S&P Global has announced its intention to acquire Kensho in a deal worth $550 million. On Wednesday, New York-based S&P said that the deal would bolster the firm's portfolio of next-generation technologies. The acquisition agreement has been signed for $550 million in cash and stock. Kensho's goal as a company is to "deploy scalable machine learning and analytics systems across the most critical government and commercial institutions in the world to solve some of the hardest analytical problems of our time." Founded in 2013, the startup, which has no more than 100 employees, has raised a total of $67.5 million in funding.

Wireless LAN provider Mist has secured $46 million in funding for its pioneering AI-powered WLAN services. Founded by former Cisco executives, Mist claims its cloud-based WLAN offering for enterprise is the world's first self-learning network, driven by the company's proprietary AI technology, which automates much of the network's management. The programmable cloud architecture is able to track and adapt to each user and their devices in order to deliver a reliable and consistent connection, according to a company blogpost. It does this by tracking over 100 pre- and postconnection states for every Wi-Fi client, and then sending that information to the Mist Cloud every few seconds to be run through multiple machine learning algorithms. The solution can also calculate mobile users' locations with low latency.

ELSA, an app whose name stands for "English Language Speech Assistant" (and not the popular Disney character!), Unlike other courses that focus mainly on teaching grammar and vocabulary, ELSA uses artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology to help language learners with their pronunciation. The $3.2 million pre-A round of funding was led by Monk's Hill Ventures, a firm that invests in post-seed stage startups in Southeast Asia. Monk's Hill founder and partner, Peng T. Ong, is joining ELSA's board. The San Francisco-based startup was originally founded in 2015 by Stanford grad Vu Van, ELSA CEO, and Dr. Xavier Anguera, whose background is in speech recognition and A.I. technologies. It debuted at SXSW in March 2016, where it later won the SXSWedu launch competition.

Finance CyberX raised $18 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to $30 million. Norwest Venture Partners led the new round and was joined by ff Venture Capital, Flint Capital, Glilot Capital Partners, and OurCrowd. CyberX makes its headquarters in Framingham, Mass., with operations in Israel. The startup offers security protection for Industrial Internet of Things applications and for industrial control systems. ZEDEDA came out of stealth mode this week and said it received $3.06 million in seed funding.

Apple Inc.'s AirPods earphones have been a surprise hit. Now, the company is planning a push into the high end of the market. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is working on noise-canceling, over-ear headphones that rival headsets from market leaders like Bose and even the company's own Beats by Dre brand, according to people familiar with the product's development. The company plans to launch the headphones as early as the end of this year, but has faced development challenges that might push back the release, the people said. Work on the Apple headset has been on-and-off over the past year.

Nineteen different startups were funded in February, raising $377 million; a substantial two-month start for the new year. Five acquisitions were reported during the month, while the IPO front had no activity whatsoever. CB Insights said that China dominated the funding of AI-related startups during 2017. So far in 2018, the China funding percentage appears to be less than the 48% of 2017. Viking Global Investors LP led the round, and was joined by investors including Perceptive Advisors and CPMG Inc.

Members of a U.S. national security panel are locked in a dispute over a hostile takeover bid for chip giant Qualcomm Inc., QCOM -0.06% pitting officials in the departments of Justice and Defense against Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. In a meeting Tuesday, members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as CFIUS, debated whether the panel has the right to weigh in on Singapore-based Broadcom Ltd.'s AVGO -1.28% bid of $117 billion for Qualcomm before a deal is struck, according to people briefed on the matter. Qualcomm is a leader in semiconductor technology and the development of standards for 5G, the next generation of wireless technology that could enable self-driving cars and other innovations. Some members are concerned that if Broadcom buys Qualcomm, it could sell parts of the company and hobble American prospects of eclipsing China in the race to develop the technology, the people familiar with the matter said. CFIUS, which can advise the president to block takeovers by foreign companies on national security grounds, is chaired by the Treasury Department and includes members from other agencies, including Justice, Homeland Security, Defense and Energy.

In a U.S. regulatory filing, Baidu said it would list iQiyi on the Nasdaq exchange and is seeking to raise around $1.5 billion. Analysts at Jefferies have valued iQiyi at $17 billion. The move comes as Baidu looks to raise money for the loss-making unit to stay ahead in the fiercely competitive video-streaming sector where tech titans Tencent Holdings Ltd. TCEHY 2.24% and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA -1.00% also have strong plays. Baidu told investors in its most recent earnings call that it would remain iQiyi's controlling shareholder. IQiyi, which was founded in 2010 and will list under the ticker IQ, said it is China's largest video-streaming service by amount of time spent watching, with more than 50 million paid subscribers.

Amazon has acquired video doorbell and home security camera maker Ring in a deal reportedly worth more than $1bn, as it pushes further into the internet of things and in-home-delivery space. The deal values Ring, which makes and sells popular video doorbells in the US, UK and Europe, at between $1.2bn (£86.4m) and $1.8bn, according to reports, making it Amazon's second largest acquisition after the $13.7bn deal last year for Whole Foods Market. Analysts see the Santa Monica, California-based Ring fitting in with Amazon's move into the home security market, driven by a bet on delivering packages inside shoppers' homes to boost sales. "As Amazon moves more aggressively into the grocery delivery space ... we believe smart security devices will be an important factor in driving user adoption," said Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian. Amazon already sells two different camera products: the Echo Look fashion-advice camera and the Amazon Cloud Cam indoor security camera, which forms part of Amazon's Key service that lets uses a smartlock to allow delivery personnel put packages inside a home to avoid theft or, in the case of fresh food, spoiling.

In the broad sweep of AI's current worldly ambitions, machine learning healthcare applications seem to top the list for funding and press in the last three years. Since early 2013, IBM's Watson has been used in the medical field, and after winning an astounding series of games against with world's best living Go player, Google DeepMind's team decided to throw their weight behind the medical opportunities of their technologies as well. Many of the machine learning (ML) industry's hottest young startups are knuckling down significant portions of their efforts to healthcare, including Nervanasys (recently acquired by Intel), Ayasdi (raised $94MM as of 02/16), Sentient.ai With all the excitement in the investor and research communities, we at TechEmergence have found most machine learning executives have a hard time putting a finger on where machine learning is making its mark on healthcare today. We've written this article, not to be a complete catalogue of possible applications, but to highlight a number of current and future uses of machine learning in the medical field, with relevant links to external sources and related TechEmergence interviews. The list below is by no means complete, but provides a useful lay-of-the-land of some of ML's impact in the healthcare industry.