Coming off its best quarter ever, SoftBank is on the hunt for its next billion dollar IPO. Having funded 29 of the 657 unicorns in the world, according to CB Insights, the Japanese telecom giant has been on a shopping spree, looking for promising new AI startups to bet big on. At Collision's tech conference held online last month, I had a chance to talk with the CEOs of SoftBank's newest portfolio companies, Standard Cognition and Forward. Here's how the two San Francisco startups are leveraging artificial intelligence to help gain market dominance in the post-pandemic world. In 2017, a group of machine learning engineers at the SEC became obsessed with computers that could see better than humans and ditched their jobs to join Y Combinator to build the computer vision company of their dreams.

The ability to automate human sight is opening up massive opportunities for value creation across ... [ ] every sector of the economy. Computer vision is the most technologically mature field in modern artificial intelligence. This is about to translate into enormous commercial value creation. The deep learning revolution has its roots in computer vision. At the now-historic 2012 ImageNet competition, Geoff Hinton and team debuted a neural network--a novel architecture at the time--whose performance eclipsed all previous efforts at computer-based image recognition. The era of deep learning was born, with computer vision as its original use case.

The ability to automate human sight is opening up massive opportunities for value creation across ... [ ] every sector of the economy. Computer vision is the most technologically mature field in modern artificial intelligence. This is about to translate into enormous commercial value creation. The deep learning revolution has its roots in computer vision. At the now-historic 2012 ImageNet competition, Geoff Hinton and team debuted a neural network--a novel architecture at the time--whose performance eclipsed all previous efforts at computer-based image recognition. The era of deep learning was born, with computer vision as its original use case.

As technology improves, AI and ML applications are becoming increasingly pivotal for businesses to stay ahead of their competition. The time will soon come when a business that doesn't leverage AI in its decision making processes will find itself out in the cold. While AI holds a lot of potential, the technology is still nascent and prone to error. A big reason for this is the so-called "cold start" problem. ML algorithms rely on historical data being fed to them, so they can learn and get better and better at predicting future data patterns.

The simplest way to think about Artificial Intelligence is in the context of a human. It forms systems that work intelligently and independently. It can perform in complex environments, autonomously, and adapts to that environment by learning. From SIRI to self-driving cars, AI has taken the world by storm and has the potential to disrupt nearly every sector one can think of. AI has disrupted nearly every industry to boost efficiency in this competitive market. As part of our education program efforts, we prepared a list of 10 emerging companies in AI that in our judgement harnessing the true power of AI to make our lives easier and more efficient.

According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Research, waiting in the checkout line is the top complaint among U.S. grocery, mass-merchandise, and convenience store shoppers. Mega-retailer Amazon and a quartet of well-funded retail technology startups -- Zippin, Standard Cognition, Grabango and Trigo -- believe they have the solution to the problem: Checkout-free stores powered by various technologies that enable shoppers to walk into the store, grab what they want off the shelves and just walk out. Autonomous checkout, another term for checkout-free, is becoming one of the hottest areas of retail investment today. It comes as the convenience expectations of today's Amazon-shopping, Grubhub-ordering, Uber-hailing consumers are ever-increasing, and informing their in-real-life (IRL) shopping demands. Brands are responding in kind, delivering digital services aimed at automating mundane tasks -- in this case, the checkout process -- so much so that the result is meant to feel "automagical," according to trend forecasting firm TrendWatching. Checkout-free retail has the potential to make shopping even more convenient, retail technology consultant Richard Crone said at this summer's National Retail Federation's NRF Tech 2019 conference in San Francisco.

AI and ML are becoming an essential part of the engineering and data science everyday workflow. ML teams need new tools for data versioning, ML pipeline versioning, experiments metrics visualization and others. Do you have the tools to successfully version data and ML pipelines, visualize experiments, and more? Come and join us for a discussion on the best ML practices! In this talk, Dmitry Petrov will discuss: - The current practices of organizing ML projects using open-source tools like Git, MLflow, and DVC.org.

A checkout-free future might be closer than you think, thanks to startups like Standard Cognition. The San Francisco-based company, whose patented platform uses cameras and algorithms to keep tabs on customers as they peruse store shelves, nabbed $40 million in series A funding last November and a partnership with Paltac in Japan that will see its autonomous checkout solution deployed in 3,000 stores. On the heels of this success, it's secured $35 million in a series B round led by the EQT Ventures fund, with participation from existing investors Initialized Capital, CRV, and Y Combinator. The newfound capital brings Standard Cognition's total raised to date to more than $86 million at a post-money valuation of $535 million. That's more than double the company's valuation as of November 2018, notes CEO Jordan Fisher, and it'll enable Standard Cognition to "continue to focus on making its early customers in the U.S. and Japan successful" while expanding both its team and geographic footprint.

Cashierless checkout technologies today are delivered in two iterations. The first takes the form of a typical mobile self-checkout -- a shopper scans products with a mobile device as they browse the aisles, then pays for the transaction via a mobile app without having to fumble through their wallet for cash. Consumers are warming up to the concept, with 48% of U.S. consumers expressing the belief that scan-and-go technology would make shopping easier, and 43% saying they would rather try scan-and-go than wait in a checkout line, according to data from GPShopper. The more recent iteration of cashierless has been heavily publicized with the openings of the first 10 Amazon Go stores. Most of the major players within this space have combined AI- and computer vision-based technology with in-store sensors.

Standard Cognition helps retail stores stand up to Jeff Bezos' juggernaut. The $50 million-funded autonomous checkout startup is racing to equip bigger shops with scanless payment technology that lets customers walk out the door without ever stopping at a cashier. While Amazon Go opens its own 2,000 square foot boutiques, Standard Cognition is working on outfitting 20,000 square foot and larger drug stores and grocers. That led Standard Cognition to make its first acquisition, Explorer.ai. Why would an automated checkout company acquire a self-driving car startup?