In October 2019, an Amazon employee in Melbourne, Australia, bumped into another person while cycling on the road. As she was assuring that person that she would help, she realised he was deaf and mute and had no idea what she was saying. That awkward situation could have been avoided if assistive technology was on hand to facilitate communication between the two parties. Following the incident, a team led by Santanu Dutt, head of technology for Southeast Asia at Amazon Web Services, got down to work. Within 10 days or so, Dutt's team had built a machine learning model that was trained on sign languages.

Just when you thought you had the ultimate password to foil hackers, along come new cyberthreats that make you WannaCry. Meet the new cyberthreats, in many cases driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Fortunately, the new countermeasures are starting to deploy AI as well. "What we have seen in the last while is that passwords have kind of broken down. Weak passwords – that's what's behind a lot of the recent breaches we have seen," says Deepak Dutt, founder and chief executive officer of Zighra, a Toronto-based cybersecurity company.

This might be the easiest 2017 prediction to make: Artificial intelligence will continue to generate big headlines and command a considerable share of the corporate pocketbook as companies look to bolster their products and services with more automated decision making and human-like qualities. As we start the New Year, one of the big trends that nearly everybody in the big data analytics industry agrees on is that AI will continue to grow in scope and importance. In many ways, AI is picking up where big data is leaving off. Whereas people once associated machine learning with big data, they're now lumping that technology and its offshoot–deep learning–into the AI category. Whatever definition you use for AI, it's clear that the current phenomenon has legs.

The team: Dutt, who has a background in theoretical physics and has done software-development work at Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Intel, oversees an 11-person team that includes software developers, mathematicians, data-science experts and a psychologist. "What's nice about the Seattle area is there's a growing job force, and talent in educated people who are skilled at doing these kinds of things," Dutt said. Not quite robots: Artificial intelligence is a pretty broad term (and often misused, industry insiders say). When Dimensional execs say A.I., they don't mean a fully conversant robot that can also fold your laundry. Instead, they're building a software platform that provides off-the-shelf pattern recognition and analysis tools.

Today DimensionalMechanics, a company launching out of stealth to make artificial intelligence scalable in the enterprise, announced the close of an oversubscribed 4.7 million Series A round of financing and introduced NeoPulse, a flexible cloud-based platform that will enable users to solve enterprise challenges by incorporating the power of AI into existing systems. We believe DimensionalMechanics has huge potential to bring the power of AI to bear on real-world market challenges across a range of verticals," said Kent L. Johnson, long-time Seattle VC /angel investor and DimensionalMechanics lead investor and board member. "By expanding the utility of AI as an applied science platform, the company is developing a horizontal platform flexible enough to address diverse challenges, rather than one that works in silos. Enterprise users want to unlock AI as a centerpiece of decision-making and operations – and DimensionalMechanics is forging the key." The investment round is comprised of angel investors as well as full board and founder participation. The funding will allow DimensionalMechanics to accelerate platform development and expand its diverse team of AI experts, engineers, mathematicians, physicists and others. DimensionalMechanics is on track to release an MVP version of its core platform, NeoPulse, in the fourth quarter of 2016. Still in early stages of development, NeoPulse is an extensible cloud platform that will enable developers to build limitless applications. The agnostic platform will work across systems and devices, allowing users to integrate AI capabilities without restructuring existing software stacks and workflows. We are on our way toward achieving our goal of building a robust AI platform that will enable enterprise users to answer far more complex questions than existing databases or AI systems currently allow – to move past answering, 'What?' so that we can answer, 'Why?'" said Rajeev Dutt, the company's co-founder and CEO.

The investment round is comprised of angel investors as well as full board and founder participation. The funding will allow DimensionalMechanics to accelerate platform development and expand its diverse team of AI experts, engineers, mathematicians, physicists and others. DimensionalMechanics is on track to release an MVP version of its core platform, NeoPulse, in the fourth quarter of 2016. Still in early stages of development, NeoPulse is an extensible cloud platform that will enable developers to build limitless applications. The agnostic platform will work across systems and devices, allowing users to integrate AI capabilities without restructuring existing software stacks and workflows.