Apple published its first paper on AI last month and now the company is set to join five others in a newly-formed research group. The Partnership on AI announced today that Apple would become its sixth founding member, adding to a lineup that already touts Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft. The group was first formed last September as a means of supporting research, establishing ethical guidelines and promoting both transparency and privacy when it comes to AI studies. In today's announcement, the Partnership on AI explained that Apple has already been working with the group before it was made official last fall, but now the company is a full member alongside those other tech titans. Part of today's news was also that the group selected its board of trustees that will oversee the initiative.

WIRE)--Virtualitics, LLC, a data analytics in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) startup, today announced the launch of its new tool that combines powerful data visualization in VR/AR and artificial intelligence to provide insights and discover actionable knowledge hidden in big and complex data. The company also announced they closed a $3 million investment seed round from angel investors. Virtualitics combines VR/AR with machine learning and natural language in a data exploration, collaborative environment suitable for both data scientists and non-expert users. The technology is the only one of its kind that can provide a simultaneous rendering of up to 10 dimensions, revealing multidimensional relationships present in the data, which may not be discoverable in any other way. The company is based on over a decade of research at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and was founded by: professor George Djorgovski, the founding director of Caltech's Center for Data-Driven Discovery; Michael Amori, former Deutsche Bank managing director, Harvard MBA and Caltech alumnus; Dr. Ciro Donalek, computational scientist at Caltech; and Dr. Scott Davidoff, manager of the Human Interfaces Group at NASA's JPL.

Their machine-learning platform predicted a trio of reagents that was able to generate a never-before-seen cancer-like phenotype in tadpoles. The research, reported in Scientific Reports on January 27, shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can help human researchers in fields such as oncology and regenerative medicine control complex biological systems to reach new and previously unachievable outcomes. The researchers had previously shown that pigment cells (melanocytes) in developing frogs could be converted to a cancer-like, metastatic form by disrupting their normal bioelectric and serotonergic signaling and had used AI to reverse-engineer a model that explained this complex process. However, during these extensive experiments, the biologists observed something remarkable: All the melanocytes in a single frog larva either converted to the cancer-like form or remained completely normal. Conversion of only some of the pigment cells in a single tadpole was never seen; how, the researchers asked, could such an all-or-none coordination of cells across the tadpole body be explained and controlled?

WorkFusion, the leading provider of intelligent automation, has closed a $35 million Series D financing round led by Georgian Partners with participation from existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, iNovia, Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), Greycroft and RTP Ventures, bringing total funds raised to $71 million. The funding will accelerate customer adoption of AI-powered automation as they realize the immense productivity gains from digitizing business processes. "We invested in WorkFusion not only because it aligns with our thesis that AI will transform business, but most importantly because the company has made machine learning practical and powerful for enterprise operations," said Justin LaFayette, Managing Partner at Georgian Partners. "WorkFusion has category leading products and a strong leadership aligned by a powerful vision of helping businesses drive rapid productivity improvements with AI." WorkFusion transforms operations through self-learning, process-level automation that eliminates up to 90% of manual back-office work and AI-powered chat bots that increase front office service center capacity by 5x. "IDC estimates the AI and cognitive systems market will grow from $8 billion in 2016 to over $47 billion in 2020 and businesses are looking to invest in the most innovative and comprehensive automation technologies on the market," said Max Yankelevich, WorkFusion CEO.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump's choice for labor secretary is CEO of a fast food empire that is outsourcing jobs, a stark contrast with Trump's scathing attacks on companies that send jobs overseas. A filing with the Department of Labor and Trump's criticism of outsourcing could be raised at Andrew Puzder's confirmation hearing, with Democrats questioning how well he can advocate for workers. Puzder's company, CKE Restaurants Inc., notified the government in August of 2010 that it was outsourcing its restaurant information technology division to the Philippines. Doing so, the agency found, "contributed importantly" to the layoffs of both CKE employees and those of an outside staffing firm at an Anaheim, California, facility. The agency's finding made workers eligible for federally funded benefits meant to dampen the impact of globalization on employees. "By outsourcing the function to a firm that employs hundreds of Help Desk specialists, CKE was able to improve the quality of service levels to their restaurants," the company said in a statement Wednesday to The Associated Press.

Announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, BelleFox (www.bellefox.ai) is poised to revolutionize how families interact in this constantly connected world. The BelleFox Wi-Fi router is a unique technology that delivers not only reliability and fast speeds, but a host of features to help parents see and understand their children's online behavior -- and even to learn more about who their children are as individuals. The system uses Big Data and AI (artificial intelligence) to deliver its powerful, useful insights. "Children today are online natives, which can be extremely stressful for parents," stated Lily Li, co-founder of BelleFox. "Until now, family Wi-Fi systems simply offered ways to limit children's time and access to specific sites.

MyPolly is the world's first product that introduces continuous conversation via natural language understanding. MyPolly, which is currently in closed beta testing for developers and bot builders, enables virtual assistants and bots to interpret a human's input, making MyPolly "smarter" over time. Jack Crawford, Founder and CEO of datalog.ai and Malaikannan Sankarasubbu, Founder and CTO, started the company last year to equip bots and virtual assistants to intelligently remember associations between words and things. For example, you might say to your virtual assistant, "My dog's name is Sebastian." Later in the dialogue, MyPolly would recall your dog's name.

Raspberry Pi will probably getting a taste of some advanced artificial intelligence tools from Google as Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the search giant is planning to make its "range of smart tools" available for the maker community this year. The machine learning technology from Google will enable makers from the Raspberry Pi community to make even more powerful projects than before, the company said in its official blog. Google has even asked makers to share ideas through a survey so that the company can meet smart tools for the makers. Thank you for taking the time to take our survey. We at Google are interested in creating smart tools for makers, and want to hear from you about what would be most helpful.

Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services, today announced that it has been awarded in the'Best in Show' category by TM Forum Live! Asia". TM Forum is a leading global industry association for digital business. The award was given for the'Cognitive Digital Agent' - a project championed by Globe Telecom, Philippines along with Infosys, Amdocs and Huawei. The project demonstrated the feasibility of using cognitive computing technologies aligned to telecom business processes to enhance customer experience in a more intuitive and natural fashion. To address changing consumer needs and demands in today's digital economy, Infosys, along with Huawei and Amdocs, established the Cognitive Digital Agent - a five-month project, led by Globe Telecom. This was aimed at creating the next generation of customer care services, leveraging artificial intelligence technologies. The core solution is driven by Infosys' expertise in natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive computing. The Cognitive Digital Agent has the capability to address complex queries and answer questions through omni-channel access including interactive voice responses (IVR), portals and wearables. The Cognitive Digital Agent creates a difference in situations where, if a call center is contacted, the responses are generated using natural language processing - making them more consumer friendly, or on social media platforms and in smart watches where the machine agent responds to queries 24x7. TM Forum recognized the project for some of these exceptional demonstrations of business outcomes across channels, and the inventive use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). "Our goal has been to explore the use of cognitive computing and artificial intelligence technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning to create the next generation of customer care services, which, in turn, enabled us to create this compelling project that can significantly improve customer satisfaction.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be understood as a science, engineering and deployment of machines, which perform tasks with intelligence as similar to humans. Since its inception 60 years ago, AI has observed significant growth in recent years. Initially, AI was considered as topic for academicians, though in recent years with development of various technologies, AI has turned into reality and is influencing many lives and businesses. Additionally, evolution of various other supplementary technologies such as cloud computing, machine learning and cognitive computing are collectively paving the growth of the market for AI. Many IT giants and start-ups are investing heavily in development of AI software solutions and hardware products. Some the prominent players in AI market in the recent times are Intel Corporation (U.S.), Google Inc. (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.), Amazon.com,