Waabi, founded by AI pioneer and visionary Raquel Urtasun, today launched out of stealth to build the next generation of self-driving technology. Waabi's innovative approach unleashes the power of AI to'drive' safely in the real world, bringing the promise of self-driving closer to commercialization than ever before. Waabi also announced today a $83.5-million (USD) Series A financing with backing from best-in-class investors across the technology, logistics and the Canadian innovation ecosystem. The round, which is among the largest Series A rounds ever raised in Canada, was led by Khosla Ventures with additional participation from Uber, Radical Ventures, 8VC, OMERS Ventures, BDC Capital's Women in Technology Venture Fund (WIT), Aurora Innovation Inc., AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel, Sanja Fidler and others. AI and self-driving pioneer Raquel Urtasun is the founder and CEO of Waabi.

It is not the best of times for self-driving car startups. The past year has seen large tech companies acquire startups that were running out of cash and ride-hailing companies shutter costly self-driving car projects with no prospect of becoming production-ready anytime soon. Yet, in the midst of this downturn, Waabi, a Toronto-based self-driving car startup, has just come out of stealth with an insane amount of $83.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Uber, 8VC, Radical Ventures, OMERS Ventures, BDC, and Aurora Innovation. The company's financial backers also include Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Peter Abbeel, and Sanja Fidler, artificial intelligence scientists with great influence in the academia and applied AI community. What makes Waabi qualified for such support?

Bottom Line: Dexcom and Micron adopting a single AI platform for talent management that adapts to their specific HR strategies and provides new insights is delivering significant results. AI-based platforms provide new insights, intelligence and guidance to CHROs and HR leaders, helping them close the growing talent gaps their organizations face. By integrating hiring, internal mobility, diversity & inclusion, contingent workforces, training & development and performance management all on a single AI platform, HR leaders gain greater insights into closing talent gaps. And it's encouraging to see how AI platforms evaluate candidates on their capabilities while anonymizing factors that might lead to hiring bias. Interested in learning more about why AI platforms are gaining adoption, I recently attended a webinar co-hosted by Talent Tech Lab (TTL) and Eightfold.ai The webinar is titled An AI-First Approach to Recruiting with Eightfold and TTL.

Today, customers are at the heart of digitization. Smart companies are using artificial intelligence to better understand their customers, build engagement and offer a hyper-personalized experience. The smart speaker market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 48% between 2016 and 2020.[1] And our research of over 10,000 consumers shows that more than two-thirds of consumers (69%) consumers are satisfied with their AI-enabled interactions. As Figure 1 shows, the top three attributes they prize are: first, greater control; second, 24/7 availability; and third, faster resolution.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been "pretty stunning" but what the humanity is going to see soon will be even more profound across the spectrum, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has stressed. Addressing thousands of partners at the'Microsoft Inspire' event here on Wednesday, Nadella said that the potential is for us to be able to turn every industry into an AI-first industry, be it retail, healthcare or agriculture. "Microsoft has been working on fundamental AI breakthroughs for over 20 years and some of the advances, especially as measured by our ability to have human parity in a lot of these perception and language capabilities is pretty stunning. "It's happening because of the ability to provision lots of computing capability, to have lots of data, and these new techniques of algorithm promise around the deep neural net in particular," Nadella said. "For us to be able to turn every industry into an AI-first industry, whether it's retail or healthcare or agriculture, we want to be able to make sure that they can take their data, in a security-privacy preserving way, convert that into AI capability that they get the return on.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most powerful forces in the digital transformation. At Microsoft, we believe developers, data scientists and enterprises should have easy access to the power of AI so they can build systems that augment human ingenuity in unique and differentiated ways. Today, at Microsoft Build 2018, as we engage in conversations about digital transformation with over a million developers, customers and partners, I am pleased to share some of our latest and most exciting innovations in the Azure AI Platform. Cognitive Services are cloud hosted APIs for developers to easily add AI capabilities such as speech recognition, voice synthesis, vision, language understanding, translation, knowledge and Search. To date more than a million developers have already discovered and tried Cognitive Services, including the major auto insurance provider Progressive, British Telecom, Box.com, KPMG, and Big Fish Games.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is finally coming of age after many a false start. The days of runaway robots are still futuristic, but the time has come when the confluence of AI, Big Data and human domain knowledge is happening, with exceptional results. AI is being applied in multiple domains. IT operations is one such domain that is ripe for taking an AI-first approach. Today's hybrid cloud environments continue to undergo a massive transformation.