Inbenta, a San Mateo, CA-based enterprise-grade artificial intelligence solutions, raised 12m in Series B funding. The round was led by Level Equity, with participation from Amasia and Scale Capital through its Amérigo Chile fund. In conjunction with the funding, founder and partner George McCulloch and Amasia chairman Ramanan Raghavendran joined Inbenta's board of directors. The company intends to use the funds to expand sales and marketing, and to further drive product development for its technology. Founded in 2005 by Jordi Torras, CEO, Inbenta has developed natural language processing (NLP) technology that powers search, chatbots, and self-service solutions for customer support and e-commerce.

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence are revolutionizing cars, investing, defense, and manufacturing. The Global X Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Thematic ETF (BOTZ) invests in companies with high exposure to the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence theme.

Microsoft has chosen the 10 machine learning and data science companies that will make up the fourth class of its Seattle Accelerator. The startups hail from all over the U.S. and focus on a variety of industries. All are later stage companies, and Microsoft said they have a collective average of 5.3 million in funding and 3 million in annual recurring revenue. As part of the program, startups will have access to individualized coaching and work with Microsoft's Sales and Azure Machine Learning teams to scale their businesses.

Engineers from Caltech have developed a method that uses data from satellite and street-level images, such as the ones that you can see in Google maps, to create automatically an inventory of street trees that cities may use to better manage urban forests. Their work is described in the proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, which was held in Las Vegas this summer. "Cities have been surveying their tree populations for decades, but the process is very labor intensive. It usually involves hiring arborists to go out with GPS units to mark the location of each individual tree and identify its species," says senior author Pietro Perona, the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science. "For this reason, tree surveys are usually only done every 20 to 30 years, and a lot can change in that time."

Useful quantum computers are closer to becoming a reality as some of the world's biggest corporations try to bring the technology from the lab into the practical world. A quantum computer utilizes subatomic particles called qubits to speed up the solving of complex computations. Near-term expectations for quantum computers range from solving optimization problems to quantum-encrypted communications, and more. With the help of CB Insights' investment, acquisition, and partnership data, we identified 18 corporate groups involved in the development of commercialized quantum computing hardware and software. They are a diverse group of players, ranging from tech industry behemoths to defense contractors to national telecommunications companies.

Artificial Intelligence has come a long way from science fiction to providing innovative, and life-changing solutions in the real world. AI is a form of intelligence exhibited by machines, where machine learning methods teach machines how to perform tasks that humans either can't do or at which machines are more efficient and productive. AI never stands still and it has become a subject of ethical debates, including how to exploit AI but not harm the humanity but also how to treat an artificial intellect in terms of rights and freedoms? Machines we see today are already capable of performing full-time both industrial and non-industrial jobs, they can speak, learn, and even have sexual relationships with humans. These factors lead to questions of whether the time has come to institutionalize robots and give them rights and freedoms, because at the moment, the creation of conscious entity is not prevented by laws or physics.

In the future, you'll have personal relationships with the brands that surround you. What does that mean exactly? It means the massive shift from outbound marketing to highly personalized inbound marketing will reach its logical conclusion: brands will become personalities (think of the endearing droids in Star Wars), who can consolidate all of the objectives of content marketing into a simple 1:1 interaction between the customer and the brand. George Wiedemann of UMarketing.com, in his keynote address at the Integrated Marketing Virtual conference, provided a vivid picture of this 1:1 relationship. A user, when car shopping, can type in the make and model of a desired car and the mile radius around where the user lives.

Editor's note: Our 6th Annual Vator Splash LA conference is coming up on October 13 at the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica. Speakers include Mark Cuban (one of the hosts of Shark Tank and owner of the Dallas Mavericks); Brian Lee (Founder & CEO, Honest Company); Leura Fine (Founder & CEO, Laurel & Wolf); Nick Green (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Thrive Market); Tri Tran (CEO & Co-founder, Munchery); Adam Goldenberg (Founder & CEO, JustFab); Andre Haddad (CEO, Turo); Mike Jones (Founder, Science) and many more. Yesterday I ate lunch at Eatsa. If you've never been, imagine a fast food joint the size of a large bedroom. Instead of a line of cashiers with the kitchen behind them, you see a line of electronic kiosks with a grid of screens behind them. After sliding your credit card in the kiosk and selecting your quinoa bowl, you wait alongside several other humans, looking at their phones, waiting for their orders.

ARLINGTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) today announced additional programming for Innovate! Jointly produced by CTA and Tech.Co, the event's combined programming will feature event offerings from both organizers for an audience of industry influencers and innovative tech startups. "We are thrilled to bring Innovate! "Hosting our conference in Silicon Valley's backyard enables us to provide even more opportunities for startup founders from across the world to meet nationally recognized accelerators and investors, gain valuable knowledge and connect with resources that will help amplify their efforts to build a high-growth company," said Frank Gruber, CEO and Co-Founder Tech.Co. Registration is open for Innovate!

An Expert system solves problems that are normally solved by human experts. We believe that SERAPEUM is even better in the sense that the speed of responses is unmatched by a human being. An expert system consists of a knowledge base of the domain, in our case tax law that draws both from public databases or private, reasoning mechanisms to apply knowledge to problems that are proposed mechanisms to explain the users the reasoning used when providing a response and mechanisms of learning and acquiring new knowledge. SERAPEUM also provides references to information that is based (whether Judgments, Legislation and Consultations resolved by the Director General). To create a knowledge base is necessary to have at least one human expert's domain. In our case has been formed through questionnaires and experience accumulated over time of various professionals in tax law.