Qualcomm said Monday that it recently acquired the assets of Twenty Billion Neurons, a Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence/computer vision startup that develops avatars that can see and interact with people in a human-like way. The San Diego mobile technology company declined to say how much it paid for TwentyBN, which has locations in Berlin and Toronto. But it is likely a relatively small deal. Qualcomm said the company has under 20 employees. It raised about $10 million in venture capital from M12 -- Microsoft's venture capital fund-- and others since it was founded in 2015 by Chief Executive Roland Memisevic. Memisevic was the co-head of MILA, a well-respected AI research institute in Montreal.

"There is nothing more motivating than having'someone' around who acknowledges and remembers the hard work you are doing when you exercise," says Roland Memisevic, co-founder and CEO of TwentyBN." Our thesis is that an AI companion qualifies perfectly well as that'someone', as long as it is sufficiently aware of your behaviors and the environment you're in to convey a real physical presence in your space--and to give you that extra nudge when it senses you need it." Fitness Ally is based on TwentyBN's humanoid AI platform that lets AI assistants better understand user behavior using a consumer camera and microphone as the assistant's "eyes and ears." The AI platform is optimized to recognize the most subtle of motions and behavioral cues, using millions of videos that the company sourced with the help of its network of crowd workers around the world. TwentyBN's platform has previously been deployed in the automotive and retail industries, where it powered the world's first visually interactive sales assistant.

Twenty Billion Neurons (TwentyBN), is a leading provider of real-time, interactive computer vision and artificial intelligence solutions. It is an AI company with the mission of instilling common sense into computers through video understanding and of turning inanimate devices into human eyes that can understand the world around them, assist humans, and ensure a safe and healthy lifestyle. Founded in 2015, a company is building an artificial intelligence system that interacts with humans while "looking" at them. This enables the system to understand their behavior, surrounding and the full context of the engagement. This AI solution allows people to interact with technology and each other in new and exciting ways that will impact every aspect of their lives.

Robots are a staple of industry; the International Federation of Robotics predicts that 1.7 million of them will find a home in factory floors worldwide by 2020. In order to work safely and effectively alongside human employees, they have to be painstakingly taught rules accounting for every potential scenario they might encounter. Twenty Billion Neurons (TwentyBN), a three-year-old a startup with offices in Berlin and Canada, believes there's a better way. It today announced a $10 million funding round led by M12, Microsoft's venture fund, with participation from Coparion, Creative Edge, and MFV Partners. CEO and chief scientist Roland Memisevic said it'll use the new capital to scale its business.

Machines today can identify objects in images, but they are unable to fully decipher the most important aspect: what's actually happening in front of the camera. At TwentyBN, we have created the world's first AI technology that shows an awareness of its environment and of the actions occurring within it. Our system observes the world through live video and automatically interprets the unfolding visual scene. As with other technologies before it, deep learning has followed a series of step functions defined by sudden, often unexpected, outbreaks of capability. Each step function fundamentally pushed the envelope beyond what computers were previously able to achieve.

Video plays an increasingly important role in our lives. As consumers, we collectively spend hundreds of millions of hours every day watching and sharing videos on services like YouTube, Facebook or Snapchat. When we are not busy gobbling up video on social media, we produce more of it with our smartphones, GoPro cameras and (soon) AR goggles. As a growing fraction of the planet's population is documenting their lives in video format, we are transitioning from starring in our own magazine (the still image era) to starring in our own reality TV show. All that is arguably just the beginning.

While researchers have been working on AI for many decades, the technology is finally making the transition into the commercial world. Recent developments in AI are mainly driven by the convergence of powerful computing infrastructure, an explosion in data availability and the development of large-scale deep learning algorithms. The pace of innovation in AI is truly breathtaking. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, AI is catalyzing change at a ten times quicker rate than mechanization during the industrial revolution and at roughly 3,000 times the impact. It is therefore not unreasonable to hear industry experts call AI "the new electricity" (Andrew Ng) and machine learning "the most powerful advance in engineering since the Scientific Method" (Steve Jurvetson).

The four founders, two of whom have resigned their professorships to devote their full attention to TwentyBN, met each other during studies at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. Each of the founders has over 15 years of experience in machine learning and the relatively young deep learning discipline. Prof. Dr. Roland Memisevic, Chief Scientist, received his doctorate in Toronto, studying with Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founding fathers of deep learning. Prior to co-founding Twenty Billion Neurons, Memisevic was a member of the faculty at the renowned Machine Learning Institute of the University of Montréal led by Yoshua Bengio. The institute counts Google, Facebook, and IBM amongst its most active donors.