IBM Corp. and Heifer International announced today that blockchain-based IBM Food Trust and artificial intelligence platform IBM Watson are being used to help small-scale coffee and cocoa farmers in Honduras get higher crop yields and access new markets. Food Trust uses blockchain technology to track products from farm to point of sale, providing transparency along the entire supply chain. It is currently being used by coffee farmers in the Cooperativa Regional Agroforestal Nuevas Ideas Limitada, a farmer cooperative, and cocoa farmers that are part of Heifer's Chocolate4All project. According to a study published by Heifer International small-scale farmers operate at an average of 46% to 59% loss because of excessive middlemen. Increased transparency enables end buyers more opportunity to understand whom they are buying from and thus can create a competitive advantage for small-scale coffee and cocoa farmers.

Hugging Face is the technology startup, with an active open-source community, that drove the worldwide adoption of transformer-based models thanks to its eponymous Transformers library. Earlier this year, Hugging Face and AWS collaborated to enable you to train and deploy over 10,000 pre-trained models on Amazon SageMaker. For more information on training Hugging Face models at scale on SageMaker, refer to AWS and Hugging Face collaborate to simplify and accelerate adoption of Natural Language Processing models and the sample notebooks. In this post, we discuss different methods to create a SageMaker endpoint for a Hugging Face model. If you're unfamiliar with transformer-based models and their place in the natural language processing (NLP) landscape, here is an overview.

SAN ANTONIO, July 07, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CloudCommerce, Inc. (CLWD), a technology driven provider of digital advertising solutions, today announced that it has retained Dr. Peter Holden, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) strategist and IP expert, who will assist the Company with the expansion of AI capabilities to its SWARM platform and development and protection of its intellectual property to protect these innovations. "Great teams require great players and Dr. Peter Holden is a great player in the world of applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive technologies to real-world problems," said Andrew Van Noy, CloudCommerce CEO. "We are very fortunate to have Peter advising us as we continue the process of transforming CloudCommerce into a true technology company." Dr. Holden has spent the last 25 years leveraging advanced or'deep' technologies as both an investor as well as hands-on operator having established and/or led three tech funds to date and taken multiple companies through to sale or IPO. His relevant technical background, holding a Ph.D. in A.I. and a Honda Post-Doctoral AI Fellowship award from Tokyo University, has allowed him to help companies embrace new and emerging Machine Learning, Deep Learning and cognitive technologies which enable transformative changes to create a competitive advantage.

MONTREAL and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, July 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rithmik Solutions, whose mission is building the world's most advanced and reliable analytics for mobile mining equipment, today announced the closing of a US$1.2M investment led by Chrysalix Venture Capital and joined by Fonds Ecofuel. The funding will accelerate the commercialization of the company's flagship product, Rithmik Asset Health Analyzer (AHA), which has been in development for the past three years and is currently undergoing real-time onsite trials in Alberta, Quebec and Zambia. Rithmik AHA applies a multi-tiered machine learning approach to increase mobile equipment uptime while reducing maintenance costs and lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Mining companies typically spend anywhere from 20%-50% of their annual operating budgets on equipment maintenance, and lost production from unplanned downtime has an even bigger financial impact. "We were impressed by the Rithmik team's deep technical experience in the space of mobile mining equipment data, across equipment types and OEM brands, and that experience has strongly resonated with their early customers," said Alicia Lenis, Vice President at Chrysalix Venture Capital, an industrial innovation fund.

DataRobot, the leader in Artificial Intelligence, will host a public job fair from 3-7 p.m. at Morgantown's Erickson Alumni Center on Tuesday, July 13th. In June, DataRobot announced the opening of a new office at Vantage Ventures Morgantown headquarters. The company plans to bring new jobs in the fast growing technology sector to West Virginia through expanded hiring in software engineering, professional services, and customer support. Sally Embrey, DataRobot's vice president of public health and medical technologies, said she is excited the company has the opportunity to help create new careers in the Mountain State and is looking forward to a long-term presence in the region. "Last month's announcement of DataRobot's new Morgantown office has created significant interest in our company both locally and throughout West Virginia. We hope that Tuesday's job fair will help build upon the momentum created by the announcement and showcase the talent available to support technology jobs in the state," Embrey said.

Ideal for healthcare, finance, legal and enterprise organizations, etherFAX AI uses Microsoft's Cognitive Services to extract and digitize data from a range of unstructured documents and forms, streamlining workflow and eliminating manual entry. "Powerful AI document data extraction transforms unstructured documents -- such as faxes, PDFs, and paper-based forms -- into structured, searchable data ready to integrate into workflow processes and applications," said Ben Manning, Director of Product at etherFAX. "Utilizing these cognitive services for data extraction turns content locked in unstructured forms into usable, structured data and fields that can be used to automate workflows and eliminate manual processes." Manually searching and keying in data into fields is time-consuming and often leads to human error. With etherFAX's AI solutions, organizations can quickly transform content locked in unstructured documents such as PDFs and paper-based forms into structured, searchable data ready to be integrated into workflows, applications, or EMRs.

A Chinese gene company selling prenatal tests around the world developed them in collaboration with the country's military and is using them to collect genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations, a review of scientific papers and company statements found. U.S. government advisers warned in March that a vast bank of genomic data that the company, BGI Group, is amassing and analyzing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage. As science pinpoints new links between genes and human traits, access to the biggest, most diverse set of human genomes is a strategic edge. The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisers said. Reuters has found that BGI's prenatal test, one of the most popular in the world, is a source of genetic data for the company, which has worked with the Chinese military to improve "population quality" and on genetic research to combat hearing loss and altitude sickness in soldiers. BGI says it stores and reanalyzes left-over blood samples and genetic data from the prenatal tests, sold in at least 52 countries to detect abnormalities such as Down's syndrome in the fetus. The tests -- branded NIFTY for "non-invasive fetal trisomY" -- also capture genetic information about the mother, as well as personal details such as her country, height and weight, but not her name, BGI computer code shows.

Paris and Amsterdam – Nexyad, the embedded, real-time platform for aggregating on-board data, and HERE Technologies, the leading location data and technology platform, are now working together to apply cognitive AI to road safety. Nexyad uses cognitive AI to aggregate extensive data sources in a vehicle in real time and interprets them to assess whether a certain driving behaviour is appropriate given the surrounding context. Nexyad's assessment, that can easily be delivered to a driver via a mobile phone, can be calculated from four sets of data only: HERE map, Global Navigation Satellite System, electronic horizon and acceleration. Nexyad's platform is also scalable and can aggregate data from Advanced Driving Assistant Systems (ADAS) sensors to include camera, radar and lidar, weather (visibility and temperature), and traffic data. Nexyad's real-time data aggregation platform provides two output values 20 times every second: the lack of caution of the driver and the maximum speed recommended given the road conditions – legal speed limit, road roughness, topography of the road, weather, and traffic.

CALGARY, Alberta, July 06, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Quorum Information Technologies Inc. (TSX Venture: QIS) (Quorum) announced today that it is receiving advisory services and funding of up to $724,746 from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) to support a research and development project to consolidate Quorum's dealership data and add machine learning capabilities to its Cloud-based applications. The NRC IRAP support is the next step in a process started in 2020 when Quorum launched QAnalytics – an enterprise reporting tool for the Quorum suite of products powered by Microsoft Power BI. QAnalytics is now utilized by 30% of Quorum's XSellerator Dealership Management System (DMS) customers. "QAnalytics has changed how we manage our 11 franchised dealerships in our auto group," stated Tim Davis, CEO of Davis Auto Group. "The real time metrics that QAnalytics provides for all aspects of our dealership's operations allow our management team to make confident, data-driven decisions." Quorum's next step is to strategically consolidate dealership data from its 1,025 customers on Microsoft Azure Synapse, enabling QAnalytics to deliver enhanced critical Business Intelligence insights into dealership operations and provide a consolidated dataset for Machine Learning projects.

GNW Insights from AI/ML platforms not only explain what happened (as in looking at the rear-view mirror), but can also predict future outcomes based on different scenarios and suggest or even trigger actions autonomously.Additionally, combinations of AI/ML platforms with applications like chatbots, cybersecurity or automation can control or reduce costs of scaling operations. These tools usually have shorter returns on investment and their business cases are easier to defend.But the real power of AI/ML platforms resides in the potential to generate additional or new revenue streams. From being something reserved for large corporations with vast financial resources, AI/ML is starting to become accessible to even small businesses without a dedicated team of data scientists. Insights-driven organizations are rapidly getting ahead of the competition. In the medium term, AI/ML adoption is forecast to be essential for business survival.