What would be a nice menu for our new very cosmopolitan friends? I would really like to make a nice impression, but at the same time I would like to go with a relatively safe card. My newly discovered app "What's cooking" mysteriously seem to know exactly what would be perfect for this Saturday night. I save the suggested grocery list and forward it to my husband. Time flies, a new season is upcoming.

Over the past year, we've had the pleasure of welcoming a number of leading Machine Learning (ML) focused companies to the Notion family. These are startups that are tackling verticals ranging from autonomous vehicles (Five.AI) to behavioural monitoring within the enterprise (Status Today). What's more, many of our existing portfolio companies are now using ML to power aspects of their products and delivering accelerating returns as they go. As a B2B fund with a strong history in SaaS, we keep an eye out for emerging technologies that have the potential to bring a business's marginal cost down to near-zero and in turn, enable subscription-based models. Here are a few thoughts on why we are bullish about a new wave of AI startups and the lens through which we are analyzing these opportunities.

Scientists at Oxford University have developed a machine that can lip-read better than humans. The artificial intelligence system – LipNet – watches video of a person speaking and matches the text to the movement of their mouths with 93% accuracy, the researchers said. They suggested, automating the process could help millions. But experts say that more testing in real-life situations are needed to fully understand the benefits. Lip-reading is a notoriously tricky with professionals only able to decipher what someone is saying around 60% of the time.

Facebook has begun allowing businesses to send users adverts on Messenger, but only if those users have previously made contact with the brand. Part of Facebook's iteration of its Messenger chat service as a platform, announced at Web Summit in Lisbon, the change will mean that if a user ever contacts a brand that will open the door to that brand then sending them adverts through the instant messaging app. "Sponsored messages" as Facebook calls them provides another revenue opportunity for Facebook, targeting users in a place where they are less likely to automatically screen out adverts. David Marcus, Facebook's vice president of messaging, said: "Of course, people using Messenger shouldn't worry about getting spammed, because the starting principles still remain: businesses can't send a sponsored message to threads that weren't previously opened by their customers or prospects, and users have full control to block messages or people/businesses they no longer want to hear from." However, users wanting to avoid ads will have to be careful which brands, chatbots and other interfaces within Messenger they use. If a user messages a chatbot it gives that brand carte blanche to then send the user adverts.

Whenever I receive bad service from a brand, I typically fire off an angry tweet and hope the company or organisation I'm complaining about notices the blue tick next to my name and takes action accordingly. It's ungracious, makes me look like a bit of a dick, and similar to trying to shift a caffeine-induced headache by consuming more caffeine, it may feel good momentarily but hardly ever works. Enter Resolver, a U.K. startup that's built tools to help you complain the correct way. They include automating parts of the complaint letter-writing process and tracking the progress of your grievance. And now the company wants to take all of the data it's amassed regards what works and what doesn't and apply AI -- their words, not mine -- to make it even easier to resolve issues.

You might expect the operating theatre to be one of the last places you'd find robotics in action but, increasingly, you'd be wrong. The OT is typically the most labour-intensive and expensive part of a hospital -- which, in this age of spiraling health costs, makes it a priority for any cost-savings that can be achieved through systemisation and standardisation. Robotic surgery, or robot-assisted surgery, has the advantage that it allows doctors to perform many types of complex procedures with more precision, flexibility and control than they could with conventional techniques. Given the speed at which robotics is advancing, how long will it be before robots start making all the decisions on surgery without the need for human control or intervention? OK, you say, that's fine where standard and predictable procedures are required.

Lip reading, an essential tool that helps the hearing-impaired to better understand the world, is now conducted by artificial intelligence with a better accuracy than done by humans, University of Oxford reveals. In an article currently published by Quartz we learn that a new paper issued by the University of Oxford with funding from Alphabet's Deepmind, reveals that they have developed an artificial intelligence system called LipNet that can read lips with an accuracy of 93.4%. University of Oxford has previously released a system that operated word-by-word with an accuracy of 79.9%, but their new system has now developed a new and different way of approaching the problem. "Instead of teaching the AI each mouth movement using a system of visual phonemes, they built it to process whole at a time. That allowed the AI to teach itself what letter corresponds to each slight mouth movement", Quartz writes. The new system was exposed to 29 000 3-second-videos videos labelled with the correct text to train the system, and in comparison with human lip-readers that had an average error rate of 47.7%, the AI's error rate was only 6.6%.

Florent Perronnin was director at Fair in Paris until July 2016, when he moved to Xerox in Grenoble. He is now deputy manager of the analytics labouratory at Xerox Research Centre Europe. One of the primary areas of focus at Xerox is computer vision. "You need a certain combination of ingredients for a country to be strong in AI," said Perronnin. "You need good research institutions. And France is very strong in two of the competencies required for AI research – mathematics and computer science."

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MUNICH, Nov. 08, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ahead of the opening of the world's largest international trade fair for the electronics industry in Munich, Electronica reveals its trend index 2020, an international survey highlighting how people see their future lives with electronic devices. In the US, 1,000 consumers took part in the survey, which indicates strongly that artificial intelligence should not replace thinking. However 69% of US people were positive about an intelligent automobile which monitors traffic like a driving instructor, and only intervenes when the driver makes a mistake. People feel comfortable with idea of using devices for protection and general security, but they don't want them to be too intrusive or connect up their office and home. Results painted a similar picture for electronic healthcare. More than 80% of the population surveyed want electronic safety technology to make living easier for older people with connected emergency alert systems.