Projects like Google’s Waymo, Uber, Cruise and Aurora are developing autonomous vehicles by throwing engineers at the problem, basing most of their platforms on rule-based systems that try to pre-empt and deal with every edge case, whilst also peppering the cars with more sensors to capture more data. This can work in relatively controlled environments but has the drawback of not being able to flexibly adapt in real-time to fast-changing situations.
Despite all this investment and many years of development, no one has yet been able to launch a commercial autonomous car service. It’s just very hard to hand-engineer. What’s required is not more eyes but better coordination. The simple answer — as it is to almost everything these days — would be to throw AI at the problem, and that’s what many startups, which lack the engineering and hardware muscle of the big players, are trying to do.
We reported on UK start-up Wayve last year when it announced its existence, but they had nothing to show for their claims.
Now they say they do, and the results are not only fascinating but might also be genuinely innovative.
In fact, they are claiming a “world first” in demonstrating that a car working on their machine-learning platform can drive on roads it’s never seen before during training, and without an HD map of its environment. Other systems, like Waymo’s, rely on maps and rules to drive. Theirs, says Wayve, does not.
Additionally, it’s also revealed that it’s been testing its platform on the Jaguar I-PACE SUV, which won the 2019 European Car of the Year. Interestingly, this is also a car which has been used by Waymo in some tests.
Alex Kendall, Co-Founder & CTO tells me: “Our cars learn to drive from data with machine learning. Every time a safety driver intervenes and takes over, the car learns to drive better. We don’t tell the car how to drive, rather it learns to drive from experience, example and feedback, just like a human. This is more safe and scalable than any other approach today.”
Emerging out of research from the University of Cambridge, Wayve has already undertaken extensive testing on public UK roads.
Kendall says: “The traditional approach used by all our competitors relies on HD-maps, expensive sensor suites and hand-coded rules that tell the car how to drive. We have built a system that learns end-to-end with machine learning. It is the first in the world to drive on urban roads it has never been on before. It uses compute/sensors which cost less than 10% of competitors.”
Bold claims. But a video today revealed on their site shows their system driving on public roads in Cambridge, UK, driving on roads it has never been on before using a sat-nav route map and basic cameras.
“We don’t tell the car how to drive with hand-coded rules: everything is learned from data. This allows us to navigate complex, narrow urban European streets for the first time. End-to-end deep learning,” says Kendall.
“Our model learns both lateral and longitudinal control (steering and acceleration) of the vehicle with end-to-end deep learning. We propagate uncertainty throughout the model. This allows us to learn features from the input data which are most relevant for control, making computation very efficient. In fact, everything operates on the equivalent of a modern laptop computer. This massively reduces our sensor & compute cost (and power requirements) to less than 10% of traditional approaches,” he says.
Assuming other independent observers can confirm these claims, it looks like a UK startup just leap-frogged the entire autonomous car space.
For now Wayve is being coy about it’s investors, saying only that Professor Zoubin Ghahramani, Chief Scientist of Uber, is an investor.
Source: TechCrunch
Security breaches, where malicious hackers obtain snippets of information that then get used to impersonate individuals in order to gain access to individuals’ and businesses’ sensitive financial and other private information, have become par for the course in the world of digital services. More than 2.7 billion records were breached in a single incident this year in the US, and overall the damage from incidents like these potentially runs into the trillions of dollars globally.
Today, a startup called Onfido, which uses AI techniques combined with human verifiers to efficiently verify people are who they say they are when using digital services — is today announcing $50 million in funding to help address that ongoing — and growing — problem.
The funding comes on the heels of some very strong growth for the startup, which was founded in London but now operates most of its business out of San Francisco. In an interview, founder and CEO Husayn Kassai said that more than half of its customers, and most of its new growth, is coming out of the US.
Onfido uses computer vision and a number of other AI-based technologies to verify against some 4,500 different types of identity documents, using techniques like “facial liveness testing,” to see patterns invisible to the human eye, now has 1,500 businesses as customers, primarily in categories like marketplaces and communities, gaming and financial services, including companies like Remitly, Zipcar and Europcar; and in the last year, it had sales growth of 342 percent. Kassai said that it has to date verified “tens of millions” of IDs.
The money — a Series C2, technically — is coming from a group that includes top strategic tech investors. The round is being co-led by SoftBank Investment (SBI) and Salesforce Ventures, with M12Capital (the new name for Microsoft Ventures), FinVC and other unnamed new and previous investors are also participating. That’s a signal not just of how the biggest companies in that sector today are grappling with this problem, but also what approach they are using to solve it.
For SoftBank, the investment is separate from the Vision fund, founder and CEO Husayn Kassai noted, but it’s notable that a lot of the businesses that have been backed out of that fund — companies like Didi, Uber, Oyo, Lemonade, and others — fundamentally rely on people trusting that they are handling personal details securely while also carefully vetting suppliers on the platform (meaning, they need and use services like Onfido’s).
Meanwhile, both Microsoft and Salesforce have extensive enterprise businesses that could see multiple benefits from working with an identity verification provider, not just for their own purposes, but as a service that is sold on to its customers as part of a larger identity management and security offering.
The company is not revealing its valuation but has raised around $100 million to date and Kassai confirmed that it was an upround, with “a lot of happy investors.”
“We have strong metrics, and we have a long way to go in our growth,” he added.
There are a lot of companies today offering services to help offer secure services to authenticate users, for example, to help them log on to their work accounts or to access their online banking services. Onfido’s business focuses on the first step in all of this — customer onboarding — specifically around services geared towards consumers.
The opportunity that has opened up for it has been the result of more than just a rise in breaches. There’s also been a growing realization that a lot of the existing services that had been used for verification are simply not fit for purpose: either they too have been breached — as in the case of some of the bigger credit agencies like Equifax — or are not realistically efficient enough for how many online services run today, such as in the case of in-person verifications. Onfido claims that its system can make a verification in 15 seconds.
“Fraud is rising and not going anywhere,” Kassai said. “And the problem is that there are a dozen other companies that have not done a good enough job to detect it so far.” While no service is perfect — Onfido says that its “risk exposure” is 0.19 percent — he says that the advantage of building its service on top of AI means that the algorithms use every experience to continue honing its accuracy. “What we learn from one client gets applied everywhere,” he notes.
“There has never been a more important time for companies to build trust with their customers by showing they are one step ahead of fraudsters,” said Frank van Veenendaal, the ex-vice chairman of Salesforce, who is joining the board with this round. “I believe Onfido has the unique opportunity to transform the digital identity market and deliver robust and scalable authentication-as-a-service, similar to how Salesforce transformed customer relationship management.”
Source: TechCrunch
But — bright side! — videos with your face on somebody else’s body usually aren’t as tantalizing to bad guys as, say, creating political chaos.
Source: CNET
The camouflage will start to come off on April 30.
Source: CNET
Just try proving you’re old enough to buy alcohol when your teeth look like you’re in middle school.
Source: CNET
Sliding around, wheel-to-wheel on a frozen lake? It’s amazing, but enjoy it while it lasts, because this form of motorsport might not be around for much longer.
Source: CNET
Join us on the lake for a look at ice racing.
Source: CNET
Whether you are tired of Craigslist or simply looking for more exposure for the dining room table you’re trying to sell, here are some more websites like Craigslist that might have what you’re looking for.
The post The best websites like Craigslist (that aren’t) appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Thousands of bodies are buried in shallow graves around Raqqa. One group is using Facebook and Google Earth to identify human remains and rebury them where they belong.
Source: Wired
Over ten years ago, OpenGamma emerged as one of London’s new breed of FinTech startups, launching an open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Its open architecture allowed financial services firms to develop analytics applications aimed at traders and risk managers. This open-source approach was designed to disrupt the proprietary software platforms.
Today it’s taken that vision to a new level, become something of a leader in derivatives analytics, and announced that it has raised $10 million in growth funding led by early-stage fintech and B2B software VC Dawn Capital. Existing investors Accel, CME Ventures and ex-SunGuard CEO and angel investor Cristóbal Conde also participated.
According to CrunchBase, OpenGamma has now raised a total of $50.2M in funding over 9 rounds. This included a debt financing in 2014, and rounds which included FirstMark Capital in New York, angel Lawrence Lenihan, and a strategic investment from NEX Group.
Peter Rippon, CEO of OpenGamma, explained: “Regulation has created new opportunities for firms like OpenGamma. We work with key market infrastructure providers, including CME Group, Eurex, JSCC as well as top tier banks, to ensure we have access to the models needed to solve a key industry problem: the rising cost of trading derivatives.”
With new regulation forcing firms to post billions in capital to take market positions with significant increases over the next couple of years, OpenGamma’s analytics solutions allows banks, hedge funds and asset managers to reduce the cost of trading derivatives.
The company claims that it has experienced a 300% increase in recurring revenues in the last 12 months, as well as a geographical expansion across the globe – doubling both the business’ customer base and team.
The new funding will enable OpenGamma to continue its growth strategy as it expands its teams in London, New York and Singapore.
Josh Bell, General Partner at Dawn Capital, said: “As regulation continues to drive up the cost of trading derivatives, efficient use of capital has become essential for financial institutions to maintain their business models. Top-tier global investment banks and asset managers are all turning to OpenGamma for support, attracted by the depth, coverage and speed of deployment of OpenGamma’s analytics platform.”
Source: TechCrunch