C100, a non-profit that connects the Canadian and Silicon Valley startup ecosystems, has accepted 27 companies into the the 2019 cohort of its 48Hrs in the Valley program. The competitive annual program, which is referral-only, pairs Canadian companies with a mentor, then brings them to Silicon Valley for two days of meetings with investors and executives. This year's cohort will run from May 7 to 9. It includes eight firms from Toronto; five from Montreal and one from Laval, Que.; six from Vancouver; two apiece from Calgary and Ottawa; and one each from Halifax, Kitchener, Ont. and Waterloo. The program has been running since 2010. So far, over 250 companies have participated, many of which have gone on to raise money soon after their Silicon Valley visits.

Santa Clara based Hotify Inc, an Artificial Intelligence Platform as a Service (AI PaaS) company, announced it has joined the NVIDIA Inception program. The program is conducted by NVIDIA, a pioneer in 3D GPUs and AI Computing, to recognize exceptional startups in the Artificial Intelligence space. Hotify Inc is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company and is the developer of NuGene, a cognitive Automation platform which can be used to develop fast and robust Intelligence Agents (Bots) in minutes. The selection of Hotify involved multiple rounds of information exchange including telephonic interaction. "We are happy to become part of this program. Working closely with NVIDIA shall help us in building AI Platform for scale. Getting selected in this program also is a good validation of our focus, approach and offerings. We aim to gain from early developers access of NVIDIA technology, their Go to Market help and vast knowledge repository," said Chinmay Joshi, Co-Founder, VP Product & Engineering, Hotify.

Both developing babies and elderly adults share a common characteristic: the many cells making up their bodies are always on the move. As we humans commute to work, cells migrate through the body to get their jobs done. Biologists have long struggled to quantify the movement and changing morphology of cells through time, but now, scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have devised an elegant tool to do just that. Using machine learning, the researchers designed a software to analyze microscopic snapshots of migrating cells. They named the software Usiigaci, a Ryukyuan word that refers to tracing the outlines of objects, as the innovative tool detects the changing outlines of individual cells.

Cleveland Clinic has launched a center to advance the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. The Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence will focus on developing innovative clinical applications of AI and leveraging machine-learning technology in hopes of improving healthcare delivery in areas such as diagnostics, disease prediction and treatment planning, according to a news release. Launched by Cleveland Clinic Enterprise Analytics, the center aims to foster collaboration and communication between physicians, researchers and data-scientists; offer programmatic and technology support for AI initiatives at the Clinic; and conduct research in several areas of medicine, according to the release. "Cleveland Clinic has formed the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence to translate AI-based concepts into clinical tools that will improve patient care and advance medical research," said Dr. Aziz Nazha, director of the new center and associate medical director for AI, in a prepared statement. The center will facilitate collaboration among physicians, researchers, computer scientists and statisticians across the United States and around the world, as well as between academia and industry, to advance the application of AI in healthcare.

AngelPad just wrapped the 12th run of its months-long New York City startup accelerator. For the second time, the program didn't culminate in a demo day; rather, the 19 participating startups were given pre-arranged one-on-one meetings with venture capital investors late last week. AngelPad co-founders Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas did away with the demo day tradition last year after nearly a decade operating AngelPad, which is responsible for mentoring startups including Postmates, Twitter-acquired Mopub, Pipedrive, Periscope Data, Zum and DroneDeploy. "Demo days are great ways for accelerators to expose a large number of companies to a lot of investors, but we don't think it is the most productive way," Korte told TechCrunch last year. Competing accelerator Y Combinator has purportedly considered their eliminating demo day as well, though sources close to YC deny this.

Esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD) is the pivotal procedure in the diagnosis of upper gastrointestinal lesions.1 High-quality endoscopy delivers better health outcomes.2 However, there are significant variations in EGD performance among endoscopists, impairing the discovery rate of gastric cancers (GC) and precursor lesions.3 The diagnosis rate of early GC in China is still under 20% and similar results are seen in most part of the world.4 5 While further expanding endoscopic technology, it is vital to raise the quality of everyday endoscopy. Ensuring competence is a seminal prerequisite for discovering lesions in EGD.6 Plenty of guidelines or expert consensus have been reached to optimise EGD examination.7 The American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) and American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) developed safety and quality indicators for EGD.8–10

Technology promises a future that isn't tied down by the limitations of flesh. Communication travels further and faster than legs can run, and data beamed into space will live longer than any of its creators. Devices that respond to our voices make hands less necessary. But the digital assistants many of us rely on inadvertently perpetuate the old restrictions of the human form. If Siri has no body, why does she sound like a woman?

China is poised to overtake the United States in artificial intelligence with a surge in academic research on the key technology, an analysis published Wednesday showed. The analysis by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence showed China has already surpassed the US in published papers on AI--although many of these were considered "medium-quality" or "low-quality." But the researchers said China is likely to top the US in the most-cited 50 percent of papers this year, the most-cited 10 percent of papers next year, and in the top one percent by 2025. The findings highlight concerns in Washington and Silicon Valley that China is racing ahead of the US in key areas of technology such as autonomous vehicles, virtual reality and fifth-generation wireless networks. Allen Institute researchers Field Cady and Oren Etzioni said the surge in AI investment in China began more than a decade ago, well before the 2017 announcement by Beijing that it planned to become the world leader in the sector by 2030.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 13, 2019--BCW (Burson Cohn & Wolfe) today announced it was a winner in the Business Intelligence Group's Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program for its work on behalf of client Boehringer Ingelheim in creating the first-ever AI chatbot for global patient education launched by a pharmaceutical company. BCW and Boehringer Ingelheim were honored in the Limited Memory, Product or Service – Large Company category. The Facebook chatbot, Tabatha, part of the company's global "Think. Breathe" asthma awareness campaign, was created to help people understand the impact asthma has on their daily lives in a private environment. Artificial Intelligence driven, Tabatha is designed to help those with asthma to self-identify symptoms, learn more about their risk and prepare for a doctor visit.

The robotics group at the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Fla., has an enormous amount of experience with walking robots. They came in second at the DARPA Robotics Challenge with their Running Man Atlas, one of just three teams to score a perfect 8 out of 8, and they've continued to advance bipedal locomotion using both Atlas and NASA's Valkyrie. We write about their research all the time--just a few months ago, they taught Atlas to walk with straight legs, much like a human does. Humans set a very high standard for bipedal mobility. We're well designed for it in both hardware and software, and we can do some absolutely amazing things.