Metanomic, a game economics and player analytics company, announced in September the launch of its player analytics platform Thunderstruck, using AI based on Bayesian inference and aiming to revolutionize game developers' use of behavioral data to improve retention and monetization. Metanomic is a software company founded in November 2021 by Theo Priestley, Bronwyn Williams and Evan Pappas. A comprehensive real-time economy-as-a-service platform for developers, it uses patented algorithms to easily deploy plug-and-play, interoperable and scalable game and creator economies ready for web3, metavers and play-and-earn games. The company has secured $2.9 million in pre-seed funding. On May 18, it announced the acquisition of Intoolab AI, a company specializing in Bayesian network-based artificial intelligence, to develop and improve data analysis in video games and on the Web3.

Created in 2013, the Stars of Europe awards recognize the coordinators of European collaborative research projects. On December 6, Sylvie Retailleau, Minister of Higher Education and Research, presented trophies to twelve winners at a ceremony at the Quai Branly Museum. Among them, Nicolas Mansard, CNRS researcher in robotics at LAAS-CNRS, holder of the ANITI chair " Artificial and natural movement", rewarded for the coordination of the MEMMO (memory of motion) project. Funded by the Horizon 2020 program over a four-year period, MEMMO (Memory of Motion) is a collaborative project initiated in 2018 that brought together a consortium of 10 European partners for a budget of €4 million: LAAS-CNRS (France), IDIAP (Switzerland), University of Edinburgh (UK), Max Planck Institute (Germany), Oxford University (UK), Trento University (IT), PAL-Robotics (Spain), Wandercraft (France), Airbus (France), Costain (UK) and APAJH (France). "I would like to thank the people who helped me coordinate this project. It is a project put together by a consortium of young researchers. It was a great pride for me to be chosen to coordinate this project. "We wanted to prove that it was possible to generate complex motions for arbitrary robots with arms and legs interacting in a dynamic environment in real time.

Leobotics, a start-up created at the beginning of 2021, a new powerful player in the robotics market, has the ambition to make robotics accessible to all, by participating in the development of a robotics culture, for the awakening, education & learning of the general public to robotics, through different innovative points. Leobotics proposes first of all the sale of robots, all categories included: educational robots for 7-18 years old and older children, service robots for the home, telecommunication robots for seniors in loss of autonomy, personal assistance robots for the disabled environment. They are also aimed at professionals through reception robots for companies, collaborative robots for small and medium-sized businesses, and new markets: table service robots, ocean cleaners, gardening robots, quadrupeds and humanoids! Associated with this, different services: discovery workshops, robotics initiations, events, team buildings, Qualiopi certified training, for all ages and on different programming languages – as well as professional turnkey solutions with a tailor-made accompaniment: identification of needs, definition of CDC, programming, installation and training, with a full availability and a guaranteed reactivity. Leobotics also offers a complete database referencing all existing entertainment, service and professional robots, a search engine and a comparison tool accessible online and free of charge (leobotics.fr), with more than 1,500 references in 2022, so that everyone can learn about robotics, be advised, compare technical data, a reference in terms of robotics.

Mathematics plays a prominent role in the developments brought about by artificial intelligence in recent years: we think in particular of machine learning, or computational neuroscience. Recently, two researchers have started what could be a revolution thanks to posits, which are nothing more or less than a different way of representing numbers. We have to consider a huge computing power to make revolutionary AI applications work. Do you know, for example, how many operations it took to train GPT-3, Open AI's most advanced language model? All at an estimated cost of $5 million.

Multiverse Computing, a leading developer of value-added quantum computing applications, and MILA, an artificial intelligence research institute specializing in deep learning, announced a new partnership on October 25 that will use quantum methods to advance AI and machine learning. The partnership will also focus on training new talent in the fields of advanced technologies, including quantum computing and machine learning. Founded by experts in quantum computing and finance in 2019, deeptech Multiverse Computing has fully owned subsidiaries in Toronto, Paris and Munich. Its expertise in quantum algorithms and quantum inspiration allows it to achieve optimal results with current quantum devices as well as high-performance classical computers. Its flagship product, the Singularity SaaS platform, enables professionals in all industries to leverage quantum computing with mainstream software tools.

Aqemia announced on October 19 that it had raised €30 million in a Series A financing round co-led by Eurazeo and Bpifrance via its Large Venture fund, with the participation of Elaia, its historical investor. The deeptech company, which specializes in the discovery of drug candidates, will be able to use this financing to develop its exclusive drug discovery platform and its portfolio of therapeutic assets, as well as to recruit. Maximilien Levesque, its co-founder, after post-doctorates in statistical physics and fluid mechanics at ENS Paris and the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, worked as a CNRS researcher at ENS. He developed a statistical algorithm inspired by quantum mechanics that could have applications in drug discovery and focused the work of his group on drug design. He joined forces with Emmanuelle Martiano, a strategy consulting engineer at the Boston Consulting Group who has worked for pharmaceutical and BtoB software companies, and the two of them created Aqemia in June 2019.

After announcing its first autonomous shuttle deployment in Portugal on Oct. 10, NAVYA reports a platoon demonstration of two Navya Autonom shuttles beginning Oct. 17 at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, a first for a U.S. airport. Navya, a French company specializing in the provision of autonomous mobility systems and related services, has made no secret of its ambition to become the reference player in Level 4 autonomous mobility systems for the transportation of passengers and goods. The Autonom Shuttle, its main development focus, is dedicated to passenger transport. More than 200 units have been sold in 25 countries as of December 31, 2021. It was recently tested in White Bear Lake, Minnoseta, and Inverness, Scotland.

OpenAI recently released Whisper, a 1.6 billion parameter AI model capable of transcribing and translating speech audio from 97 different languages, showing robust performance on a wide range of automated speech recognition (ASR) tasks. The model trained on 680,000 hours of audio data collected from the web was soon published as open source on GitHub. Whisper uses a transform-encoder-decoder architecture, the input audio is split into 30-second chunks, converted to a log-Mel spectrogram, and then passed through an encoder. Unlike most state-of-the-art ASR models, it has not been fitted to a specific data set, but instead has been trained using weak supervision on a large-scale noisy data set collected from the Internet. Although it did not beat the specialized LibriSpeech performance models, in zero-shot evaluations on a diverse dataset, Whisper proved to be more robust and made 50% fewer errors than those models.

The French defense procurement agency (DGA) has awarded Preligens a seven-year contract worth around €240 million. Named TORNADE (Traitement Optique et Radar par Neurones Artificiels via Détecteurs), it involves the acquisition of software licenses for AI solutions for processing and exploiting large amounts of data, and will benefit in particular the Ministry of Defence's joint intelligence function. Today, there is a huge amount of data coming from sensors, spy satellites, commercial satellites, drones or airplanes, and humans are struggling to process it quickly enough to enable authorities to make the right decisions quickly. The current geopolitical context shows how crucial it is for governments and military ministries to be reactive and the importance of satellite images. Preligens' AI image processing technology fully meets these needs.

Globally, there has been a significant increase in the number of people using prescription drugs for reasons other than why they were prescribed, sometimes combining them with other substances such as alcohol to sleep better or stimulants to perform better. A team of computer scientists and emergency physicians from Emory, Oregon, and Pennsylvania universities in the United States used AI to analyze drug misuse and the emotions users felt during times of use. The study, "Large-Scale Social Media Analysis Reveals Emotions Associated with Nonmedical Prescription Drug Use," was published in the journal Health Data Science. In 2021, more than 108,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses, a number that is up 20% from 2020, many of these deaths were caused by the ingestion of prescription drugs, often mixed with other substances. In France, more than 10,000 people die each year as a result of medication misuse.