More than a century after introducing the Model T, Ford hopes to once again change how the masses move. The company announced this morning that it will have thousands of fully autonomous vehicles in urban car-sharing and ride-hailing fleets by 2021. To achieve that goal, the company will double, to 300, the number of people at its Silicon Valley research center and add 60 autonomous vehicles to the fleet of 30 already deployed there. Google, Nissan, and Mercedes-Benz see autonomous vehicles on the road by 2020, and Chinese tech giant Baidu says it will have the technology in 2019. But none of them has made promises as specific as those Fields made today.

CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA), the leading licensor of signal processing IP for smarter, connected devices, today announced that Novatek Microelectronics, Taiwan's 2nd largest fabless IC design house, has licensed and deployed the CEVA-XM4 intelligent vision DSP for its next-generation vision-enabled System-on-Chips (SoCs) targeting a range of end markets requiring advanced visual intelligence capabilities. Novatek's current camera SoC lineup for car DVR and surveillance systems integrates the 3rd generation CEVA-MM3101 imaging & vision DSP and is shipping in volume. By integrating CEVA-XM4 as a dedicated vision processor in their next-generation SoC designs, Novatek and its customers can rapidly deploy highly-sophisticated vision algorithms to enable advanced applications such as surveillance systems with face detection and authentication, drone anti-collision systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). These types of applications are built utilizing CEVA's Deep Neural Network (CDNN2), a proprietary software framework that enables deep learning tasks to run on the CEVA-XM4 and outperform any GPU or CPU-based system in terms of speed, power consumption and memory bandwidth requirements. "The CEVA-XM4 is an exceptional processor for imaging and computer vision, offering outstanding performance, flexibility and power efficiency for applications requiring visual intelligence capabilities," said Allen Lu, Assistant Vice President of iVoT SBU, Novatek.

Susa Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm, announced today that it has secured a 50 million fund, Susa Ventures II. This is just the second fund for the firm, which was founded three years ago and has so far backed 41 companies through its first fund of 25 million. With its new fund, Susa plans to back 12 companies per year at seed investments falling between 400,000 and 750,000 (roughly twice the check size compared to Fund I investments). Furthermore, the firm has wisened up about the way it invests. In Fund I, Susa adhered to a 1:1 ratio for follow-on funding.

SLOUGH, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global business outsourcing provider Arvato has entered a strategic partnership with Blue Prism to offer Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to help councils deliver back-office transformation. The partnership will see Arvato use the cutting-edge automation software to provide local authorities with an end-to-end solution of identifying, designing, building and monitoring automated processes, providing RPA-as-a-service and consultancy and training. Arvato will use the innovative technology to help current and future clients in local government automate transactional back office functions, such as revenues and benefits, HR, payroll and finance, increasing process speed and efficiency while freeing up employees to deliver front-line services. RPA uses software to create an agile, virtual workforce which mimics human processing of repetitive labour-intensive tasks. It follows rule-based business processes and interacts with systems in the same way that people do.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming the backbone of many software features and services we use everyday. Anytime you search for specific image in Google Photos or read through Facebook's (NASDAQ:FB) NewsFeed, you're using a form of AI software and algorithms. These are just small AI examples, but there are much larger artificial intelligence trends that are changing how we drive our cars, use energy, answer questions, and connect with others. The companies behind these AI trends are pushing the technology forward like never before, and they (and their investors) could see major benefits just around the corner. Driverless cars are coming, there's no debating that.

"By developing a sophisticated molecular builder, using state-of-the-art quantum chemistry and machine learning, in addition to drawing on the expertise of experimentalists, we discovered a large set of high-performing blue OLED materials," said Aspuru-Guzik, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, who led the research. "Following that validation, I am extremely excited to see this platform adopted for commercial development, utilizing its capabilities for the rapid screening of TADF materials." The algorithms dramatically reduce the computational cost of testing candidate molecules for new technologies. In addition to Kyulux's licensing of the software, three key researchers who developed the system in Aspuru-Guzik's research group and were co-authors on the Nature Materials publication have chosen to join Kyulux's computational chemistry group in Boston. Professor Aspuru-Guzik will also join the company as a part-time scientific advisor.

This week, Intel announced the acquisition of machine learning startups Nervana Systems for a rumored 400M. This move is intended to improve Intel's artificial intelligence(AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities in its next generation architecture. The acquisition follows the news of Apple's acquisition of Seattle-based AI startup Turi for about 200M. These series of M&A events are signaling that we are entering a time of consolidation in the AI and ML markets.

Anagog, the leading provider of mobility status services and solutions for mobile apps and Holaverse, a leading mobile app publisher with a portfolio of games and utility apps, announced today their collaboration to include Anagog's Mobility Status SDK in the entire Holaverse portfolio of apps. Omni Swipe, Holaverse's popular accessibility app with over 100 million Google Play downloads worldwide, is the first app to be integrated with Anagog's innovative machine-learning algorithms to provide context awareness and activity classification. Holaverse hopes such smart technology will provide better functionality, convenience, and experiences for its global userbase. "We are very happy to work with Anagog," said Collin Huang, Co-Founder at Holaverse. "We found their technology to be a diffenetiator when it comes to providing the right service to our users at the right time and in the right place."

Experienced machine learning developer, Hugh Perkins, author of the popular open source OpenCL libraries DeepCL and cltorch, is an avid user of the Nimbix cloud. Mr. Perkins chose to work with Nimbix in addressing machine learning due to the powerful platform API, industry-leading selection of GPUs, superior-performance and economics. "Nimbix is a breath of fresh air," said Mr. Perkins. "The per-second billing, spin up times of seconds, and the availability of high end GPUs, make Nimbix an awesome choice for machine learning developers." The Nimbix cloud platform is democratized and developer-friendly, allowing users to monetize their trained neural networks in the application marketplace.

The first UK Robotics Week took place from 27 June to 1 July, with events and activities around the country showcasing leading UK technology and engineering research in robotics and autonomous design. Co-ordinated by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems (UK-RAS) Network, and supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the week sees robotic research groups from around the world visiting the UK to demonstrate their latest technologies in surgical robotics, field robotics, autonomous driving and unmanned aerial vehicles, while other challenges are set to engage and inspire school, college and university students. On 29 June, the Academy hosted a panel discussion on robotic ethics. The event also featured a Pepper and a NAO robot, from London Design and Engineering UTC, which will be some of the first in the UK to be used in an educational setting. The panel discussion can be found on Twitter at @RAEngNews.