BROOKLYN, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pienso, the leading machine learning platform for non-programmers, today announces the close of a $2.1 million seed round. Led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from SoftTech VC, Indicator Ventures, and E14 Fund, Pienso is focused on democratizing machine learning for domain experts who are non-programmers with no technical or data scientist experience. The funding allows the company to scale operations. "Investment by large enterprises in machine learning is rapidly accelerating as corporations spin up massive data lakes to garner insights into their business. However, it is costly, challenging to integrate and before now required data scientists on staff," said Vic Singh, general partner at Eniac.

Though the world could probably use a few more machine learning experts, there are a lot of non-programming specialists whose expertise could directly benefit ML models. That's the thinking behind the startup Pienso, an MIT spin-off that its founders hope can make the process of training machine learning models more accessible to non-technical people and allow companies to call on their existing expertise to better the insights they receive. "How can we embed a domain expert who doesn't necessarily have machine learning experience and capture their expertise and use it?" is the question CEO Birago Jones says that Pienso answers. The Brooklyn-based startup announced today that it has closed $2.1 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from SoftTech VC, Indicator Ventures and E14 Fund. The company is using this cash to grow the small team and start growing its customer base.

Big data for financial services specialist RavenPack is providing its algorithmic power to Credit Suisse to launch the Artificial Intelligence Sentiment (AIS) Index. The AIS Index tracks the performance of a US large-cap sector-rotation strategy, based on sentiment scoring extracted from news data by RavenPack's artificial intelligence algorithms. Armando Gonzalez, president and CEO, RavenPack, said there have been a few attempts from companies to create such indices but these have tended to be more like ETFs and other products. "To my knowledge, there hasn't been anything as high level or as prominent where there is an actual bank that is looking to deploy this type of index; there is definitely novelty in the grandeur of the application, where before it has only been tried mostly in the social media space and perhaps more from a marketing standpoint," said Gonzalez. Newsweek is hosting an AI and Data Science in Capital Markets conference in NYC, Dec. 6-7.

US auto retailer AutoNation Inc announced a multi-year partnership on Thursday to support Alphabet Inc's Waymo self-driving car unit, including vehicle maintenance and repairs as the company adds new brands into its fleet, sending its shares up 13 percent to a high for the year. That news was accompanied by a better-than expected third-quarter profit as AutoNation performed well despite the impact of hurricanes during the quarter. There is fierce competition between large automakers to bring self-driving cars to market first. Lauderdale, Florida-based AutoNation is the latest in a series of recent partnerships the self-driving unit has formed. Google has revealed the self driving minivans it hopes could revolutionize the way we travel.

See how self-driving cars prepare for the real world inside a private testing facility owned by Google's autonomous car company, Waymo. A Chrysler Pacifica hybrid outfitted with Waymo's suite of sensors and radar is displayed at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Google is partnering with AutoNation, the country's largest auto dealership chain, in its push to build a self-driving car. AutoNation said Thursday, Nov. 2, that its dealerships will provide maintenance and repairs for Waymo's self-driving fleet of Chrysler Pacifica vehicles. FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Google is partnering with AutoNation, the country's largest auto dealership chain, in its push to produce self-driving cars for wide use.

Google's spin-off company Waymo has hired AutoNation, America's largest auto retailer, to maintain and repair its fleeting of driverless vehicles around the country, AutoNation said in a press release. That represents a very positive step for Waymo toward its driverless car and possible ride-sharing launch. "AutoNation will help assure that Waymo vehicles are always in top condition as we bring fully self-driving cars to the public," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said. Once Waymo ditches drivers, its autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans can operate nearly constantly, day and night, so the cars will need to be mechanically perfect or the results could be catastrophic. "These vehicles need to be in service for hundreds of thousands of miles, much more than personal-use vehicles, to make them economically viable," said AutoNation CEO Michael J. Jackson.

Recently, the Moor Insights & Strategy (MI&S) team was on the road in New York City learning more about Dell Technologies strategy and vision for the Internet of Things (IoT). The event, called IQT, exhibited what the company is doing to make devices, networks, and infrastructure smarter. Dell Technologies is focusing on helping its customers to efficiently address the challenges of navigating the IoT marketplace. With that goal in mind, the company announced at the event a Pan- Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Division. The aim of this organization is to leverage the core strengths of the Dell Technologies family of companies ( Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream, and VMware) together with offerings from its partners and systems integrators, to deliver blueprints and reference architectures--while also providing a one-stop shop for customers seeking consulting and deployment. Arguably, the result is the first end-to-end, open IoT ecosystem in this highly fragmented marketplace.

CDB Technologies, LLC is pleased to announce that EveryPig (www.everypig.co), This new development will allow the farmers and veterinarians using the app to leverage data collection and machine learning models to identify illnesses and recommend potential remedies for the pigs under care. Over time, this technology will bring an unprecedented degree of insight to the pork industry regarding the care and health of pigs. Because the actual people who physically visit the pigs every day are the ones reporting, EveryPig's founder believes that the platform will be an ideal tool to provide fast recognition of domestic and foreign disease outbreaks, which could affect the multibillion-dollar pork export market. In the one year it has been in use, EveryPig has already grown to have 500 active users including many pork production and swine veterinary management companies representing over 1,000,000 pigs under care, without a focus on sales.

Google announced today that its virtual assistant will now support two new languages -- Spanish for users in the US, Mexico and Spain as well as Italian for those in Italy. These languages will be rolling out over the next few weeks, according to Google, and while initially they'll only be available for Android, the company says iPhone support will be released later this year. With these additions, Google Assistant now supports a total of eight languages -- including English, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese and Korean -- in 12 countries around the world. While that puts Google's virtual assistant in line with Microsoft's Cortana, which also supports eight languages, ahead of Amazon's Alexa, which only supports German and a few versions of English, and ahead of Samsung's Bixby, which supports just English and Korean, it's still well behind Apple's Siri. Apple's assistant currently supports 20 languages -- quite a few more than any of its counterparts.

Sony shares rose more than 11% on Wednesday to a nine-year-high. The new Aibo features improved artificial intelligence software and enhanced motors and sensors that help the robot better resemble a real dog. The company said each device will develop unique behavior patterns depending on owner interactions and can work with other internet-connected electronics. The Aibo will be released first in Japan and cost ¥198,000 (about $1,700). New owners will also need to pay about $25 a month for cloud services to provide their devices with remote updates for things like teaching the robot new tricks.