Engineer.ai, an Indian startup claiming to have built an artificial intelligence-assisted app development platform, is not in fact using AI to literally build apps, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Instead, the company, which has attracted nearly $30 million in funding from a SoftBank-owned firm and others, is reportedly relying mostly on human engineers, while using hype around AI to attract customers and investment that will last it until it can actually get its automation platform off the ground. The company claims its AI tools are "human-assisted," and that it provides a service that will help a customer make more than 80 percent of a mobile app from scratch in about an hour, according to claims Engineer.ai However, the WSJ reports that Engineer.ai The company was sued earlier this year by its chief business officer, Robert Holdheim, who claims the company is exaggerating its AI abilities to get the funding it needed to actually work on the technology.

Object detection is a computer vision technique whose aim is to detect objects such as cars, buildings, and human beings, just to mention a few. The objects can generally be identified from either pictures or video feeds. Object detection has been applied widely in video surveillance, self-driving cars, and object/people tracking. In this piece, we'll look at the basics of object detection and review some of the most commonly-used algorithms and a few brand new approaches, as well. Object detection locates the presence of an object in an image and draws a bounding box around that object.

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence adoption is disrupting many industries, most notably the banking and financial services sector. The many individual technologies that are included under the umbrella title of artificial intelligence are promising great opportunities for business efficiencies, but at the same time, creating new challenges. One of these new challenges is determining the best location to relocate or expand offices and service centers of banks, insurance companies, investment houses and other financial services companies that collectively are leading the national charge of incorporating AI technologies into their day-to-day operations. Not surprisingly, with the growing need for the latest in AI skillsets and the academic resources for recruiting and retraining of displaced workers, relocation firms such as Princeton, NJ-based The Boyd Co. are targeting those North American cities that offer superior academic programs in artificial intelligence. Indeed, the ability to provide an artificial intelligence workforce is emerging as a new site selection driver – and one that Boyd expects to soon extend well beyond the financial services sector.

Give us your feedback, and we'll help you learn more about where and how police security robots are being used This summer, the police department in Huntington Park, California debuted the newest member of its squad: A 400 pound autonomous robot developed by Knightscope Inc. The sleek "RoboCop" has gotten a fair amount of attention for its patrols of the local park, including a featured segment on NBC's "Today" show. MuckRock's JPat Brown, submitted a California Public Records Act request for materials related to the robot's use and, through a release earlier this month, found that the machine was equipped with the ability to scan and store license plate information and video footage, which it can then "analyze" for bystanders and potential criminals. MuckRock wants your help in learning more about how these machines are being used and acquired. The roving robot security guard has found employment with private companies, malls, casinos, and airports, but the use by official law enforcement is still in its earlier stages.

Chowbotics is packing up Sally the salad making robot and sending it off to college. Well, many colleges actually, as the food robotics startup is set to announce next week a bigger push into the higher education market. Chowbotics told us that this school year, students at multiple colleges and universities in the U.S. will be able to buy salads and breakfast bowls from Sally the robot. Those schools include: Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada; Elmira College in Elmira, NY; the University of Memphis in Memphis, TN; and Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. These schools join Marshall University in Huntington, WV, which installed Sally in 2018.

The automotive industry is one of the most high-tech industries in the world – so a headline finding in a report published this week was, on the face of it, somewhat surprising. Capgemini's report – Accelerating Automotive's AI Transformation – found that during 2018, the number of companies in the industry deploying AI "at scale" grew only marginally by 3%. This reflected that just 10% of respondents surveyed said that their organizations were deploying AI-driven initiatives across the entirety of its operations "with full scope and scale," during 2018, compared to 7% in 2017. The relatively slow pace of growth is evidence that "the industry has not made significant progress in AI-driven transformation since 2017", the report concludes – a surprising finding given the scale of investment and enthusiasm shown by industry leaders. I spoke to one of the report's authors, Capgemini's Ingo Finck, who told me "To an extent, I did find this surprising, because from the discussions we've been having with these companies we see that the vast majority – more than 80% - mention AI in their core strategy. "It's clearly a strategic factor for them, so yes … we were surprised by the relatively slow growth rate." Before we start delving into the possible reasons for this slow uptake, it's worth noting that there is a key geographic variation: In China, the number of automotive companies working at scale with AI almost doubled, from 5% to 9%. This is explained to some extent by the comparatively "open" approach taken by China's AI giants, such as Baidu's development of the open source Apollo platform. This has involved it partnering with over 130 other businesses and organizations. Finck explains that the slow growth demonstrated in other regions could be down to the fact that organizations are taking a more mature approach to AI deployment. This might mean they are moving away from "try everything and see what works" methodologies, towards focusing on proven use cases that can then be scaled. Another disparity is apparent when we consider the sizes of the businesses that are reporting growth in AI deployments. "We can see that the smaller companies are struggling more with AI – whereas with larger companies [with revenue of $10 billion plus] the adoption rate is higher.

Every drop of seawater contains thousands of cells that can reveal the diversity of life in our ocean. Using a self-contained robotic laboratory and an autonomous underwater vehicle, MBARI scientists and engineers are developing advanced collection techniques that may one day simplify the jobs of biologists and resource managers. A recent study confirms that autonomously collected samples of environmental DNA (eDNA) are equivalent to samples collected by people using traditional, manual methods. A growing body of research indicates that wildlife surveys using eDNA analyses can be as (or more) accurate than simply using traditional methods. As such, eDNA assessments appear to offer a very promising and cost-effective means for monitoring biodiversity, which presents an attractive proposition for researchers as well as resource managers who study ocean ecosystems.

Road Watch 2.0 Vision Zero Pedestrian Deaths Project: Learn how an award-winning Richmond Hill and York Regional Police road safety Road Watch program is the base for a space age approach to make Toronto roads safer, as kicked off on the Global News 640 AM John Oakley Show. Hear a plan to make roads safer while mitigating climate through earth and Space LiDAR technology. Learn how road safety and climate change mitigation is combined in the Ethical AI Energy Cloud City master plan, a UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals Emerging Technology Framework to Unite Society. Dave D'Silva founded Intelligent Market Solutions Group (IMSG) to make good on a University of Waterloo pact with Bill Gates. IMSG is a socio-economic emerging technology project management firm creating Star Trek inspired Ethical AI systems.

Chief Design Officer InEight Dan Patterson founded BASIS, a company that developed an artificial intelligence (AI) planning software tool that was acquired by InEight in 2018. Following the acquisition, Dan became a member of InEight's executive leadership team. He now focuses on expanding upon his vision of creating next generation planning and scheduling software solutions for the construction industry. As a globally recognized project analytics thought leader and software entrepreneur, Dan has more than 20 years of experience building project management software companies, including Pertmaster and Acumen. Throughout his career, Dan has focused on solution innovation and project management, including advanced scheduling, risk management, project analytics and AI.

Robots are about to go underground -- for a competition anyways. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to developing new emerging technologies, is holding a challenge intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate, and search underground. But the technology developed for the competition could also be used in future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Systems Competition will be held August 15 – 22 in mining tunnels under Pittsburgh, and among the robots competing will be an entry from a team led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that features wheeled rovers, drones, and climbing robots that can rise on pinball-flipper-shaped treads to scale obstacles. "By investing in this competition, we are investing in our future," Leon Alkalai, manager of the JPL Office of Strategic Planning, said in a statement.