Latest AI Articles:

It seems as though, these days, everyone and their mother has some kind of video on their main site that explains what it is that their startup does, and how it can help people. Some are warm and fuzzy, some are pretty strait forward - but few of them should be taken seriously.

Artificial intelligence has it’s advantages. Systematically, over decades of research and development, AI has come to dominate human intelligence in a number of specific and often limited tasks. Yet, AI - at least thus far - has still lagged human intelligence in certain types of rich pattern recognition. For example, AI programs are still comparatively inept with regards to picking up and handling different kinds of objects, and until recently, AI seemed to struggle vehemently in discerning a “cat” from a “dog” on a screen (see: Kaggle).

I've been a Sean Ellis fan for as long as I've been following the startup space - and after this post, you might be, too. Sean's blog ranks first for "Startup Marketing" on Google, and he's credited with creating the term "Growth Hacking." His successful career includes head marketing positions at companies like LogMeIn, where his growth leadership took the company to IPO.

In the animal kingdom, Darwin’s explanation of evolution seems relatively straightforward. The strong survive, the fittest member finds a mate, and beneficial genes are passed along in this manner, always adjusting to the traits - sometimes swiftly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution), sometimes slowly (http://www.preceden.com/timelines/68990-evolution-of-the-alligator). How might this processed be modeled in robots, or to teams of robots?

Apple’s Siri represents much of humanity’s first exposure to pocket “intelligence.” Asking questions, getting directions, and making calls / communications via voice opens up new possibilities for mobile technology, possibilities that Atooma CEO Francesca Romano thinks can go much farther, much faster.

In an industrial environment, machine downtime is a big deal. Keeping machines humming for longer means greater production and maximized use of the asset. Managers understand this, entrepreneurs understand this, but it’s possible that researchers do not. Admittedly, their work is not always geared directly toward profit, and the researchers themselves were usually not the actual investors in the actual equipment, but the overlap from research to industry is still a large one.

Why do people who use Facebook spend so much of their online time there? Why do people want to share, to comment?

If getting funding was easy, it wouldn't be called "getting funding."

Prospero Biosciences CEO Jonathan Rodriguez came on for an interview at Emerj to talk about his company and technology, as well as to shed some light on the real world experiences that a Biotech founder will face.

It's #WatchOutForTheRobots Wednesday!
"Watch out for the robots" is just a phrase we use whenever we see a crazy technology that clearly has the potential to be pretty darn scary if it ever were to go awry. No, no, this isn't because we have a pessimistic view of the future (though phronesis in all technological developments / applications is important), we just love finding/sharing this stuff. :)

RockPaperRobot just sounds fun, even when you have no idea what it's all about.

When you do learn what this startup company is about, things only get more interesting, not less. The company is driven by it's founder Jessica Banks, MIT roboticist by training, now the designer of some of the world's coolest furniture and fixtures. I found Jessica's work by keeping an eye on startups out of MIT, and seeing the name RockPaperRobot, I had to check it out.