by Don Basile | May 11, 2017 | Tech
The quest to crack the machine learning code has been a dream of scientists since the invention of the computer. In 1950 the Turing Test captivated the public’s imagination with a question that likely seemed more based in science fiction than reality: could a computer ever match human intelligence?
We’ve come a long way since the technology of the 1950s, but the goal for machine learning is essentially the same. And we are living into the age when machine learning is bringing the kind of solutions to life that have previously been relegated to sci-fi.
Computers that can learn and adapt autonomously have fast become the new gold standard. And the startups leading the way into our AI future are answering questions even more interesting than whether androids dream of electric sheep. One of the most exciting industries ripe for an AI makeover is healthcare. Machine learning has the power to revolutionize how we detect and treat illness, and also how we approach patient care. Here are 5 machine learning startups in the healthcare sector to keep on your radar:
1. ID Avatars
ID Avatars recently raised $1M in funding to create emotional intelligence aimed at improving patient care for people with chronic diseases. By using avatars to interact with patients directly, this startup hopes to lead the charge in creating technology capable of providing empathy. This would have a huge ripple effect across the healthcare industry and would be as useful to hospitals and pharmaceutical companies as to patients.
2. Arterys
The mission of Arterys is to make clinical care data driven with a machine-learning based imaging platform. They have developed the first 4D Flow Technology to measure blood flow more accurately and in a non-invasive way than current methods. The blood flow work can be done with any MRI. The tech is integrated with a SaaS platform for doctors to better interpret data on the go, and the potential applications for non-invasive blood analytics span across all kinds of medical needs.
3. Babylon
London-based startup Babylon has raised more than $30M, and it’s easy to see why because their idea is so simple but brilliant: remote app-based medical care. In other words, Babylon is your virtual doctor, nurse and pharmacy in one. Imagine how much more streamlined emergency and on-demand care could be through app-based consultations. It’s already the highest rated service in UK healthcare and aims to expand to areas where healthcare is even more essential, like rural Africa, where doctors are scarce but cell phones are becoming commonplace.
4. Nuritas
Utilizing machine learning to create custom diet plans, Nuritas will be a game-changer in preventative health and overall wellness. Based on AI plus DNA analysis, Nuritas is designed to identify the healthiest ingredients specific to your dietary needs. The future will be full of bioactive peptides.
5. Ginger.io
Developed by MIT scientists, Ginger.io uses predictive models to create a mental healthcare platform. This is a useful alternative model to traditional mental health care, which can be prohibitively expensive and frankly not that convenient for the modern world. App users can arrange a video call with a therapist, text with a health coach, learn coping strategies, and analyze their mood over time with the help of embedded sensors. This is mental health care for the 21st century.
by Don Basile | Mar 1, 2017 | Sports, Tech
Professional athletes make great money—but only for a few years—and far too often their financial gains are lost shortly after they stop playing.
While it varies athlete to athlete, on average an NFL player’s career will last just under four years and Major League Baseball players get a whopping 5.6 years, according to The Bleacher Report.
During that time, these pros can make (again, on average) anywhere from $1.5 million to $4.8 million.
That money has to last them a lifetime. Savvy players (and their agents and managers) know this, which means they know that they have to invest. Interestingly, more and more athletes are funneling their funding towards tech start-ups, whether as straight-up investments or as full-on partnerships.
A recent article in Entrepreneur discusses the start-ups, everything from coaching to photography apps, that NBA stars Steph Curry and Kevin Seraphin are backing.
The National Football League Players Association is so supportive of sports-meeting-start-ups that last year the organization facilitated a “tech tour.” Players toured companies in Silicon Valley, talking with game designers at EA, learning the ins and outs of businesses such as Uber, really seeing inside the innovations.
Why technology? There are several possible reasons. As the Entrepreneur article points out, these are athletes who’ve grown up with technology.
There’s also the potential for high returns—which could appeal to the competitive nature of professional athletes. Apple is still one best-performing stocks ever.
Regarding the start-ups, there’s evidence that playing a competitive sport makes you less-likely to be alarmed by high-risk investments.
Besides, while 90 percent of start-ups fail that’s still better odds than going pro. The NCAA reports that less than two percent of college basketball and football players make it to the pros. The odds are better for baseball, at just over nine percent.
Whether it’s the appeal of a competitive marketplace, the thrill of the risk, or simply wanting to invest in their own financial future, putting money into technology does seem to be trending among athletes.
Which is great, given the long history of pros going broke after successful athletic careers.
While technology and start-ups might seem like a risk for people new to the investment game, investment pros and pro athletes know, the only shots you’re guaranteed to miss are those you don’t take.
by Don Basile | Dec 15, 2016 | Tech
Sure, it’s convenient to have voice-controlled bots that can turn on our music or dictate emails, but the real dream for artificial intelligence has always been to create an emotionally intelligent machine. Only when A.I. tech can accurately read human emotions will we truly see the full potential for this technology to change our lives in fundamental ways.
We may be on the cusp of major A.I. breakthroughs, but culturally we have been fascinated by its possibilities at least since 1872, when Samuel Butler published the satire Erewhon to popular acclaim. “There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness,” he wrote. And while A.I. has functioned as a sci-fi trope for good versus evil and human versus machine ever since, it’s only become more relevant as our technology has become more sophisticated. The ethics of A.I. are beginning to pose real and important questions now that our technology is catching up to our imagination.
It’s this convergence of the real and the impossible that makes A.I. so gripping. Take the instant popularity of the new HBO hit Westworld, which poses the creepy questions we’ll soon have to ask ourselves in real life. Questions like, can we empathize with robots? What nuances make a robot seem human? And have we reached the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness that Samuel Butler warned about more than a century ago?
In many ways, A.I. technology is still catching up to the sci-fi realities presented in shows like Westworld. But thanks to the new convergence of A.I. and emotion recognition software, we are closer than ever before. These three startups are on the forefront of bringing emotionally controlled machines to life, stepping irrevocably across a line that has always separated fiction and reality.
1. Affectiva
By combining emotion research with big data and machine learning, Affectiva emerged from MIT’s Media Lab to lead the field in making software that can accurately read a wide range of facial expressions. Affectiva claims to have the world’s largest emotion database to date, with more than 4.5 million faces across 75 countries analyzed. Of more than 30 patents filed to date, Affectiva has secured seven so far.
Think about it: virtually any app on your phone could be enhanced by Affectiva’s analytics, from dating apps that could read your interest not by a swipe but a smile, to games that self-adjust based on the player’s level of engagement. Thanks to Affectiva, we’ll become even more addicted to our phones. The company is also working on software that can read emotion through voice, which would have a host of practical applications like better customer service interfaces. For now the technology is still making the rounds on the tech conference circuit, but we can expect to see Affectiva to partner with advertisers, app developers, and more. After all, it’s all about the user experience and creating technology that feels even more personalized and indispensable.
2. Lightwave
Lightwave is an “applied neuroscience platform” that promises golden data to marketers keen to understand audience engagements at peak moments in sporting events, movies, and more. By tracking real time biometric data from wearable wristbands embedded with sensors, Lightwave measures audience engagement at peak moments. Created by 29-year-old former DJ Rana June, Lightwave grew out of her frustration at not being able to read her audience’s engagement in real time. Major companies including Pepsi and Unilever have already utilized Lightwave to measure fan engagement at events like the NCAA basketball championship. 20th Century Fox also used Lightwave to track audience reaction to specific moments throughout The Revenant, providing much more precise feedback for the movie industry than self-reported metrics that were previously the benchmark for audience engagement.
3. Emotient
Earlier this year Apple bought startup Emotient in a bid to take the lead in the emotion recognition race. Emotient uses facial recognition technology to read feelings. While we’re still waiting to see how Apple will integrate Emotient’s technology, it could be used to help advertisers read consumer reactions, or to help doctors interpret pain levels in patients. Emotient can accurately read different emotional responses based on faces in a large crowd of people, which could provide valuable feedback for marketing insights in a number of different fields.
Reading The Future of Feelings
Affectiva, Lightwave, and Emotient are just a few of the startups trying to solve the puzzle of how big data, artificial intelligence, and facial recognition algorithms can accurately interpret human emotion. The winning combination will likely combine facial recognition software with biometric sensors for more nuanced data feedback. It’s not hard to see how this would transform marketing, healthcare, and other industries. Once this technology goes mainstream, we’ll be one step closer to stepping over that invisible line that has long separated sci-fi’s version of A.I. from the very real future we are living into.
by Don Basile | Oct 21, 2016 | Sports, Tech
This post was originally featured on TechCrunch.com
The latest sports phenomenon sweeping the globe wasn’t represented at the Olympic Games in Rio; it doesn’t require an intense physical training regimen or even traditional sports equipment. We’re talking about e-sports — competitive video gaming — and the opportunities for huge windfalls for players and advertisers are immense. Corporations plan to spend $325 million on sponsorships and marketing of e-sports this year, hoping to reach gaming’s huge millennial demographic as the sport goes viral.
The idea of publicizing video game competitions is nothing new. In 1972, Stanford University invited students to an “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics” for the game Spacewar. The prize? A year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. These days, prize pools for major competitions, like Call of Duty, are at least in the six-figure range, and crowdfunded prize pools boost those paychecks into the millions.
Beyond advertisers and gamers, the real money up for grabs here is for the tech companiesthat can successfully bring these competitions to a worldwide audience in a mainstream media format. With the industry projected to generate more than $1.9 billion in revenue by 2018, there are various rising tech players to watch as this fierce competition heats up.
Recently emerged from stealth mode, startup Genvid Technologies has the lofty goal of creating “revolutionary eSports broadcasts.” By bringing interactive elements and multiple camera angles into live-streamed games, co-founder Jacob Navok hopes to hook a whole new audience with more compelling broadcasts and greater opportunities to monetize competitions.
The challenge is that video games are built with players, rather than spectators, in mind. Genvid hopes to solve this problem by enabling developers to control camera angles during live-streamed games as if they were in the editing booth at major sporting events. This would create a more compelling narrative with built-in storytelling and emotion — something that would be appealing to sponsors, advertisers and viewers.
Genvid hopes to challenge Twitch, the leading streaming platform for e-sports, which has a staggering 45 million monthly viewers. Twitch’s single-camera perspective, Novak says, is like “watching a Major League Baseball game from the viewpoint of a GoPro camera strapped to a player’s back.” It’s pretty easy to see the huge potential for profit if Genvid is successful with its current free demo phase and upcoming beta tests withe-sports companies.
ESPN performed some unexpectedly successful beta testing of its own last June when it became the first sports magazine to dedicate an entire issue to e-sports. One of the issue’s featured stories on a top gamer received more than 1.1 million page views on ESPN.com. Realizing professional coverage of this burgeoning arena would have a huge instant audience, ESPN launched a dedicated e-sports vertical this year. ESPN2 even televised an entire live competition called Heroes of the Dorm last year. We can expect to see the sports juggernaut roll out even more coverage of e-sports in coming months.
We can’t have a conversation about e-sports without discussing its mobile applications. An app that improves the players, not the game? Germany’s got that. Technology is making it even easier for aspiring players looking to cash in on the huge prizes available to top gamers with Dojo Madness, a Berlin-based startup with plans to turn gamers’ smartphones into an e-sports coach. Through advances that combine machine learning with in-play data, Dojo Madness has created a coaching app that raised $4.5 million in its first round of funding. Initially targeting League of Legends, the app offers strategy before and during the game, and analyzes performance in a post-game recap.
This second-screen technology will be huge in the age of big data. League of Legends, among other games, offers open APIs, enabling e-sports companies to pull in gameplay data, which in turn makes in-game coaching possible. The company’s League of Legends app, called LOLSumo, is already the top app for this game, with more than half a million downloads.
Another big player capitalizing in the e-sports area isActivision, a company hoping to “activize” more cash in their cache. Earlier this year, in a $46 million deal, Activision Blizzard acquired Major League Gaming, an early organizer of e-sports competitions. Valued at $27 billion, Activision is already a leader in the industry as the publisher of leading franchises, such as Call of Duty, but this move signals that they want more than the game — Activision wants to dominate the entire arena of e-sports.
According to chief executive Robert Kotick, Activision hopes to create “the ESPN of eSports” by bringing mainstream viewing away from the internet and onto traditional cable TV channels. This could be tough competition, as ESPN still intends to be the ESPN of e-sports — may the best company win!
Kotick hopes to tap into an even bigger audience than the online community by bolstering televised broadcasts with the same kind of coverage that traditional sports receive. In the spirit of the Games, Activision and Genvid Technologies should play on the same team instead of as opponents.
The budding startups, big tech companies and TV channels planning to capitalize on e-sports are just the beginning of the sport’s global rise. TheInternational e-Sports Federation(IeSF) even took steps to be recognized by the Olympic Committee in February, and was provided the necessary route to become an official sport in April. Indeed, e-sports could be on the Olympic stage before we know it — but until then, there will be no shortage of players getting their heads and wallets in the game.
