Comet Labs Newsletter: May 11, 2017

News stories, updates, and more from the world of intelligent machines

Derek Embry

Published in

Comet Labs

9 min readMay 12, 2017

The Comet is published every two weeks. You can subscribe here!

Hey!

Before we launched it, the Transportation Lab was the result of weeks (months, even) of research into everything having to do with how self-driving cars will play a role in our future. Now, we want to share that research with you because we hope it’ll lead to even more ideas. So we decided that the best way to get as much information to you as possible would be to create a startup map.

Check out what WIRED had to say about it.

263 startups (so far), all in one graphic. It’s pretty amazing to think how dramatically the self-driving car space has expanded just in the past year. And looking at the landscape today, it’s important to note that there are startups exploring new ideas in so many different parts of the vehicle, even though the autonomous system is usually the one that gets attention.

Interested in learning more about our thinking behind the map? Read more from Taylor as she goes further into the research and how we picked the 10 startups currently in our the Transportation Lab to date.

It’s clear the self-driving car of the future will most likely be the result of a combined effort between many startups and established companies. We hope that this map starts to shed some light on how vastly intricate this evolving industry is.

That’s exactly why we created the Transportation Lab in the first place. Want to start your own project? Learn more and send us your idea.

More news about the Professional Services Lab coming soon. Stay tuned.

As always, enjoy!

Recent Thoughts From US:

Upcoming Events:

Bootstrap Labs Applied AI Conference: May 11 in San Francisco
Are you at Bootstrap Labs’ Applied AI Conference today? Shoot us a tweet. Can’t wait to see what this incredible speaker list has to offer!

Connected Claims USA Summit: May 24–25 in Chicago
You might not have expected to find us at a big insurance claims conference, but we’re really excited about the field as an avenue for new AI applications. Samiron Ray will be speaking about what we see are opportunities and challenges for deploying AI in insurance and more.

T he AI Conference: June 2 in San Francisco
MLconf, the organization known for hosting their machine learning-specific events around the country, are now broadening their scope with the AI Conference in San Francisco. Adam Kell will be joining the impressive speaker list to talk about new AI technology and investing. Knock off 18% of the ticket price with the code “Adam18” and join us there!

M Lconf: May 19 in Seattle
MLconf organizes numerous awesome events in cities around the country every year, and this year’s MLconf in Seattle will be hosted by none other than our own Mike McCormick. MLconf events are a forum for discussing new research and applications of machine learning strategies. Hope to see you there!

Synced Global Machine Intelligence Summit: May 27–28 in Beijing
If you’re feeling up for the trip to Beijing, come see Adam Kell, Liu Wei (Baidu Ventures CEO and Comet Labs co-founder), and many more incredible speakers at the GMIS, hosted by Synced (Jiqizhiqing). Synced is one of China’s most popular technology news publications, and their GMIS draws attendees from around the world to discuss artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Learn more here.

Innovation & Impact Symposium: June 14 in Mountain View
As self-driving cars continue to advance rapidly in the coming years, energy consumption and connected mobility are going to be increasingly important. With a new wave of vehicles emerging, we have an opportunity to rethink the entire environment around them. Join us, and use the code COMET for a 10% discount on your registration!

Top Story:

Mapped: The Top 263 Companies Racing Toward Autonomous Cars — WIRED
We know this is just the beginning for the transportation stack we created. The transportation industry is changing so rapidly, and new startups are being founded while others are scooped up all the time. This map marks the result of countless hours of research in preparation for our Transportation Lab, and we’re so excited to be featured in WIRED. Did we miss your startup? Do you know of one we left out? Reach out to us so that we can continue to iterate on it!

Worth Reading:

The Myth of Superhuman AI — Backchannel
Kevin Kelly (founding executive editor of WIRED) drills into some of the biggest criticisms of artificial intelligence and why we are even developing it in the first place. Will an AI become so advanced that it will surpass human intelligence? Will humanity become obsolete altogether? Kelly breaks down some of the assumptions behind these ideas and offers a fascinating perspective. But until we get closer, the jury is still out.

A I Everywhere : Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — TechCrunch
Now that machine learning has virtually taken over the technology ecosystem, Nvidia has carved out an important position in the market as a leader in computing hardware. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, discusses how his company is thinking about their part in the evolving future of artificial intelligence. (As a side note, we’re curious to hear more news coming from Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, ending today.)

The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, But Data — Economist
This might be one of the most important issues for business-government relations in the very near future. As the big tech companies that currently dominate the internet (and by some measures, the world economy) today continue to collect data at a staggering rate, that data is going to become an incredibly valuable resource as businesses of the future implement AI solutions that rely entirely on it.

Another Group of Google Veterans Starts a Self-Driving Technology Company -Bloomberg
Touting a pretty impressive list of VC names in their raise, a group of ex-Alphabet employees are working on a new approach to mapping software. Dubbed DeepMap, their company is offering a sort of “mapping as a service” product initially targeted at companies creating self-driving cars.

Didi Chuxing, The Uber Of China, Confirms $5.5B Raise For Global And AI Push -TechCrunch
So while Uber is having a fairly tough time over here these days, Didi is busy raising more capital over in China to continue pushing the boundaries of their ridesharing service. Didi will likely continue working on their AI capabilities, there is also some speculation that they may start to make moves to other markets outside China. To date, Didi has raised $13 billion, while Uber comparatively raised $8.8 billion.

China’s Tencent Is A Sleeping Giant In The Global Artificial Intelligence Race -Quartz
Though we don’t hear from Tencent (owner of WeChat, China’s most popular social app) very often these days, that may change soon. The company recently announced that they are opening an office in Seattle focused on researching AI breakthroughs after making a series of noteworthy hires, including the fomer head of Baidu’s Big Data Lab. That research will likely lead to interesting developments for WeChat, and more generally how we understand human-computer communication.

Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li Want to Liberate AI from “Guys With Hoodies” -Backchannel
The field of artificial intelligence has one significant problem that isn’t talked about nearly enough — diversity. There have been some fairly recent reports of algorithms producing biased results which have sparked some interesting discussion about the impact of the diversity of the development team. Now, Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li have launched a non-profit called AI4All that focuses on supporting high-school education programs for AI development in underrepresented areas.

Worth Watching:

“I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I’m trying to think about the future and not be sad.” — Elon Musk, on the TED stage discussing the future and his companies.

Stuff You Can Use:

A List Of Artificial Intelligence Tools You Can Use Today — For Personal Use (1/3) -Hackernoon
Sure, some of these might not be all that ground-breaking, but it’s still awesome to see just how many consumer-facing applications are available to download and start using, right now! Hopefully, as smartphones continue to get more powerful, we’ll see this list continue to grow. In the meantime, give some of these a try.

3 Million Instacart Orders, Open Sourced — Instacart
This is exactly the kind of thing that we love to see: companies opening up their datasets because they just want to see what the machine learning community can do. Instacart is the latest to join the party by giving developers access to a huge trove of online order information (anonymized, of course). The kind folks over there have even given us a head start with a few observations of their own, including showing how re-order patterns between goods might be worth taking a look at. See for yourself!

What China Reveals About the Future of Shopping — Boston Consulting Group
Another fascinating report coming out of BCG discusses some very interesting observations about ecommerce (particularly mobile) trends in China compared to the United States. More and more consumers are preferring to shop online and on mobile devices than in retail stores, but in China the rate of growth is double that in the US. This will certainly have significant implications on the retail industry as a whole, especially as AI starts to offer new solutions for consumers, like highly accurate recommendation engines.

Watch This Documentary About The AI-Powered Future Of Self-Driving Cars — Red Hat Films
Clocking in at less than 20 minutes, this mini-doc is a really enjoyable watch. The film features the CEOs of Nutonomy and Skymind, as well as Google researcher Francois Chollet and Prof. Mary Cummings at Duke U. all breaking down various concepts related to a future with self-driving cars. It’s a great reminder that to the vast majority of the population, self-driving cars are still a confusing (and sometimes frightening) technology while it might seem like an obvious solution to us in Silicon Valley.

Portfolio News

Abundant Robotics Rakes In $10 Million For Apple Harvesting Robots — TechCrunch
Having gone under the radar for a while as they continued to hone their autonomous apple-picking robot, Abundant Robotics announced their $10 million raise, and we couldn’t be more excited for them. Apple-picking, you say? It’s a far more complex problem than it might seem, and an autonomous solution would provide a potentially enormous benefit to farmers by lowering manual labor cost and mishandling fruit.

How To Bring Satellite Data Back Down To Earth — WIRED
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve just invested in RBC Signals, a satellite infrastructure-as-a-service company that looks to take advantage of antenna downtime and offer it to smaller satellite operators. With data quickly becoming a vital resource (see above) satellite communication is going to be an equally important infrastructure layer.

A Sense Of Hearing Could Make Cars Safer And More Reliable — MIT Tech Review
Audio processing might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the problem of machine diagnostics. But OtoSense has developed machine learning solution that can analyze, for example, very subtle sounds your car engine makes to determine whether or not you’re having problems. Right now, the company is focusing on the market for self-driving cars to help autonomous systems understand environments both inside and outside the vehicle.

Thanks!

Have thoughts? Want to submit an article to be featured in our next newsletter?

Send us a note at hi@cometlabs.io

Follow our networks for more updates and interesting AI ideas.

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Medium

Let your friends know about this newsletter! They can subscribe here.
We hope The Comet is the best email you get all week.
If it isn’t, how can we make it better?
Send us your feedback here.