ROSS Intelligence and Sedgwick LLP are pleased to announce their partnership. Sedgwick will bringing the power of ROSS Intelligence's advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to its Creditors' Rights and Bankruptcy group. "We are excited to be on the cutting edge of new technology to provide superior and more efficient service to our clients," said Mike Healy, Sedgwick Chair of the Firm. "Our firm's Creditors' Rights and Bankruptcy Practice is already using AI to enhance our legal research, making it faster to analyze complex legal issues and to discover relevant'connect-the-dots' information that otherwise might go unnoticed. This technology will allow us to best represent, protect and advance the interests of our clients."

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up SenseTime has completed a US$410 million series B round, in what the company calls the largest private financing rounds ever closed by an AI start-up globally. The company said it is now valued at over RMB10 billion (US$1.47 billion) in an announcement, revealing its valuation for the first time. It means another company has joined China Money Network's China Unicorn Ranking, which currently counts 108 unicorns in China with aggregate valuation of US$445.66 billion. The round includes two portions: a series B1 round, which was led by Chinese private equity firm CDH Investments, and a B2 round led by Chinese investment firm Sailing Capital. China Money Network previously reported that SenseTime raised US$120 million last December and US$60 million in April, both were part of the series B round.

Today, Toyota announced the launch of Toyota AI Ventures, a new venture capital subsidiary focused on startup tech companies working on artificial intelligence. The fund has received an initial $100 million from the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), an AI-, robotics- and autonomous car-focused initiative created in 2015. AI Ventures will direct its investments towards AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and data and cloud technology. Along with funding, it will also offer companies it invests in both mentorship and support at its Silicon Valley headquarters. "One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face is knowing if they're building the right product for the right market. We can help them navigate that uncertainty, and we're committed to doing so in a founder-friendly way because their success is our success," said TRI VP Jim Adler in a statement.

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to Bloomberg, "The Street is paved with gold, which presents a challenge to deploying the record $1.5 trillion in dry powder, or investable funds, private equity firms are holding globally." At The Alliance of M&A Advisors' Summer Conference, taking place July 19-21 at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, buyers and sellers in the private middle market will come together and make deals at this unprecedented time of change. A featured portion of this 19th annual M&A conference features Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) experts sharing their experience gained from research, consulting, and analysis of more that 20,000 deals offering game-changing tech innovations that will change how deal making is done forever. The Alliance is showcasing a new Center for Excellence platform hosted by Dr. Kiran Garimella with a special session moderating a discussion with leaders from global solution providers: D&B Hoovers and ansarada. Dr. Kiran Garimella, co-founder and columnist, is a former Global CIO and Chief Architect at GE, VP for Business Process Management at Software AG, and an expert in building Centers of Excellence.

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Exscientia, an innovative company at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery, is pleased to announce it has entered into a strategic drug discovery collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). During this collaboration, Exscientia will apply its AI enabled platform and combine this with the expertise of GSK, in order to discover novel and selective small molecules for up to 10 disease-related targets, nominated by GSK across multiple therapeutic areas. Exscientia will receive research payments from GSK to undertake new discovery programmes with nominated targets with the goal of delivering pre-clinical candidates. In addition to research funding, Exscientia is eligible to receive near-term lead and pre-clinical candidate milestones if all objectives are achieved. The total amount payable by GSK to Exscientia on achieving these milestones is £33 million, if all 10 projects are advanced.

Infor, a leading provider of beautiful business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, today announced Coleman(TM), an enterprise-grade, industry-specific AI platform for Infor CloudSuite(TM) applications. A pervasive platform that operates below an application's surface, Coleman mines data and uses powerful machine learning to improve processes such as inventory management, transportation routing, and predictive maintenance; Coleman also provides AI-driven recommendations and advice to enable users to make smarter business decisions more quickly. Coleman uses natural language processing and image recognition to chat, hear, talk, and recognize images to help people use technology more efficiently. Coleman develops a conversational relationship with the user which can be rendered in Infor Ming.le, a social collaboration platform, or a synthetic conversational user interface. User efficiency is increased as studies show humans are able to speak and hear 3-4 times as many words per minute as they can type.

With cybercrime projected to reap some $6 trillion in damages by 2021, and businesses likely to invest around $1 trillion over the next five years to try to mitigate that, we're seeing a rise of startups that are building innovating ways to combat malicious hackers. In the latest development, Darktrace -- a cybersecurity firm that uses machine learning to detect and stop attacks -- has raised $75 million, giving the startup a post-money valuation of $825 million, on the back of a strong business: the company said it has a total contract value of $200 million, 3,000 global customers and has grown 140 percent in the last year. The funding will be used to expand the company's business operations into more markets. Notably, Darktrace also separately (not in its funding release) announced today that it is now in a strategic partnership with Hong Kong-based CITIC Telecom CPC, a telecoms firm serving China and other parts of Asia, "to bring next-generation cyber defense to businesses across Asia Pacific." We're asking if CITIC, which owns the strategic partner, has also invested in Darktrace as part of this partnership.

While self driving cars, vans, helicopters and even tank are al under devopment, one concept has revealed a very different type of vehicle. Italian design company CAMAL has shown off a three-wheeled pod carriage - drawn by horses. The seven-meter (23-foot) long, 2.5 meter (8.2-foot) wide carriage is shaped like a pod and is held up by a chassis with side runner panels. While the company's press release doesn't mention anything about the pod's glass exterior, concept images reveal that it may be able to change color and appearance Two horses can pull the The VIVA model, but the vehicle can also run autonomously, on its electric motors alone. The vehicle has four seats and according to CAMAL's, it's similar in size to a limousine, with a'living room' like interior.

A new Google initiative was announced today that aims to improve how humans and AI interact. Called PAIR, or People AI Research initiative, its goal is to make sure AI technology is beneficial and empowering to everyone and it will focus on aspects like tools for AI developers and how to make sure AI systems are inclusive. "PAIR is devoted to advancing the research and design of people-centric AI systems. We're interested in the full spectrum of human interaction with machine intelligence, from supporting engineers to understanding everyday experiences with AI," said PAIR's website. The PAIR team will be led by Google Brain researchers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg and its 12 full-time staff members will also work with researchers outside of Google, such as Harvard University professor Brendan Meade and MIT professor Hal Abelson.