It has been a good week for artificial intelligence companies. This morning, Crunchbase News reported that Beautiful.AI, an AI-powered presentation software, raised an $11 million Series B to end frustration with PowerPoint. Similarly, Alloy announced today that it has closed a $12 Million Series A round for its AI-powered supply chain platform. This round brings its total known funding to $15.3 million, according to its press release. Alloy was co-founded by its CEO Joel Beal with the goal to help companies use data with insights about supply and demand to inform business decisions.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 15, 2018--, which, an artificial intelligence provider and legal research solution, has formed an internal Artificial Intelligence Taskforce consisting of attorney and staff representatives from various practice and industry groups throughout the firm to promote the use of new and disruptive technologies. A diverse group in terms of roles, practice groups and subject matter expertise, the taskforce is tasked with fostering the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and other innovative technologies in ways that complement the firm's strategic business plan. Working with attorneys and staff, the group will continue to establish the firm's short and long-term strategy and execution of the firm's artificial intelligence action plan, taking into account the latest developments in the legal industry and beyond. "Artificial intelligence is growing at a phenomenal speed, and we are proud to be early adopters," said Chief Digital Officer Victor Barkalov. "We are operating at a time when AI has a potential impact on almost every aspect of our business, and we realized quickly that we needed a diverse group to assess how to best implement machine learning throughout the firm, while ensuring we are keeping our clients' best interests in mind. The taskforce recently recommended and implemented Clocktimizer, a tool designed to review timekeeping data to bring predictability and transparency to legal project management and budgeting. "Clocktimizer uses natural language processing to read time card narratives and identify the tasks and activities to help our attorneys with matter management, budgeting and pricing.

Actor Robert Downey Jr. and his wife, producer Susan Downey, are making an artificial intelligence documentary series on YouTube, the company announced today. The series will have eight episodes that are each an hour long and it's set to air on the paid membership-based YouTube Red platform next year. The series is still untitled, but we do know that Robert Downey Jr. will host and narrate the series, which will feature scientists, philosophers, and other experts in AI. YouTube says the series will explore how AI transforms the way we work and live in the present and future. The series will be executive produced by the Downeys through their production company Team Downey.

WIRE)-- 8x8, Inc. (NYSE:EGHT), a leading provider of cloud phone, meeting, collaboration and contact center solutions, today announced the acquisition of MarianaIQ (MIQ), a high-growth Silicon Valley startup, as part of the strategic investments it has been making in AI and Machine Learning. MIQ brings deep learning capabilities to the newly announced X Series to transform both employee and customer experience. The MIQ team, including founders Soumyadeb Mitra and Venkat Nagaswamy, have been leaders in applying AI and deep learning to practical business problems since 2013, and join 8x8 to strengthen AI capabilities for enterprise communications. "8x8 has continuously evolved itself to provide best-in-class enterprise communications to our customers. With the acquisition of MarianaIQ, we are fundamentally transforming how customers and employees interact through one system of engagement, and how companies optimize valuable moments of customer engagement with one set of data in one system of intelligence," said Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer, 8x8.

WIRE)--Looker, a leading data platform company, today announced tools and integrations that optimize data science workflows. Looker accelerates the data science stack by removing the struggle to prepare data and freeing up time for data scientists to use their unique skill set to perform higher-value tasks. Looker already delivers reliable, governed data, at scale, for data scientists to input into their models and then present the insights in understandable and actionable dashboards and reports. Now, Looker has further improved this workflow with an SDK for R and connections for Python, as well as streamed and merged results, Google TensorFlow integrations, and clean, visual recommendations for users. Looker also continues to partner with best-of-breed data science vendors to provide more seamless workflow integration.

Tokyo, Japan and Princeton, NJ, U.S.A., May 15, 2018 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) announced today successful transmission tests that took place over a commercial subsea cable measuring more than 10,000 kilometers using artificial intelligence (AI) and probabilistic shaping at a modulation of 64QAM. NEC, in a joint research publication with Google, has demonstrated for the first time that the FASTER open subsea cable can be upgraded to a spectral efficiency of 6 bits per second per hertz (b/s/Hz) in an 11,000km segment. This represents a capacity of more than 26 terabits per second (Tb/s) in the C-band, which is over 2½ times the capacity originally planned for the cable, for no additional wet plant capital expenditure. In doing so, the authors set a spectral efficiency-distance product record of 66,102 b/s/Hz in a field trial performed together with live traffic neighboring channels. The team achieved this result using near-Shannon probabilistic-shaping at a modulation of 64QAM, and for the first time on a live cable, artificial intelligence (AI) was used to analyze data for the purpose of nonlinearity compensation (NLC).

Tesla Inc's chief executive officer told employees on Monday the company is undergoing a "thorough reorganization," as it contends with production problems, senior staff departures and two crashes last week involving its electric, self-driving cars. CEO Elon Musk said in an email it was "flattening the management structure to improve communication," combining functions and trimming activities "not vital to the success of our mission" in the reorganization. The company confirmed the note that was disclosed earlier by the Wall Street Journal. Tesla is at a critical juncture as it tries to fix production headaches that have slowed the rollout of its Model 3 sedan, a mid-market car seen as key to the company's success, and as it expands on other fronts. Tesla shares fell 1.3 percent to $297 on Monday.

J.P. Morgan announced that Dr. Manuela Veloso will be joining the Corporate & Investment Bank as the head of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research. Veloso is currently the head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, widely considered the preeminent institution in the field. J.P. Morgan has already started to apply machine learning technology across its businesses and functions, and this expanded effort will be aimed at identifying further opportunities. A.I. is among the areas of investment within the bank's annual technology budget of $10.8 billion, with more than half earmarked for new investments. Veloso was named a Carnegie Mellon University Professor in 2014, the highest academic accolade bestowed by the university, and holds the Herbert A. Simon Chair in computer science.

FRISCO, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Federos, the leading provider of next-generation, service management solutions for telecommunications service providers, managed service providers and enterprises, announced today the availability of an integrated module for its Assure1 solution that provides sophisticated event analytics and machine learning to help customers quickly and accurately pinpoint, analyze and resolve the root cause of service impacting events. Faster mean time to repair results in improved service quality and customer experience, and significant time and resource savings for operations teams. The event analytics module for Assure1 will be offered to customers as an add-on subscription solution. Today, when network and service problems happen, operations teams need to analyze millions of events and data transactions to understand where, when and why the problem occurred before they can fix it. Federos' Assure1 with Event Analytics eliminates and suppresses massive amounts of data noise that can distract operations and affect customer service.

The development of new Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is often subject to bias, and the resulting systems can be discriminatory, meaning more should be done by policymakers to ensure its development is democratic and socially responsible. This is according to Dr Barbara Ribeiro of Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at The University of Manchester, in On AI and Robotics: Developing policy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new policy report on the role of AI and Robotics in society, being published today. Dr Ribeiro adds because investment into AI will essentially be paid for by tax-payers in the long-term, policymakers need to make sure that the benefits of such technologies are fairly distributed throughout society. She says: "Ensuring social justice in AI development is essential. AI technologies rely on big data and the use of algorithms, which influence decision-making in public life and on matters such as social welfare, public safety and urban planning."