This is the TalentSeer AI News Roundup for the first half of January 2020. You can find the most relevant and recent news about the AI talent, aimed specifically at tech leaders, VCs, and members of the AI field. Subscribe here to receive these roundups twice a month via email.
Zume, a robotics startup specializing in pizza-making hardware, has announced that it will be downsizing its company by removing approximately 400 employees, with the aim of raising more money; the layoffs are expected to affect many of its engineering employees. This follows after a stream of executive members chose to leave starting around June 2019, include beverage industry executive, and member of the Board of Directors, David Kamenetzky who left in December 2019. In November 2018, Zume’s parent company successfully managed to raise $375 million from the investment and banking corporation, SoftBank. [Read More]
Stats Perform, a sporting data company that uses AI to provide its insights, has announced that Aaron Symanski will be joining their team as Vice President of Engineering, along with Goodman Gu as Vice President of AI. Both hires are highly experienced, with Symanski previously working as a Governing Board Member for Linux Foundation Hyperledger, and Gu previously working as the Director of Mobile Commerce at Dell, as well as Head of Machine Learning and AI at Cogito. These new hires are expected to reinforce Stats Perform’s AI and technology tools and allow it to perform richer data analytics. [Read More]
MusashiAI, a joint venture by Honda affiliate company Musashi Seimitsu, and SixAI, have launched two fully autonomous robots that are designed to integrate within human-focused industries and environments, such as factories. The AI-powered robots will be used to undergo several repetitive tasks usually performed by humans such as quality control inspection checks, where they have been found to have a higher accuracy rate than most people. These two robots are described as “genuinely autonomous”, rather than simply automated, as they have higher freedom to determine how the tasks they are set should be completed. MusashiAI is allowing companies to hire these robots on a pricing structure of either pay per hour or per task, offering flexibility to other businesses. [Read More]
Multiple high-profile AI leaders have shared their predictions for what 2020 will bring within the industry. Google AI Chief, Jeff Dean, expects more of a focus on multimodal learning, which allows AI to build its knowledge from several types of media, as well as multitask learning, where one network is designed to handle more than one objective. Anima Anandkumar, Machine Learning Research Director at Nvidia, predicts that there will be progress within iterative algorithms, which execute their functions in sequences, along with self-training models, which use unlabeled data. Overall, many AI leaders said they expected to see some significant improvements to natural language models, and more energy and resources allocated towards ethical challenges such as those surrounding biometric data. [Read More]
This is a curated list of books specifically focusing on AI trends, leadership, and culture building. Among the list of books is “Superhuman Innovation”, written by creative technologist Chris Duffey, and co-authored by AI, about AI. It provides a practical guide on the various ways that AI and Machine Learning will change the world of work. The book was named as the 2020 CES Top Tech Book of the year [View More]
Samsung to promote new research lead, MongoDB appoints new CTO, Healx appoints new CTO, COVID-19 causes loss of jobs for tech startups globally, Whip Media Group Announces MediaLink CEO to join Board of Directors.
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C-suite executives are leading AI projects; Ex-LinkedIn VP joins Databricks; UK-based tech firm Signal AI hires former UN-IPCC comm strategist; Ex-Google SVP founds search engine startup; tech industry voiced concerns about Trump’s Executive Order suspending H-1B visas.
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New startup layoffs have dropped since COVID-19; Jim Keller resigned from Intel; YC CEO is named on Reddit Board; Velchamy Sankarlingam joins Zoom; Former Verizon & Hulu Executive is appointed as CTO in WarnerMedia; and more
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