external lecturer. She holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Karlsruhe and a PhD in Technical Sciences (Computer Science) from Vienna University of Technology. Katja Bühler has many years of experience in leading international applied research projects in close cooperation with industry and academia and deepened her knowledge in Strategic R&D Management at INSEAD. In 2012 Katja Bühler and Rainer Wegenkittl received the Austrian science2business award for the management of a successful long term research project with AGFA Healthcare.

Sebastian J. Schultheiss, Managing Director of Computomics, founded Computomics together with a very experienced board of scientific advisors from ETH Zurich, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and the University of Tübingen. Sebastian studied Bioinformatics at University of Michigan and Tübingen. He worked on Machine Learning research and its application to biological data for his PhD degree at the Max Planck Institute for Developental Biology and FML. He brings startup experience, boinformatics skills and machine learning expertise to Computomics, which brings superior prediction accuracy and unprecedented integration of phenotyping, genotyping, management and environmental data to agriculture, enabling its clients to produce stable, value-added crops. He studied Bioinformatics at University of Tübingen and McGill, Montréal, and graduated with researching the evolution of epigenetic marks in plants at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen.

Dyspnoea, shortness of breath and coughing are just a few of the potential symptoms of asthma. Those affected suffer sudden attacks of bronchial constriction. Identifying the disease quickly is crucial, as that is the only way as to lower the threat of asthma attacks, which can even be fatal. It is particularly important to identify the disease early in children in order to quickly intervene and alleviate the symptoms. However, diagnosing children is more complicated and tedious than diagnosing adults.

Back in the '70s, renowned mathematician James Lighthill predicted that machines would never be capable of reasoning or even simple tasks, like being able to checkmate a chess pro. Fifty years later, artificial intelligence programs have not only defeated the world's top chess players, but they can match -- and in some cases, outperform -- humans when it comes to art, science and even companionship. Here's a look at nine outrageous things AI can do. Vincent van Gogh's painting technique was considered to be so revolutionary that art critics thought it was inimitable, but scientists from Germany's Bethge Lab invented a program that can replicate his iconic brush strokes. The AI system analysed the colours, shadows and highlights of "Starry Night," then used the same techniques to create an original painting of the Neckar river in Tuebingen, Germany.

Airport hubs increasingly are embracing technology in their operations. As part of a three-day Airport IT conference in Munich, Amadeus head of airport IT product management Holger Mattig outlined the future of airport management and said that aviation hubs will witness more use of wearables, internet of things (IoT) applications and predictive analysis in the future. Talking about how the IoT has impacted the aviation industry, Mattig said that computing devices are already exchanging data between each other. "If you look at the apron, all of the devices that go on there – the push back tractors, the de-icing elements, all of these are actually able to talk to each other and give data about every stage of activity," he said. "In terms of flight handling, we now have technologies from companies like Assaia who can make prediction through videos generated by machine learning, and technologies like geofencing, where you can manage drones and improve safety. "We have the same for indoor where there are a lot of initiatives that are used to engage with the mobile phones of passengers in events of potential disruptions." While aviation companies are increasingly using technologies such as IoT and machine learning, Mattig said that going forward, airport and airline companies will start using wearable technology to improve efficiency. He added that employees could start wearing devices such as "smart sunglasses" and "smart bracelets" to track passenger activity, and that monitoring how passengers prefer to shop, eat and spend their time in an airport could help authorities to understand consumer behaviour. "Airports must start to build what I would call airport-centric visible analytics by implementing CRM solutions with the aim to look at the profile of passengers.

Now scientist from Italian research institute SISSA and the Technical University of Munich have found a light to shine inside – an approach for studying deep neural networks that reveals the processes that they are able to carry out – so long as they are image processing networks. "We have developed a method to systematically measure the level of complexity of the information encoded in the various layers of a deep network – the so-called intrinsic dimension of image representations," according to SISSA scientists Davide Zoccolan and Alessandro Laio. "Thanks to the collaboration of experts in physics, neurosciences and machine learning, we have exploited a tool originally developed in another area to study the functioning of deep neural networks". Working with Jakob Macke, of TUMunich, they applied the method to find out that, inside an image recognition deep neural network, representations of the image undergo a progressive transformation. Similar to what happens in the visual system, they analyse content progressively, through a chain of processing stages.

German data mining software firm Celonis said on Thursday that it had raised $290 mln in a Series C funding round, putting a $2.5 billion valuation on the company that has been compared with enterprise application giant SAP . The funding round was led by Arena Holdings and investors included Ryan Smith, the founder of customer experience specialist Qualtrics that was bought by SAP for $8 billion a year ago. Celonis, based in Munich and New York, runs a cloud-based service that uses artificial intelligence to mine data and optimize business processes, serving customers including Siemens, 3M, Airbus and Vodafone. "We are in a market that shows enormous momentum," co-CEO and co-founder Bastian Nominacher told Reuters, adding that Celonis would invest the funds raised in its global sales and customer service and in enhancing its cloud platform. The funding round brings total investments into Celonis to $370 million.