A group of data, technology, digital services and other organizations on Tuesday launched the AI Global Marketplace. The marketplace is, in essence, an artificial intelligence app store. It will host more than 2,000 high-value AI assets focused on customer engagement and process intelligence problems for the banking, insurance, healthcare and digital commerce markets. The launch group includes CognitiveScale, HyperGiant, the IEEE, USAA, the Saxena Foundation, the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and the University of Texas at Austin. Software assets in the AI Global Marketplace will be based on the beta version of an open interface: the Cognitive Agent Modeling and Execution Language, or CAMEL.

Versium on Tuesday announced a partnership with LiveRamp, an Axiom company, to launch artificial intelligence-powered B2B audience segments,as part of a new business-to-business data management platform. The partnership will let companies perform online targeting of offline business professional data that often is housed within their own CRM systems. LiveRamp customers will get access to Versium's modeling engine to create custom audiences optimized for their likelihood of engagement. Versium will also offer unique business and consumer audiences built from its extensive LifeData Warehouse, which contains more than 1.5 trillion proprietary consumer and business professional behavioral data attributes, including social-graphic details, real-time event-based data, purchase interests, financial information, activities, skills and demographics. When those attributes are matched to an enterprise's internal data and used in Versium's machine learning models, clients improve customer acquisition, retention and cross-sell and upsell marketing activities, the company said.

As beneficial as artificial intelligence can be, it has its dark side, too. That dark side is the focus of a 100-page report a group of technology, academic and public interest organizations jointly released Tuesday. AI will be used by threat actors to expand the scale and efficiency of their attacks, the report predicts. They will employ it to compromise physical systems such as drones and driverless cars, and to broaden their privacy invasion and social manipulation capabilities. Novel attacks that take advantage of an improved capacity to analyze human behaviors, moods and beliefs on the basis of available data are to be expected, according to the researchers.

Oracle on Tuesday demonstrated artificial intelligence and machine learning advances in the Oracle Cloud Platform at Oracle CloudWorld in New York. Autonomous capabilities for application development, mobile and bots, integration, analytics, security and system management are scheduled for availability in the first half of this year. Oracle also demonstrated an Oracle Digital Assistant, which will provide centralized communications across CRM, ERP, HCM, custom applications and business intelligence data. The assistant will use AI to correlate data and automate user behavior. The Assistant's cross-application capability "is the differentiator," said Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Google on Wednesday released its Cloud AutoML Vision service in Alpha. It is the first in a planned series of Cloud AutoML services designed to help people with limited machine learning expertise build their own custom models using advanced techniques such as learning2learn and transfer learning. Learning2learn is a process for automating machine learning, while transfer learning "takes a fully trained model for a set of categories and retrains it from the existing weights for new classes," a Google Cloud spokesperson told the E-Commerce Times in a statement provided by company rep Danny McCrone. Cloud AutoML Vision makes it faster and easier to create custom ML models for image recognition. Its drag-and-drop interface lets users upload images, train and manage models, then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud.

Uber on Monday announced the acquisition of startup Geometric Intelligence, a move designed to increase its presence in the autonomous vehicle technology field. Geometric CEO Gary Marcus will become the chief of Uber's new artificial intelligence business. He will lead the newly formed Uber AI Labs, which will be dedicated to conducting research into artificial intelligence and machine learning for Uber, according to Jeff Holden, the company's chief product officer. The new AI lab initially will be staffed with the 15 employees from Geometric Intelligence, and additional hires are expected in the future. The firm grew out of a business incubator at NYU through a partnership between its Tandon School of Engineering and the New York City Data Future Labs.

Facebook on Wednesday introduced DeepText, an artificial intelligence-fueled text analytics engine. "Text is a prevalent form of communication on Facebook," wrote Facebook software engineers Ahmad Abdulkader, Aparna Lakshmiratan and Joy Zhang in a post describing its capabilities. "Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products," they continued, "whether we're surfacing more of the content that people want to see or filtering out undesirable content like spam." DeepText can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands posts per second, spanning more than 20 languages. The engine leverages several deep neural network architectures and can perform word-level and character-level based learning, noted Abdulkader, Lakshmiratan and Zhang.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise last week announced the public availability of its HPE Haven OnDemand Machine Learning as a Service. The Microsoft Azure cloud-based platform provides more than 60 APIs and services that deliver deep learning analytics on a variety of data, including text, audio, images, social Web and video. Launched in beta in 2014, HPE Haven OnDemand has more than 12,750 registered developers generating millions of API calls per week, the company said. Usage- and SLA-based pricing for enterprise-class delivery to support production deployment also are available. "We're bringing a unique solution to the market built on almost a decade of experience in advanced analytics and machine learning that has been proven," said Jeff Veis, VP of marketing for big data at HPE. "We have leveraged this experience into both the design and approach that we have adopted for Haven OnDemand," he told the E-Commerce Times.