One of Canada's largest banks and a multinational software firm are both announcing expanded investment in artificial intelligence (AI) that will include partnerships with Canadian universities, according to announcements made Wednesday morning. Microsoft Corp. just announced its acquisition of Montreal-based AI startup Maluuba Jan. 13 and now it says it wants to double the size of that team over the next two years. That investment will be paired with a $6 million gift to the Universite de Montreal and $1 million to McGill University to be spent on AI research over five years. The announcement was made by Microsoft President Brad Smith from the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was joined by Navdeep Bains, Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. "Microsoft's investment is proof of Canadians' world-renowned expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning," Bains is quoted as saying in a press release.

The pioneer in intelligent automation, ServiceNow can further increase productivity for its customers by applying machine‑learning capabilities and data models developed by DxContinuum. As more Internet of Things devices make service requests, it is increasingly important that those requests be categorized, routed and responded to. Hundreds of thousands of machine and manual work requests can now be effectively and automatically categorized and routed for each ServiceNow customer, bringing the "intelligent automation" of today's manual processes one step closer. While artificial intelligence and automation are rapidly changing the consumer world from self‑driving cars to smarter homes, the workplace still relies on manual processes. Every day employees deal with IT incidents, HR cases, customer requests, and security alerts with back‑and‑forth emails, calls and spreadsheets.

Following a recall of some of its Shield tablets last week, Nvidia published solid second quarter financial results after the bell on Thursday. Non-GAAP earnings were 34 cents per share on a revenue of $1.153 billion, up five percent year-over-year. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 10 cents per share with $1.01 billion in revenue. Nvidia highlighted revenue growth for two verticals in particular: gaming and automotive tech. The GeForce GTX GPU series alone -- primarily utilized for sports gaming titles -- is touted to now have an estimated 130 million viewers. The GeForce Experience PC gaming platform has also grown to 65 million users, up from 38 million a year earlier.

With the deluge of reports lately on how robots are replacing humans at everyday tasks, you may think the end of the world, at least for a certain category of human workers, is nigh. Indeed that may well be the case in certain professions. The Associated Press, for instance, has a team of robots that generates 3,000 news reports about the quarterly earnings releases of companies. This Japanese hotel that I wrote about recently is staffed entirely with robots. The paralegal may soon be a position of the past as law firms commission bots to sift through vast reams of legal information and synthesise them.

Every decade or so, a new era of computing comes along that shapes everything we do. Much of the 90s was about client-server and Windows PCs. By the aughts, the Web had taken over and every advertisement carried a URL. Then came the iPhone, and we're in the midst of a decade defined by people tapping myopically into tiny screens. So what comes next, when mobile gives way to something else?

It's already sorting your email and translating your voice searches, and machine learning will play a bigger role in Google's services moving forward. Google's parent company, Alphabet, reported its quarterly financial results Thursday, with revenue and profit both up from a year earlier. New Google CEO Sundar Pichai took part in his first earnings call, and in between discussing the numbers he revealed how important Google thinks machine learning is to its future. "Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we're rethinking everything we're doing," he said. He was putting the spotlight on a branch of artificial intelligence that's getting more attention lately.

A Toronto-based content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform is boosting its big data capabilities with the acquisition of a New York City-based influence analytics marketing platform. ScribbleLive announced its acquisition on Wednesday of Appinions Inc., developers of an influence analytics marketing platform that is built on natural language processing and social network analysis technology. The vendor says combining ScribbleLive's data centric content workflow and publishing platform with Appinions' deep data technology will create an even more powerful content marketing platform for data-driven marketers. Toronto-based web platform creators Scribble Technologies Inc. has acquired another well-known live publishing platform in CoveritLive from California-based Demand Media. "By enabling over 500 brands such as Red Bull, PwC and Oracle to serve up the right content at the right time in the right place online, ScribbleLive has been validated as the platform for planning, creating and distributing content," said Vince Mifsud, CEO of ScribbleLive, in a statement.

Writing basic stats from a sporting event or the latest stock prices can be a tedious assignment for journalists. "Neothetics Inc. (NEOT) on Thursday reported a loss of $6.9 million in its first quarter. The San Diego-based company said it had a loss of 50 cents per share. Neothetics shares have decreased 16 percent since the beginning of the year." This is important information for someone with stock in the pharmaceutical company Neothetics, but not very useful to a mass audience. These basic stories can become a waste of time and resources for news outlets, especially a wire service such as the Associated Press.

Google has acquired a University of Toronto startup to improve its speech and object recognition research, the university announced this week. DNNresearch, incorporated in 2012 by computer science professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, focuses on speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding. It has developed a system that "dramatically improved the state of the art in object recognition," according to the university's media release. The three-person team also received a $600,000 grant earlier from Google's Focused Research Awards, which support research in computer science and engineering. The announcement makes DNNresearch the 9th Canadian company acquired by the search giant.

Having recently turned a corner in profitability, Nuance (NASDAQ:NUAN) trades at a PEG ratio of 0.0762. For reference, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has a PEG of 0.2012. Nuance is 1/60th the size of Apple. Nuance has an EV/EBITDA TTM of 25.07. Nuance has a Price/Sales ratio of 4.075.