Automated camera systems have enabled scientists to quickly track traits of thousands of plants.

San Diego, Calif., November 14, 2019 -- From companies worth billions of dollars to startups employing a small number of people, UC San Diego engineering alumni are at the core of the robotics ecosystem here in San Diego County. This was clearly evident at the sixth annual robotics forum organized by the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute Nov. 7. The forum focused exclusively on local companies this year and was dubbed the San Diego Robotics Forum for the occasion. The goal was to showcase the breadth and depth of the region's robotics strengths, and solidify San Diego's reputation as Robot Beach. "We have an important mission here to showcase how strong San Diego is in the area of robotics," said Henrik Christensen, director of the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute.

A business that leverages virtual process analysis to accelerate digital transformation through imitation learning is one of three startups to win ISG Startup Challenges at events hosted this fall by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm. FortressIQ, the San Francisco-based startup that uses AI-based computer vision to "learn" business tasks as they occur in real time, won the ISG Startup Challenge at the inaugural ISG Agile Enterprise Summit October 28 in Boston. Beth Bourg, FortressIQ's marketing director, delivered the winning pitch to an independent panel of judges, and was chosen the winner in a live audience poll. "The first-ever ISG Agile Enterprise Summit explored the benefits of becoming an agile organization and building a culture of continuous improvement," said Karen Healy, partner and global leader, ISG Events. "We were thrilled to hear compelling pitches on emerging solutions that increase efficiency and agility in new and exciting ways. The audience choice, FortressIQ, offers an innovative, automated solution to discover and document processes that are ripe for automation, saving both time and money."

Everything you need to know about Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle and her new life as part of the British royal family. There's something about that "Markle sparkle" that has the world transfixed, seeing as Meghan Markle has now been named the world's "most powerful dresser" in a 2019 report from Lyst, a fashion search engine. It was a big year for the Duchess of Sussex, who stylishly seized the spotlight at dozens of public appearances and royal tours, and even when introducing the world to baby Archie -- and according to Lyst, shoppers took notice. There's something about that "Markle sparkle" that has the world transfixed, as Meghan Markle has been named the world's most powerful dresser of 2019. According to Lyst's annual Year in Fashion roundup, each of the Duchess' numerous fashion statements sparked a 216-percent average increase in search for similar items.

Eric Siegel, PhD, is the author of Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie or Die, Revised and Updated Edition (Wiley, January 2016), founder of the Predictive Analytics World conference series, executive editor of The Predictive Analytics Times, and a former computer science professor at Columbia University.

This is a global problem, yet one of the most striking examples is the case of Japan. From 800 until 1900 CE, Japan used a writing system called Kuzushiji, which was removed from the curriculum in 1900 when the elementary school education was reformed. Currently, the overwhelming majority of Japanese speakers cannot read texts which are more than 150 years old. The volume of these texts -- comprised of over three million books in storage but only readable by a handful of specially-trained scholars -- is staggering. One library alone has digitized 20 million pages from such documents.

Listen to today's podcast featuring CTO, Dr. Danny Rittman: "What Epsilon will have that all of these guys will not have ... Epsilon will have Avant! in it," Rittman said in a recent interview with Investorideas.com. "It will do something very simple that currently no other programs do. Avant! will equip Epsilon with a phenomenon that we call'an attention to details'. The neural network will actually pay attention as the design is going forward. GBT announced its intention to implement its Avant! "We identified the EDA field, a modern domain used to design integrated circuits (ICs), that we believe can significantly benefit from our AI technology.

The time frame for this idea is 2 decades-plus. You will get out of the box thinking from me sometimes but it comes with a connecting thread running it -- which you will profit from. The thread here will run for decades. I'm going to talk about The Future, The Fear of it and Fixing those Fears. We have worries about the future. I'm talking about how to survive the big unknown about the future: Change and its impact on our lives -- jobs, health, safety and family. There's a joke from a startup guy who said, "I sleep like a baby, I wake up crying and needing to poop every couple of hours." On the spectrum of humans worrying, there's people like Buddha on one end, who does great - living his best life in the present. Not me, (I might be in danger of looking like the Buddha with my diet.)

AI and machine learning algorithms require data. But the bulk of that data is of no use if it isn't first labeled by human annotators. This predicament has given rise to a cottage industry of startups, including Scale AI, which recently raised $100 million for its extensive suite of data labeling services. That's not to mention Mighty AI, Hive, Appen, and Alegion, which together occupy a data annotation tools segment that's anticipated to be worth $1.6 billion by 2025. CloudFactory is yet another vying for attention.

Light behaves differently in water than it does on the surface -- and that behavior creates the blur or green tint common in underwater photographs as well as the haze that blocks out vital details. But thanks to research from an oceanographer and engineer and a new artificial intelligence program called Sea-Thru, that haze and those occluded colors could soon disappear. Besides putting a downer on the photos from that snorkeling trip, the inability to get an accurately colored photo underwater hinders scientific research at a time when concern for coral and ocean health is growing. That's why oceanographer and engineer Derya Akkaynak, along with Tali Treibitz and the University of Haifa, devoted their research to developing an artificial intelligence that can create scientifically accurate colors while removing the haze in underwater photos. As Akkaynak points out in her research, imaging A.I. has exploded in recent years.