Repsol has acquired a stake in Belmont Technology, incorporating it as part of the participated strategic companies of their Corporate Venturing portfolio. The investment supports Repsol's initiatives to leverage artificial intelligence for its global energy business. Belmont Technology is developing the cloud-based Sandy platform for the Upstream Oil & Gas industry. Sandy offers unique knowledge management capabilities, continuously ingesting and structuring all types of industry data and making it consumption-ready for analytics and seamless queries in natural language. Sandy also features a breakthrough innovation; enabling real time, AI-based, simulation of subsurface scenarios from exploration risk assessment to oilfield development plans.

San Diego, Calif., November 14, 2019 -- From companies worth billions of dollars to startups employing a small number of people, UC San Diego engineering alumni are at the core of the robotics ecosystem here in San Diego County. This was clearly evident at the sixth annual robotics forum organized by the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute Nov. 7. The forum focused exclusively on local companies this year and was dubbed the San Diego Robotics Forum for the occasion. The goal was to showcase the breadth and depth of the region's robotics strengths, and solidify San Diego's reputation as Robot Beach. "We have an important mission here to showcase how strong San Diego is in the area of robotics," said Henrik Christensen, director of the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute.

Are you one of those writers who struggles to find topics to write about? I hear that a lot: "I just don't have any ideas!" So I decided to take a few minutes and find some article ideas for you. Seriously, I did not spend hours gathering the ideas for this post. I collected press releases for a week that come in my inbox due to my long history as a business reporter, and then took perhaps 5 minutes apiece to think on them.

A business that leverages virtual process analysis to accelerate digital transformation through imitation learning is one of three startups to win ISG Startup Challenges at events hosted this fall by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. FortressIQ, the San Francisco-based startup that uses AI-based computer vision to "learn" business tasks as they occur in real time, won the ISG Startup Challenge at the inaugural ISG Agile Enterprise Summit October 28 in Boston. Beth Bourg, FortressIQ's marketing director, delivered the winning pitch to an independent panel of judges, and was chosen the winner in a live audience poll. "The first-ever ISG Agile Enterprise Summit explored the benefits of becoming an agile organization and building a culture of continuous improvement," said Karen Healy, partner and global leader, ISG Events. "We were thrilled to hear compelling pitches on emerging solutions that increase efficiency and agility in new and exciting ways. The audience choice, FortressIQ, offers an innovative, automated solution to discover and document processes that are ripe for automation, saving both time and money."

Epiq has deep experience applying advanced analytics to eDiscovery matters for the benefit of its clients, using AI in over 1,000 matters in the past year, spanning an array of litigated matters, regulatory reviews, and internal investigations. Recent client engagements include leveraging AI for a leading international bank, a national healthcare provider, and one of America's largest cities. The matter type and project size differed greatly in each case, but those clients sought the cost, time, and quality advantages that only Epiq can offer. About Epiq Epiq, a global leader in the legal services industry, takes on large-scale, increasingly complex tasks for corporate counsel, law firms, and business professionals with efficiency, clarity, and confidence. Clients rely on Epiq to streamline the administration of business operations, class action and mass tort, court reporting, eDiscovery, regulatory, compliance, restructuring, and bankruptcy matters.

Luko, a France-based insurance tech startup that's using sensors, data, and machine learning to circumvent the need to make a claim in the first place, has raised €20 million ($22 million) in a series A round of funding led by Silicon Valley VC heavyweight Accel, with participation from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Europe's Speedinvest. Founded out of Paris in 2016, Luko offers a similar proposition to other modern, mobile-focused insurance companies such as New York-based Lemonade, insofar it promises to provide quick coverage with minimal friction. The company said that it takes just two minutes to secure coverage, two hours to receive payment for a claim, and two days for any damage to be repaired. But the company is going further than that, by trying to detect issues before they escalate -- Luko is pitching its product as a means to move away from a "reactive" claims-based model to one of prevention. "This is the first step to our true endgame -- avoiding home accidents altogether," Luko cofounder and CEO Raphael Vullierme said.

HPC and AI in a phone booth: ScaleMatrix and Nvidia announced today at the SC19 conference in Denver a joint offering that puts up to 13 petaflops of Nvidia DGX-1 compute power in an air conditioned, water-cooled ScaleMatrix Dynamic Density Control (DDC) "clean room" cabinet. Built for modular deployments and designed for high-demand AI workloads, ScaleMatrix said its ruggedized cabinet can be erected "anywhere power and a roof exist," and it includes biometric security and fire suppression. At the high end of the product line is a composable SKU comprised of the Nvidia DGX-1 system, a single rack running at 42kW, containing 13 DGX-1 units and delivering 13 Pflops of throughput. Other configurations come with a DGX POD deployment, four DGX-2s, run at 43kW and deliver 8 Pflops of compute, the companies said. The units will be sold with storage and networking following DGX POD reference architecture designs, such as NetApp's ONTAP AI solution.

Machine learning technologies and techniques are giving organizations powerful new ways to utilize the vast amounts of data they're collecting. According to several reports, ML spending is increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 25%. That's benefitting vendors providing ML solutions, which appears to be mostly cloud vendors outside of the HPC segment. According to Zion Market Research's July report, the global market for ML was valued at $1.6 billion in 2017 and is expected to account for $20.8 billion in spending by 2024, which translates into a rather healthy 44% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). That was the outlier in a recent roundup of ML market reports. Market Reports World came up with a similar number in its global tally on ML spending.

The oil and natural gas industry is turning to artificial intelligence technology to save billions of dollars in maintenance and production costs. Houston oilfield services company Baker Hughes, tech giant Microsoft and Silicon Valley artificial intelligence company C3.ai have signed an agreement to develop and deploy the technology for industry customers around the globe, the companies said Tuesday. In the oil field, artificial intelligence technology is being used to compile massive amounts of data transmitted by sensors and so-called smart equipment, look for patterns, make predictions and inform decisions by operators. "Companies that adopt this technology will be the next Amazon, and those that don't adopt will be the next Sears," Tom Siebel, C3.ai founder and CEO, said in an interview. Baker Hughes and C3.ai launched a joint venture in June to deploy artificial intelligence in the oil patch.

Finn AI, the world's leading AI-powered conversational banking technology provider, today announced that one of the world's largest financial services corporations has chosen Finn AI to help improve customer service and to enhance customer acquisition workflows. Under the terms of the engagement, Finn AI has developed a virtual assistant to pre-qualify prospects for the company's personal and small business banking products, ensuring human sales agents are engaged only when an inquiry is sales-based, thus reducing the cost to acquire. The virtual assistant also interacts with customers outside of regular call center hours, allowing the financial institution to extend their support hours to a 24/7 model. Additionally, the virtual assistant is used to expedite the product application process for new and existing customers, providing information about banking products and in-the-moment guidance, through to applying for a product. "This customer engagement is an excellent example of how Finn AI can help financial institutions achieve very specific, and often complex, business objectives," said Jake Tyler, CEO at Finn AI. "This particular use case leverages a number of our pre-built Customer Acquisition features including Smart Routing, Product Comparison, and Product Recommender. Used in combination, the customer is able to reduce distractions to sales agents while improving the consumer experience."