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.

Unity, a leading maker of game development tools, announced today that it's created a new, unprecedented type of video game: one designed not to be played by humans, but by artificial intelligence. The game is called Obstacle Tower, and it's a piece of software created to judge the level of sophistication of an AI agent by measuring how efficiently it can maneuver up to 100 levels that change and scale in difficulty in unpredictable ways. Each level is procedurally generated, so it changes every time the AI attempts it. With Obstacle Tower, and a $100,000 pool of prizes set aside for participants to claim as part of a contest, Unity hopes it can provide AI researchers with a new benchmarking tool to evaluate self-learning software. "We wanted to give the researchers something to really work with that would to an extreme degree challenge the abilities of the AI systems that are currently in research and development around the world," Danny Lange, Unity's vice president of AI and machine learning, told The Verge.

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 25, 2019 -- Guavus, a Thales company and pioneer in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based analytics, announced today that it has acquired SQLstream, a real-time streaming analytics company based in San Francisco, CA. The acquisition enables Guavus to expand its offering, providing communications service providers (CSPs) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) customers access – at the network edge – to real-time, cloud-enabled streaming analytics to address their growing big data needs. "With our integrated solutions, CSPs to IIoT customers will be able to take advantage of something that's radically different as we deliver AI-powered analytics from the network edge to the network core. With this solution, our customers can now analyze their operational, customer, and business data anywhere in the network in real time, without manual intervention, so they can make better decisions, provide smarter new services, and reduce their costs," said Guavus CEO, Faizel Lakhani. "In a world facing exponential growth in the volume of data coming from increasingly connected network devices and IIoT-based sensors, the inclusion of SQLstream's industry-leading technology opens up huge new opportunities for our customers and our partners. Their disruptive technology allows customers to interactively inspect and curate streaming data for analytics at the edge. We're excited to have the SQLstream team onboard," said Lakhani.

Back in 2002, movie director Steven Spielberg and automaker Lexus worked together to create a vehicle that predicted what cars might be like in the year 2054. That car, the Lexus CS 2054, was "driven" in Minority Report by actor Tom Cruise; driven in quote marks because the car actually drove itself. But while such vehicles weren't expected until the middle of this century, a research project undertaken by Leasing Options, a British vehicle-leasing company, says that Lexus CS 2054-like cars will be on the road by 2027. "Who would have thought that 2027, just eight short years away, could be the year we see the Lexus 2054 from Minority Report become commercially available," the company said in its news release last month. "That's a whole 27 years earlier than Spielberg had predicted, seeing as the film was set in 2054."

Investment in artificial intelligence: Porsche has invested in startup "Urgent.ly". The American company sees itself as the leading global platform for mobility and roadside assistance. The financing round amounted to 21 million U.S. dollars (18.5 million euros). Alongside "Porsche Ventures", other companies obtained shares in Urgent.ly, The U.S. startup's platform supports roadside assistance services in North America, Europe and Asia.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Dec. 17, 2018--Machine-learning research published in two related papers today in Nature Geosciences reports the detection of seismic signals accurately predicting the Cascadia fault's slow slippage, a type of failure observed to precede large earthquakes in other subduction zones. Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers applied machine learning to analyze Cascadia data and discovered the megathrust broadcasts a constant tremor, a fingerprint of the fault's displacement. More importantly, they found a direct parallel between the loudness of the fault's acoustic signal and its physical changes. Cascadia's groans, previously discounted as meaningless noise, foretold its fragility. "Cascadia's behavior was buried in the data. Until machine learning revealed precise patterns, we all discarded the continuous signal as noise, but it was full of rich information. We discovered a highly predictable sound pattern that indicates slippage and fault failure," said Los Alamos scientist Paul Johnson. "We also found a precise link between the fragility of the fault and the signal's strength, which can help us more accurately predict a megaquake."

Bing has been blocked in China, Microsoft has said. The outage makes the search engine the latest of a whole host of foreign technologies to be taken down by China's "great firewall", which controls what people can see from within the country. Bing was the only major foreign search engine available in the country. "We've confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps," the company said in a statement. It is the U.S. technology giant's second setback in China since November 2017 when its Skype internet phone call and messaging service was pulled from Apple and Android app stores.

Recent flight stoppages involving remote-controlled drones have highlighted the potential for self-flying vehicles to interfere with existing commercial aviation. The autonomous airborne vehicles under development generally take off and land like a small helicopter that could carry a handful of passengers. They would shuttle between predetermined sites, such as building rooftops. Boeing said its electric-powered concept demonstrator, designed to have a range of 50 miles, flew for the first time on Tuesday in Manassas, Va. The 30-foot-long, 28-foot-wide aircraft took off, hovered and landed, the company said.