President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday designed to beef up how the U.S. approaches artificial intelligence. The effort comes as China continues making inroads in AI development. The so-called American AI Initiative does not directly target the communist country, but some experts believe approach leaves no doubt about the administration's designs. The move is light on details but comes as China's telecommunications industry comes under withering criticism. "Continued American leadership in Artificial Intelligence is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States," Trump noted in a press statement attached to the order.

Tom Paine Follow @phillytechnews Subscribe in a reader Subscribe to Philadelphia Tech News by Email California-based hospitality platform Zingle announced $11 million in venture capital funding last week, from PeakSpan Capital. At the same time, the company said it had acquired a Philadelphia AI startup, Presto (sometimes referred to as Presto AI), apparently late last year. From Presto's LinkedIn page, this description: Acquired in 2018, Presto developed predictive NLP models that perform the world's best classification, similarity analysis, and entity recognition in the hospitality domain. We set out to improve the quality and efficiency of text based guest interactions in hotels. Presto's mission is to create experiences better than humanly possible.

UiPath is leading the "Automation First" era – championing one robot for every person, delivering free and open training and collaboration and enabling robots to learn new skills through AI and machine learning. Led by a commitment to bring digital era skills to more than a million people, the company's enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for business and government organizations all over the world, improving productivity, customer experience and employee job satisfaction.

The Revolutionary War never looked so good. Ubisoft announced today that it will be reaching into its vault and giving Assassin's Creed III a fresh coat of paint with a remastered edition, set to drop on March 29th. The new, higher resolution version of the classic title will be available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC -- though there's been no mention of a Nintendo Switch version for the time being. According to Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed III Remastered will offer 4K and HDR support that will make the title, first released in 2012, look like a modern release. The game has also received some tweaks and improvements to gameplay mechanics that should squash some of the clunkiness present in the original release.

In his keynote speech, Zheng explained that the concept of urban computing includes urban perception & data acquisition, big data management, data-driven analysis and services provided. Zheng said that the urban perception & data acquisition process is facing lots of challenges, including acquiring more data with limited resources; insufficient data due to the extreme lack of sensors in cities; and serious data loss issue due to faulty sensors or other factors. To address these challenges, Zheng proposed to unify different types of data in urban spaces, such as crowd flow data, traffic flow, air quality, weather data and social media data into unified spatial-temporal data types, and then optimize the management of those data utilizing multiple specially designed spatial-temporal indexes. Zheng gave an example of how these techniques help with detecting parking violations by mining the massive trajectory data of shared bicycles. When talking about the layer of data-driven analysis in cities, Zheng emphasized that the structure of spatio-temporal data is different from simple text and image data.

Thanks for taking the time to read this far. I hope you feel more comfortable with Natural Language Processing in Python and maybe even have some ideas how you can make the code even better. Here's a few ideas to get you started Want to learn more about the NLTK library? You can find the full documentation here.

Zesty.ai was selected as the Silver Award winner by Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) in the first ever Zurich Innovation World Championship for its work leveraging artificial intelligence to revolutionize risk underwriting and customer experience for Property and Casualty insurance. Zurich is a leading multi-line insurer with about 53,000 employees and presence in more than 210 countries. Zurich is the parent company of Zurich North America and Farmers Insurance. Zesty.ai has developed an AI-based solution that can provide insurers with detailed and accurate property insights to improve underwriting, pricing and post-event response. Using satellite and drone imagery, information collected by aircraft, weather data and other structured data sources, zesty.ai

ROCKY HILL, Conn., Jan. 31, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Connecticut Innovations (CI), Connecticut's strategic venture capital arm and the leading source of financing and ongoing support for Connecticut's innovative, growing companies, today announced the closing of a $750,000 investment in Aureus Analytics (Aureus), a provider of AI and a predictive analytics platform for the insurance industry. Aureus was selected as an early winner of VentureClash and is the first company to receive an investment from the VentureClash 2018 competition. CI's investment is a part of a total fundraise of $3.1 million, which also included participation from other funds including Multi-Act, Alpine Meridian and additional investment by existing investors. "From the strength of the management team to the prowess of their analytics solutions, we have been very impressed with Aureus's progress and prospects," said Peter Longo, senior managing director of investments at CI. "Their new headquarters in Hartford will allow them access to major insurers in the United States and accelerate their growth in this market." Aureus provides insurance industry solutions hosted on an artificial intelligence platform that combines both explicit and implicit data to measure the customer experience in real time to determine a SentiMeter score for customers. In addition to participating in the VentureClash competition, Aureus also was selected to be part of the inaugural Hartford InsurTech Hub and subsequently expanded its presence to Hartford at the conclusion of the program.

Integrate.ai has raised undisclosed financing from Telus Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Canadian telecommunications company Telus Corp (TSX: T, NYSE: TU). The funds raised will support development of the Toronto-based company's artificial intelligence (AI) enterprise software platform. Launched in 2017 by CEO Steve Irvine, Integrate.ai in September closed a $39.5 million Series A financing. The round was led by Portag3 Ventures and joined by Georgian Partners and Real Ventures. Deal to accelerate development of ethical AI-powered software platform; multi-year commercial deal will deploy solution to optimize TELUS' customers' experience TORONTO, Jan. 31, 2019 /CNW/ – Integrate.ai

File photo: Youtube logo is seen on an android mobile phone. YouTube is again claiming it'll tweak its recommendation system to promote fewer conspiracy videos. The Google-owned service announced the change after BuzzFeed published a report detailing how YouTube's recommendation systems can lead you down a "rabbit hole" of misinformation and politically charged content. "We'll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways--such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the Earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11," the company said in a Friday blog post. What will be different this time isn't clear.