When Japanese mobile phone company SoftBank offered 1000 of its emotionally intelligent Pepper robots for the consumer market last summer, the entire run sold out in under a minute. At CES this year, SoftBank announced that IBM would be bringing Watson's artificial intelligence to Pepper, a bid to ready the robot for broad adoption in the home. Now SoftBank is planning to branch into the U.S. At Google IO today, the company announced that it's opening up a new developer portal and adding SDK Android Studio to enable the development of custom applications for Pepper, continuing to evolve it's capabilities ahead of its U.S. launch, which it's planning later this year. "We'll also be announcing the opening of SoftBank's U.S. office, headquartered in San Francisco, which will be driving the efforts surrounding the launch of Pepper in the U.S.," a company spokesman told me. Today's announcement came along with a demonstration of Pepper's functionality and features for developers.

Intensix raises $8.3M for machine-learning tech to head off ICU complications Intensix, which is harnessing machine learning in the ICU, reeled in an $8.3 million Series A. The funds are pegged for the expansion of its sales and marketing ops in North America as well as further development of its predictive analytics platform. The Intensix platform applies machine learning to the early detection of life-threatening complications in intensive care. A proliferation of structured and unstructured ICU data--from vital signs to historical and demographic data--goes into the system, is run through a set of models and results in predictions, CEO Gal Salomon said. ICU staff and management could use these predictions to head off deterioration before it happens. Studies have shown that the tech could potentially save lives, reduce the length of hospital stays and lower costs, the company said in a statement.

Ford Motor Co. says it's investing $1 billion over the next five years in a Pittsburgh startup called Argo AI to develop the virtual-driver system for Ford's autonomous vehicles. Argo AI was founded only a few weeks ago by CEO Bryan Salesky, who directed hardware development for Google's self-driving cars; and chief operating officer Peter Rander, who led Uber's program to develop self-driving cars. Salesky and Rander, as well as other Argo AI executives, have worked on robotics and AI at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which helps explain the placement of the startup's headquarters. The technology coming out of the collaboration could be licensed to other companies, Ford President and CEO Mark Fields said today in a statement announcing the deal. "We believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford's leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future," Fields said.

Ford is investing $1bn (£801m) over the next five years in tech startup Argo AI to help the Detroit company achieve its goal to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle by 2021, the companies announced on Friday. Pittsburgh-based Argo AI was founded last year by Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander who previously worked at Google and Uber respectively on the companies' self-driving vehicle initiatives. "We've made significant progress and are on track to achieve our goal," Ford president and CEO Mark Fields wrote in a Medium post. "At the same time, we know rapidly evolving technologies and fierce competition require us to remain flexible and open to new ways of strengthening our team." In August last year, Ford announced plans to sell fully autonomous self-driving cars, without steering wheels, for urban ride-sharing fleets by 2021.

Ford Motor Co. is investing $1 billion in a months-old startup founded by two pioneers in the nascent autonomous vehicle sector. The Pittsburgh-based artificial intelligence company Argo AI will develop the brains -- specifically, a virtual driver system -- for the fully autonomous vehicles Ford has promised to bring to market in 2021. Founders Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander are former leaders of the self-driving car teams at Uber Technologies Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. "This is a unique partnership," Mark Fields, Ford's chief executive officer, said in an interview. "A lot of tech companies are looking for customers and a lot of OEMs are looking for technology partners. We are getting expertise, and Argo AI is getting a customer in Ford."

Seemingly out of the blue, Ford announced today that it's investing $1 billion in Argo AI, a Pittsburgh-based company building self-driving technology. Ford is effectively buying the previously unknown startup, which was founded by engineers from Google and Uber. Argo AI will operate as an independent subsidiary and will focus on developing a software platform for Ford's self-driving car, which the company is targeting for 2021. Notably, Ford is also planning to license the technology out to other companies. While the extent of the deal is surprising, it makes sense for Ford, especially after GM acquired the self-driving car startup Cruise for over $1 billion last year.

Ford Motor Co. plans to invest $1 billion US over the next five years in tech startup Argo AI to help the Detroit automaker reach its goal of producing a self-driving vehicle for commercial ride sharing fleets by 2021, the companies announced on Friday. The investment in Pittsburg-based Argo AI, founded by former executives on self-driving teams at Google and Uber, will make Ford the company's largest shareholder. Ford chief executive officer Mark Fields said the investment is in line with previous announcements on planned capital expenditures. Argo AI, which focuses on artificial intelligence and robotics, will help build what Ford calls its "virtual driver system" at the heart of the fully autonomous car Ford said last year it would develop by 2021. "With Argo AI's agility and Ford's scale we're combining the benefits of a technology start up with the experience and discipline we have at Ford," Fields said at a press conference.

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 7, 2017) - SentinelOne, the company transforming endpoint security by delivering real-time protection powered by machine learning and dynamic behavior analysis, today announced the Deep File Inspection (DFI) engine, a significant new feature to its next-generation endpoint protection platform. The DFI engine identifies and prevents the execution of advanced threats and performs powerful, on-access static analysis to uncover and block file-based malware prior to execution and without any dependence on signatures. With DFI, SentinelOne Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) becomes the only next-generation endpoint protection offering to seamlessly pair advanced static prevention with dynamic behavior-based detection within a single platform. Built with the same advanced machine learning technology that drives the company's award-winning behavior-based detection capabilities, the DFI engine earned SentinelOne EPP top scores across several validation test reports from AV Comparatives and AV-TEST, making it the first certified AV replacement for MacOS. "Legacy antivirus is simply no match for today's sophisticated file-based malware, which proliferates much faster than new signatures can be created," said Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne.

The artificial intelligence market is expected to grow to USD $16.06 Billion by 2022. The McKinsey Global Institute says, "Recent advances in machine learning can be used to solve a tremendous variety of problems--and deep learning is pushing the boundaries even further." One such company set to take advantage of this emerging market is ASX-listed BrainChip Holdings (ASX:BRN) which is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California. They have developed a Spiking Neuron Adaptive Processor (SNAP) that essentially mimics the human brain: autonomous and unsupervised learning, evolves and associates information. According to CEO Louis DiNardo, SNAP has many applications, which includes surveillance, casino operations, and even investing.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich promised $7 billion today to resume construction of a chip factory near Phoenix that could one day employ 3,000 people. But he didn't make the announcement at the job site or on stage during a Silicon Valley keynote. Instead, Krzanich stood in the Oval Office holding a sheet of microchips next to President Trump. The photo-op played into Trump's #AmericaFirst promise of more US manufacturing jobs, and the president didn't waste time exploiting the PR moment. But everything was not as it looked.