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Fintech firm Tipalti, which uses AI to automate payment workflows, has raised $150m and is now valued at over $2b. Its valuation was less than $500m last year. The U.S.-Israeli startup says it will use the fresh funding to hire 100 workers in Israel and expand its growth and global presence.
More:
- Tipalti uses AI and other technology to help businesses automate their payment processes more efficiently and quickly. It counts Twitter, Uber, and GoDaddy as among its clients.
- So far it's raised $280m from investors including 01 Advisors, the fund from former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter COO Adam Bain. The most recent late-stage round was led by Durable Capital Partners, with investments from Greenoaks Capital and participation from 01 Advisors.
- Tipalti CEO Chen Amit says the pandemic boosted interest in businesses wanting to automate payment processes as they shift more to remote work. Its transaction volume on its platform so far this year is $12b, an increase from 80% a year ago.
- Citigroup, Starbucks, and Paypal are among the companies adopting AI and ML to improve their payment processes.
VENTUREBEAT
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Nearly 60% of tenure-track AI faculty at four universities — Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto — have received financial support from big tech companies, according to a new study. Leading the study were Toronto AI grad student Mohamed Abdalla and his brother Moustafa Abdalla, who said that such funding shows how 14 prominent tech firms can potentially distort the academic landscape to suit their needs.
More:
- The Abdallas looked at the resumes of 35 AI-focused computer science faculty at the four universities. They weren't able to make a determination for 52 of the faculty.
- Of the remaining 83, 48 has received fellowships, grants, or other funding from Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Element AI, Facebook, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Samsung, and/or Uber.
- Mohamed Abdalla said there are "very few people" in AI-related academia who "don't have some sort of connection to Big Tech." He compared Big Tech to Big Tobacco, saying both use similar strategies to "sway and influence academic and public discourse."
- Google says the company policies bar staff from trying to influence academic work. UC Berkeley's Ben Recht says academics can generate ethically questionable work even without industry funding. “You can make a capitalist argument that it is good for companies to pursue ethical technology,” he noted.
WIRED
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Report: The gradual growth of autonomous vehicles
A new report predicts that more than half of all vehicles produced by 2024 will have some level of automation, ranging from Levels 1-5.
- The report forecasts that there will be 54.2 million vehicles with Level 1 autonomy in 2024, up from 31.4 million in 2019. This represents a compound growth rate of 11.5%.
- Level 0 cars, which are the most common now, will decline in favor of vehicles with greater autonomous functionality, the report says...
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Samsung's Kinam Kim will deliver opening remarks at its AI Forum 2020
Professors Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun are among the speakers at this year's Samsung AI Forum 2020, which will stream on YouTube November 2-3. Kinam Kim, Samsung's vice chairman and CEO of device solutions, will deliver the opening remarks on Day 1. Registration is now open for the event, which covers new research findings, insights, and more about the future of AI.
Day 1 Sessions:
- “Towards Discovering Causal Representations” by Prof. Yoshua Bengio, the University of Montreal
- “Self-Supervised Learning” by Prof. Yann LeCun, New York University
- “Meta-Learning: From Few-Shot Adaptation to Uncovering Symmetries” by Prof. Chelsea Finn, Stanford University
- “Reconstruction of the Brain” by Prof. Donhee Ham, Fellow at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Professor at Harvard University
- “Intelligibility Throughout the Machine Learning Life Cycle” by Dr. Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Microsoft Research
- “End-To-End Models for Speech Recognition” by Dr. Tara Sainath, Google Research
Day 2 Sessions:
- “Natural Language Processing” by Prof. Christopher Manning, Stanford University
- “Vision” by Prof. Devi Parikh, the Georgia Institute of Technology
- “Human-Robot Interaction” by Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati, Arizona State University
- “Robotics” by Prof. Daniel D. Lee, Cornell Tech, Executive Vice President at Samsung Research and Head of Samsung AI Center-New York
SAMSUNG NEWSROOM
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Instagram's AI now automatically blocks offensive comments based on what users have already reported. The feature, which coincides with National Bullying Prevention Month, is currently in beta mode for testing.
More:
- The feature is similar to Twitter’s “Hide Replies” but is automatic. Instagram's AI will hide comments based on those that were previously reported, as well as comments in violation of its community guidelines.
- Users can still view the removed posts under the label “View Hidden Comments."
- Instagram is also expanding its AI-powered nudge warnings to notify repeat offenders. The feature alerts people that their comment/post may be offensive before it's posted, giving them time to reflect.
- The company says it's seen a "meaningful" drop in negative interactions since introducing the nudge feature in 2019.
- Instagram's new features still rely on AI to accurately identify what's considered harassment, which can be problematic particularly "for borderline messages with a limited context," Cornell University professor Natalie Bazarova said.
THE NEXT WEB
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Einride's self-driving transport vehicle
Swiss autonomous transportation startup, Einride, closed a $10m fundraising round, ahead of the release of its new vehicle. The round was led by Norrsken VC, with the fund also receiving a board set. EQT Ventures, Nordic Ninja VC and Ericsson Ventures also participated in the round.
More:
- Einride is working on electric and autonomous vehicles dubbed “T-Pods,” which are designed to carry freight. The capital will be used to bring the pods to market. Four are currently being used on public roads today.
- The company plans to unveil a new vehicle on October 8. Not much is known yet about the project. Einride has said it's building the autonomous electric pod to replace conventional trucks and drivers.
- The funding brings Einride’s total raised to $42m.
A version of this story first appeared in Inside Transportation.
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Beth is a tech writer and former investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic. A graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, she won a First Amendment Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for reporting on the rising costs of public pensions.
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Editor
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