AskBrian, the startup specialized in applied artificial intelligence and provider of AI-based digital assistant Brian, announced the closing of its angel funding round. Experienced business angels Björn Kolbmüller and Paul Schwarzenholz (founders of Zenloop and Flaconi) led the investment round with the participation of private investors from leading management consultancies (Bain & Company, Oliver Wyman, EY, and Stern Stewart & Co.) along with several experienced entrepreneurs. The company, founded by management consultant Pavol Sikula (Stern Stewart & Co., Roland Berger), uses narrow AI technologies to build products that connect humans with state-of-the-art services and information via natural language. Multiple building blocks are orchestrated by the co-founder and CTO Matthias Ruppel (T-Systems) who brings his experience as a software architect and big data specialist. "We see large potential in this very innovative approach of connecting humans and knowledge. We are excited to help the experienced and dedicated founders to fulfill their ambitious mission," said Björn Kolbmüller.

When you hear Artificial Intelligence (AI) the first thing that comes to mind are robots; in particular, the Steven Spielberg movie titled A.I. where a robot child is built that can love and behave just like a real human. This idea appears to be closer to a dream than reality. Truth is, AI is more ubiquitous than we might think. It ranges from self-driving cars, movie recommendations on Netflix, e-mail spam detection to voice-controlled assistants such as Apple's SIRI. The fact is that AI is already present across many businesses and various industries, as is shown in the figure below.

The Amazon Summer Sale has kicked off with a great range of discounts on everything from laptops, tablets, smartwatches and headphones, placing the best tech at your fingertips for less. There are plenty of smart home gadget savings to take advantage of, with the Echo Dot (3rd generation) with clock now half price. And if you've been curious about smart lights, but don't know where to start, today you can score up to 43 per cent off Philips Hue Starter Kits. The Hue Starter Kits on sale all include three bulbs (screw, cap or spot) and the Philips Hue Bridge, which is an internet-connected central hub. It allows you to add up to 50 Philips Hue lights of your choice, is easy to install and enables full smart home control with the likes of Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit and Google Assistant.

Insurance is a serious and complex subject. When it comes to securing their lives, their health, and their finances from any possible eventuality, customers understandably want to leave no stone unturned. During the process of buying insurance, they require access to detailed information while evaluating multiple options, in order to make an informed decision. And they will also need constant post-purchase support when it comes to making inquiries about their policies or filing claims. Needless to say, insurance firms across the globe receive massive volumes of queries every day, from prospective customers looking to buy insurance, and existing customers looking for help.

FreshLime is building a next-generation customer engagement platform for locally-focused businesses. It is a multi-channel platform that gathers data from marketing, point of sale, and customer data, enabling merchants to develop and implement targeted marketing campaigns to increase customer spend and frequency. Rasa Technologies provides the standard infrastructure layer for developers to build, improve, and deploy better AI assistants. The Company offers an open-source machine learning tools for developers to create contextual text and voice-based chatbots and assistants. Rasa Technologies serves customers in the United States and Germany.

Apple recently acquired Inductiv Inc. Inductiv, a machine learning startup, is co-founded by Professor Ihab Francis Ilyas, University of Waterloo. It has other professor co-founders from the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University. Inductiv uses artificial intelligence to correct errors in data. Apple has so far acquired four companies in 2020– DarkSky, Voysis, Xnor.ai and NextVR. Inductiv is the 5th acquisition in 2020.

A common challenge for most current recommender systems is the cold-start problem. Due to the lack of user-item interactions, the fine-tuned recommender systems are unable to handle situations with new users or new items. Recently, some works introduce the meta-optimization idea into the recommendation scenarios, i.e. predicting the user preference by only a few of past interacted items. The core idea is learning a global sharing initialization parameter for all users and then learning the local parameters for each user separately. However, most meta-learning based recommendation approaches adopt model-agnostic meta-learning for parameter initialization, where the global sharing parameter may lead the model into local optima for some users. In this paper, we design two memory matrices that can store task-specific memories and feature-specific memories. Specifically, the feature-specific memories are used to guide the model with personalized parameter initialization, while the task-specific memories are used to guide the model fast predicting the user preference. And we adopt a meta-optimization approach for optimizing the proposed method. We test the model on two widely used recommendation datasets and consider four cold-start situations. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

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When will artificial intelligence really have'arrived'? For a long time, this was a question for philosophers and computer scientists, pondering over whether passing the Turing test truly indicates intelligence, or debating about how broad our definition of artificial intelligence should be. Over the last several years, however, this question has changed considerably: with the advent of consumer AI tools such as virtual assistants and the increasing availability of off-the-shelf solutions offering to bring the power of AI to business operations, the issue has become less philosophical, and much more pragmatic. Now, for business leaders, it is often a matter not of whether to respond to the arrival of AI, but of how to respond to the arrival of AI. The promise is, of course, huge.

Bottom Line: Knowledge-sharing networks have been improving supply chain collaboration for decades; it's time to enhance them with AI and extend them to resellers to revolutionize channel selling with more insights. Add to that the complexity of selling CPQ and product configurations through channels, and the value of using AI to improve knowledge sharing networks becomes a compelling business case. Automotive, consumer electronics, high tech, and industrial products manufacturers are combining IoT sensors, microcontrollers, and modular designs to sell channel-configurable smart vehicles and products. AI-based knowledge-sharing networks are crucial to the success of their next-generation products. Likewise, to sell to any of these manufacturers, suppliers need to be pursuing the same strategy.