This week, TechCrunch is turning its spotlight on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with interviews, profiles, and an event featuring the outgoing mayor, CMU's President, and local startups. The Rust Belt city has spent much of the past decade working to shed the image that arrived in the wake of the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 80s. Courtesy of world class universities like Carnegie Melon and the University of Pittsburgh, the Steel City has transformed itself into a vibrant startup ecosystem and a world class environment for robotics, AI, autonomous driving and other high-tech companies. Ahead of tomorrow's event, TechCrunch spoke to Bill Peduto, who has served as Pittsburgh's Mayor since 2014, a role that has involved overseeing much of that transformation. The Mayor spoke on his efforts over the past half-dozen years, which will culminate in January when he leaves office.

At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Australian transport agency Transport for New South Wales (NSW) had to restore public confidence in the state's transportation network and curb the spread of the disease. One of the ways it did that was to analyse the travel history recorded by Opal transit cards – with an individual's permission – and inform the commuter if the regular buses and train services that they had been taking were Covid-safe. Chris Bennetts, executive director for digital product delivery at Transport for NSW, said those insights were derived using a machine learning model that predicts how full a bus or train carriage was going to be at a given time. Based on the predictions, commuters would be advised if they could continue using their regular services or switch to a different service or mode of transport. "That was interesting for us because it was our first foray into personalisation to offer more choices for customers," said Bennetts.

In 2017, China laid out a three-step roadmap to become the world leader in AI by 2030. It hopes to make the industry worth 1 trillion yuan, or $147.7 billion, within the next decade. Already, it has announced billions in funding for innovative startups and launched programmes to entice researchers. It might not be long before it gains an edge over the US. That said, the US continues to pave the way, as is the case with many new fields of technology. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing the American AI Initiative, which orders funds, programmes and data to be directed towards the research and commercialisation of AI.

The Times of India spoke to Kathy Bloomgarden, Global CEO of Ruder Finn, on the role of emerging technologies, its impact and challenges for global industries and businesses. Q: What brings you to India? A: India has fantastic potential and I think more and more people are beginning to realize this. Even though you see some slow down and people are concerned about it, it's still amongst the fastest growing economies in the world. With the focus being on digitisation means you will be increasing your ability to be productive, to go into new areas, to bring new innovations globally.

Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. It is powered by Google for Entrepreneurs. We host monthly events in 400 cities and 120 countries featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share personal stories and lessons learned on the road to building great companies. Startup Grind is a connected online and offline network of vibrant startup communities to help fuel innovation, economic growth and prosperity at the local level. While Startup Grind was founded in Palo Alto, California, our extended network of Startup Grind chapters are located around the world.

The annual C2 Montreal conference every May is widely considered to be the benchmark for corporate event design in North America, but it's actually much more than that. Inside Montreal's sprawling Arsenal contemporary art gallery this year, as reported last week in Skift, the show floor was filled with dozens of creative activations, such as networking experiences in trapeze chairs suspended from the ceiling. In a high point for the event, attendees booked more than 3,000 face-to-face meetings with each other to discuss topics of common interest via E-180's Braindate platform. Outside, a pop-up big top circus tent with 360-degree ceiling projection hosted the keynote sessions. Surrounding the tent, stacks of brightly painted shipping containers served as outdoor corporate VIP suites overlooking the dock and restaurant floating on a channel connected to the St. Lawrence River.

For the past decade, New York has worked to overtake the Bay Area as the US's #1 startup hub. New York startups have doubled their relative share of dollar volume invested into new tech companies nationwide since 2006 (source: Mattermark), and are now potentially staring down the opportunity to carve out a larger slice of that pie. Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence will enable tasks that were once thought impossible for a computer to accomplish. In the way that mobile made Uber (via GPS chips) and Snapchat (via front-facing cameras) possible, AI is believed to be the technology that will set off the next wave of massively successful start ups. The most interesting thing to see over the next few years is how New York's startup community will weather the hype surrounding artificial intelligence.

When the two students decided to start a company, they knew that they wanted it to be big -- really big. "The sky is the limit," says Ennslen today, seven years later. And there's still room to grow. They recently moved their company, Synapticon, and its 45 employees to new headquarters in a nondescript building in Schönaich outside Stuttgart. There, they develop intelligent control systems for robots.

This is the first instalment of Generation AI, a regular column that will explore innovations being made in the vast area of artificial intelligence, in which Canada is a top global player. It was a big news item for the startup community when Microsoft announced last week the acquisition of Maluuba – a Montreal-based deep learning research lab for natural language understanding, and the doubling of its AI campus there. But the reality is, an acquisition by a major player is quickly becoming old news in the artificial intelligence (AI) world (a term that is also applied to the disciplines of deep learning and machine learning). Maluuba was founded in 2011 by Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman after they graduated from University of Waterloo. "We went through a number of accelerator programs including Velocity and Communitech when we started," Pasupalak says.

Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. It is powered by Google for Entrepreneurs. We host monthly events in 150 cities and 65 countries featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share personal stories and lessons learned on the road to building great companies. Startup Grind is a connected online and offline network of vibrant startup communities to help fuel innovation, economic growth and prosperity at the local level. While Startup Grind was founded in Palo Alto, California, our extended network of Startup Grind chapters are located around the world.