We had the opportunity to meet with Eero Laaksonen, CEO of as part of the IT Press Tour in San Francisco. Valoh is the Finnish word for lantern shark, a deep-dwelling, self-illuminating fish. Eero believes automation is key to improving quality of life and that deep learning makes things that are not scalable today, scalable like looking at medical images and autonomous cars. Valohai strives to push all industries forward with the ability to do meaningful things faster.

Devices communicate with a central server periodically to learn a global model. Federated learning helps preserve user privacy and reduce strain on the network by keeping data localized. How does it differ from traditional large-scale machine learning, distributed optimization, and privacy-preserving data analysis? What do we understand currently about federated learning, and what problems are left to explore? In this post, we briefly answer these questions, and describe ongoing work in federated learning at CMU.

What was the first thing that you did this morning when you woke up? And what was the last thing that you did before you went to bed last night? Chances are that many of us -- probably most of us -- were on our smartphones. Our day-to-day consumption of all things digital is increasingly being analyzed and dictated by algorithms: what we see (or don't see) in our news and social media feeds, the products we buy, the music we listen to. When we type a query into a search engine, the results are determined and ranked by based on what is deemed to be "useful" and "relevant." Serendipity has often been replaced by curated content, with all of us enveloped inside our own personalized bubbles.

New York-based startup Barsys recently announced the Coaster, a smart saucer that guides the user on how to create a particular cocktail. By connecting the coaster to a smartphone with the complimentary app downloaded, users can choose from Barsys' existing library of cocktails or input their own recipe. Once a cocktail is selected, the user can simply start pouring ingredients one by one, and with each new alcohol or mixer, the coaster will light up when the correct amount has been added to the glass. The Barsys Coaster is regularly priced at US$149 (S$203), but interested customers can pre-order it here for US$95 (S$130). The device will start shipping in December.

In its Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century report, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) identifies six distinct "Aims for Improvement" addressing the divide between good health care and the health care that people actually receive. Patient-centered service is a leading focus. Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP, former president and chief executive officer of IHI and former administrator of CMS said, "We are guests in our patients' lives instead of hosts in our healthcare organizations." Being guests in the lives of patients means being welcomed in, not waited for. This requires that we prioritize patient convenience–something artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare can help deliver.

A woman uses an ATM with facial recognition technology during the presentation of the new service by CaixaBank in Barcelona on February 14, 2019. So, I just got the new iPhone 11 Pro. I have to say, I pretty much love the facial recognition unlock feature. And no, Apple is not paying me to say that. Prior, I was a facial recognition skeptic.

Aviso, the pioneer in AI-powered guided selling, announced reaching a slew of corporate milestones in Q3 2019. These include further customer momentum building on recent funding by Storm Ventures, winning recognition as a major category leader, making key new executive hires, and expanding both in the US and internationally. Aviso's headcount has increased by 30% under new CEO Trevor Templar, and revenues are up over 100% year on year. The company expanded with both new and existing clients in Q3, including major Fortune 500 corporations such as Honeywell and MongoDB. Aviso also won recognition as an industry leader for the third year running in G2 Crowd's annual tech-sector power ranking.

Clustering tries to find structure in data by creating groupings of data with similar characteristics. The most famous clustering algorithm is likely K-means, but there are a large number of ways to cluster observations. Hierarchical clustering is an alternative class of clustering algorithms that produce 1 to n clusters, where n is the number of observations in the data set. As you go down the hierarchy from 1 cluster (contains all the data) to n clusters (each observation is its own cluster), the clusters become more and more similar (almost always). There are two types of hierarchical clustering: divisive (top-down) and agglomerative (bottom-up).

NASA's mission of exploration requires leveraging new ways to utilize and learn from the unprecedented amount of data that space-based observation platforms generate. New capabilities are needed, ranging from onboard autonomy for robotic spacecraft to techniques for understanding the world and universe where we live. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science are rapidly becoming integral to NASA's future to drive automation and interpretation. AI is a collection of advanced technologies that allow machines to think and act, through sensing, comprehending, interacting, and learning. AI's foundations lie at the intersection of several traditional fields - Philosophy, Mathematics, Economics, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Computer Science.

Imitation learning has allowed recent advances in learning robotic manipulation tasks but has been limited due to the scarcity of high quality demonstrations to learn from. RoboTurk is a system that help solve this problem by enabling the rapid crowdsourcing of high-quality demonstrations. This allows the creation of large datasets for manipulation tasks that we show improves the quality of imitation learning policies. We have recently extended the RoboTurk platform to work with real robots and presented this work at IROS 2019. Click the link above to learn more.