Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Harvest.ai Prevents Theft of Critical Business Data

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We live in an age where technology has advanced to a level where our footprints left in the virtual space record almost all of our routines. The internet servers hold specific private data which is invaluable to us. Naturally, we would want it to be as secure as possible. But we also know that data leaks are quite common these days, even with the largest search and technology giants. Harvest.ai analytics comes into the picture, promising a better security system with an ability to stop targeted attacks on your data.

Traditional security vs Harvest.ai

Hackers, in general, try to take advantage of the sloppiness of an average user, into compromising their online accounts. They use common internet platforms like Google, Yahoo or Dropbox to steal data. Modern sophisticated data breach is usually through the use of legitimate tools. Thus there aren't enough evidence to prove an account's compromise.

Traditional security systems fail in this stead. This is because they are programmed to check only the authentications and can't spot hacking through legit tools. This is where Harvest.ai can make a difference. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze user behavior around a company's key IP. Through this, it can understand user intention and thus stop targeted attacks from happening.

The algorithms of Harvest.ai can iteratively learn the business value of documents. Its industry-first ability helps it to detect and stop data breaches from happening. This includes threats from inside the organization.

AI analytics of Harvest.ai

The Data Loss Prevention (DLP) analytics developed by Harvest.ai is cutting-edge technology, which allows it to classify critical documents. This is made possible through artificial intelligence. The true IP matches are found and once identified, the documents are made secure against targeted attacks.

One of the interesting things about the AI analytics tool is that it can identify sensitive data coming through different channels. It can vary between written documents, videos, code or even marketing campaigns. The AI system understands business intelligence and acts accordingly.

Future of cyber security

Harvest.ai is a San Diego-based startup, co-founded by a team which boasts of two ex-NSA employees. Recently, they have been acquired by Amazon for $19 million, possibly to bolster the cybersecurity features of AWS. The advantage of Harvest.ai in cloud services platforms like AWS can not be discounted. Data security is a huge concern amongst cloud server users. Having an AI system power the process would be a huge step towards gaining user trust.

Conventional security systems are in the need of a major revamp. Utilizing AI in cyber security can do wonders. Harvest.ai (website) having understood that, is making all the right moves towards creating a secure future for users on the internet. Hopefully, there will come a time when users can browse the internet without the worry of having their data breached by hackers.

Original article: Harvest.ai Prevents Theft of Critical Business Data at Artificial Intelligence in Businesses / Machian Future

Monday, April 24, 2017

Biobeats, your AI pocket psychiatrist

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In the fast paced world we live in, the only constant is the amount of stress we take in every day. Extended hours at work does nothing in helping to alleviate the stress that builds up over time. With the advent of technology in the form of wearables, it is quite literally possible to understand your health now. Through different sensors, your basic biometric indexes can be measured. Applications these days can help in understanding different symptoms and conditions. Biobeats believes it can use the data that the wearables receive to glean insights from it.

Hear and Now application

Biobeats has created a new venture in the name of Hear and Now. The application is projected to be a stress-reliever. It takes in data from the wearable and processes it through a home-built artificial intelligence platform. Biobeats plans to introduce this app to both the consumer and the corporate wellness market.

Multinational corporations are increasingly interested in understanding the regular health concerns of their employees. Nearly all the employees are covered under the corporate insurance program. It is in the interest of the company to make sure it understands the health of its employees. This is to prevent them from getting ill through some avoidable cause. Preventive healthcare through wearable technology is an effective solution to the issue.

Apart from regular physical illness, the mental health of the employees needs to be checked through psychiatrists. Biobeats intends to replace such clinical visits by real-time monitoring through their application. Through existing hardware devices like smartphones and wearables, Biobeats plans to gather biometric data. It then proceeds to create customized health programs for the person based on his stress levels.

The Biobeats advantage

For corporations, Biobeats can provide insights on their employees to the HR department. This could, in turn, help them to allocate work and responsibility based on the employee's mental health and well-being. This directly corresponds to the productivity and efficiency on the work floor. Biobeats is currently running trials with major U.S and U.K companies.

What Biobeats does better than its competitors is the way it uses AI to understand biometric pulses. This is unlike the conventional questionnaire results which are present in the market right now. It primarily uses heart rate and skin conductance along with monitoring movement and behavior. Using this data, it can understand if the stress levels of a person and can warn if he nears fatigue or burns out.

Biobeats then instructs the person to master the technique of Deep Breathing, which is scientifically proven to be a stress buster. Over time, it also measures progress and the reduction in stress levels through the technique. The AI system can perceive patterns in the data and can devise new programs for creating better progress. Currently, Biobeats has raised $2.28 million funding from a round led by White Cloud Capital. The Hear and Now is present on the iTunes store.

Original article: Biobeats, your AI pocket psychiatrist at Artificial Intelligence in Business / Machian Future

Friday, April 21, 2017

Nuritas AI Turns Unhealthy Food Healthy

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After many decades of studies telling that fast food and sugar are not healthy, the point is starting to hit home. We are finally starting to realise that the processed food that we buy at the store might not be good for us. A lot of these foods lack many essential vitamins and nutrients. Even though the corporations that produce them know about it, they are helpless because they don't see a means of adding them to the mix. In recent years, there has been a push towards improving the nutritious value of food in the food processing industry. Nuritas provides them with a way ahead by helping companies add nutrition to their products.

The conventional food industry has been bogged down with slow processes of change. This is because its intention has always been to minimise running costs and maximise quantity. But now with the advent of the internet and social media, things are changing. People are increasingly getting aware of the dangers of processed food missing important nutrients. The industry is in dire need to reinvent itself by producing food that tastes good and is healthy as well.

The artificial intelligence advantage

Nora Khaldi, the founder of Nuritas mentions that the biggest difficulty in the field is the identification of peptides. These peptides as additives are a must to the processing industry. The identifying process has been manually done all these years and thus, quite unsustainable for the food companies. What sets Nuritas apart is the way it combines technology and food science. Nuritas uses artificial intelligence algorithms to identify peptides faster. With AI, the process is expedited and also much more feasible for identifying food ingredients that contain peptides.

Nuritas is developing a database of molecules called peptides which are found in food and plans to sell these ingredients which contain peptides, to the food and supplement companies.

The company has aligned itself into calling itself an AI company more than a food tech one. Through AI, Nuritas can cut a lot of redundant manual effort taken by biochemists and molecular biologists in the field.

The company's algorithm is now searching through over 30 billion peptides through a variety of food sources. The system then tries to identify the ones with a health benefit and try extracting them to be used as an additive. Depending on the size of the genome, the process duration might vary. But with AI, there is always the scope to learn from mistakes and make it more efficient the next time around.

Reducing wastage and creating new alternatives

Another channel Nuritas is looking into, is to reduce wastage of food and to decrease environmental footprint. The startup believes its algorithm can create uses for the roughage that usually gets thrown away, like banana peels and orange pips. If there could be tangible use cases for these products, it definitely would reduce wastage. It could also pave way for extracting nutrients from alternative sources.

Nuritas raised $3.4 million in funding in its Series A funding and is looking to scale up its processes. The techniques it uses are revolutionary and more importantly sustainable and safe, making it a startup to look out for in the future.

Original article: Nuritas AI Turns Unhealthy Food Healthy at Artificial Intelligence in Organizations / Machian Future

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Deepgram: The Google of Audio

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We all have used Google to search for anything and everything under the sun. Google's search engine is so powerful that it can sense what you are intending to search for, even if you can't phrase it properly as a search query. Now Google is only known for its prowess in search word phrases and to an extent, pictures. But what if the search query needs to be in the form of an audio? Deepgram lets you do just that.

Deepgram, an AI audio startup, has developed a neural network based artificial intelligence software. Using this software, it can search through audio files just like Google does with word queries. The co-founder of Deepgram, Noah Shutty had this idea when he found it hard to search for specific audio life-logs which he had recorded over the years. Using this new software, people can search and categorise audio files just like they do with word documents.

Business streams for Deepgram

Searching for audio recordings is something that is vital for a variety of different fields. Journalists, for instance, record thousands of hours worth of interviews at work. Traditionally, they are forced to listen to the whole tape to understand it completely and to create insights. Deepgram could effectively solve this issue by automating the process. It can produce actionable insights on its own and thus save hundreds of man hours for the journalists and to media houses.

Apart from this, audio recordings are an integral part of customer service divisions of all major corporations. As far as the workflow goes, transcribing audio content is a tedious process. Also, once it is transcribed it needs to be fed in as search queries, making it extremely time-consuming and expensive. By automating this, Deepgram offers a viable and cheaper alternative to these firms.

Process behind the innovation

From the user end perspective, it is just about feeding the Deepgram software with the audio file, or even an URL link to the file. Once this is done, Deepgram processes the speech and stores it as a 'deep representation index'. This basically is indexing files based on phonetics instead of the actual words.

This is innovative because it lets the users search the file by the way they sound, instead of how they are spelt. So even if the words are misspelt, the system can identify it properly. The final solution is given through an easy-to-use API through which actionable insights can be gathered.

Future of audio search through Deepgram

The company now has over 1000 registered users. It charges clients based on the amount of data that they process through its system. Recently Deepgram had given its services for free to journalists covering the US 2016 elections. This was to get the word out on the street about their technology and about how it can change the way transcribing is done from now on.

Deepgram has recently closed a funding round worth $1.8 million, led by Metamorphic Ventures and Y Combinator. It plans to scale up and commercialise the tool in the enterprise market in the immediate future.

Source post: Deepgram: The Google of Audio at AI in Companies - Machian Future

Monday, April 17, 2017

Persado Automates Copywriting Services

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Ever since the advent of the internet and the explosion of companies with an online presence, copywriting has been pushed into prominence. That said, copywriting is an art which takes time and talent to learn. Engaging the audience effectively in improving brand value, is vital for a company's future sales. Persado, an AI startup claims to do just that. It teaches its software to strategically deliver words to get a positive response for a call-to-action from the users.

Cognitive content generation

Persado's co-founder Assaf Baciu believes that their software has the ability to understand the cognitive content and generate it as well. Persado's AI can run campaigns for companies looking for conversions on their landing pages. The software writes content and does efficient A/B testing methods to improve conversion rates. Baciu says Persado on average, uplifts conversion by 49.5%.

Persado's content platform combines natural language processing and machine language to understand the psyche of the intended users. Based on its observations from previous conversions and call-to-action pages, it can generate content which makes people respond positively. Using big data, the system can systemically quantify emotional and rational characteristics of the consumers.

Content crafted like this can improve the way marketing and sales are done. It improves communication and engages with people on a more personal level. And through these conversions, Persado can learn new insights which could have potentially been lost in information translation. Such practices help it to outperform human copywriters nearly all the time.

Persado's data mine

Over the course of these few years, Persado has managed to curate and tag more than a million words. This is based on the emotional and motivational appeal the words create in the minds of its users. The response data it holds now is from over 40 billion impressions. Based on the type of business and the objective, the software can automatically select the best words to be put out to create maximum impact.

Baciu believes that cognitive content has a bigger role to play in the future, with content playing a role in motivation and not just in upselling. That said, he also is clear that Persado isn't looking to replace human copywriters, but only to enhance the field. Artificial intelligence is impacting different streams in a positive way, and copywriting is one that is reaping benefits at the moment. Persado's clients include giants like Intel and Vodafone. It had taken two rounds of funding till now, with the last one led by Goldman Sachs for $30 million.

Source post: Persado Automates Copywriting Services at AI in Organizations / Machian Future

Friday, April 14, 2017

Kylie’s AI Automates Social Media For Businesses

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Social media presence is an intrinsic part of the marketing division of every company, looking to engage with its customers real-time. And unlike other conventional mediums, social media is quite dynamic. The content that is circulated around changes quickly and adapting to change is integral to making it through the medium. Marketing teams understand this and thus there is a whole section of social media managers working around the clock to engage with interested people and potential customers. Kylie provides an automated solution to this, by using artificial intelligence to clone responses which are human-like in nature

Inside Kylie - the concierge service for companies

Kylie is a product which came through Y-Combinator. It was founded by Jamasen Rodriguez and Sinan Ozdemir, with the intent of using cutting-edge technology to understand the intent and context of a customer engaging with the system. It might be a word of praise, or probably is a complaint which needs to be escalated to the service department. It essentially does the work of the customer care personnel. It can respond to questions with customized answers which changes with the question. This is unlike previous bots with pre-programmed answers to framed questions. Such a program makes it more appealing to the customers, who feel more inclined towards a human-like interface than a robotic answering mechanism.

Kylie uses artificial intelligence to learn incrementally with every question the user asks. This makes it better over time. Kylie is implemented in a company's social media response system. It monitors every communication channel within the company's help desk. Through that, it generates responses for managers to look into and confirm if it is okay. This saves a lot of man-hours and also expedites the process.

Kylie can also adapt itself to the language and the dialect which is specific to the company it is working with. Through recurring questions and similar patterns in queries, Kylie can iterate on its answers to improve on its confidence level. Over a period of time, Kylie might be proficient enough to bypass human managers and directly respond to its customers.

Future of conversational commerce

The idea of conversational commerce through AI is fast picking up amongst big players as well. IBM’s Watson joined hands with 1-800-Flowers.com to create Gywn, a concierge service. It is aimed at customers looking to buy flowers off the site. Similar to Kylie, Gywn is powered through AI. Its interaction is human-like, which improves customer satisfaction on the service front.

Kylie at present needs to be installed over a third party service provider, such as Google, Facebook, Zendesk and their likes. Kylie has the potential to disrupt the way customer care services are done and can replace low-level jobs of handling generic customer queries simultaneously and effectively. This can cut costs for the company and also help it in utilizing its manpower in more complex tasks. Kylie can work on different channels like messaging services, email, Twitter and chat boxes. Right now, it has Microsoft, Nike, Verizon, HP amongst various others as customers.

Original article: Kylie’s AI Automates Social Media For Businesses at Artificial Intelligence in Organizations / Machian Future

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

EyeQuant Judges Website Design

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There are millions of websites that exist on the internet and thousands more are being created every day. One of the primary need for a web page is its appealing factor. People usually flock to a website based on how attractive it is to their senses. And at this juncture we see artificial intelligence changing the design field forever. EyeQuant, an AI software designed over neural networking can understand and rate the cleanliness of a website just like a human being would.

Web sites usually come in all shapes and sizes, but all of them have a motive to sell something to the viewer. They might range from e-commerce to design to even literature blogs, but they all have the intent of giving value to the viewer. And from the viewer's perspective, the more presentable a website is, the more is the trust factor attached to it. Creating trust based on appearances might be confusing since the overall outlook of the site might be comprehended by different people in a different light. EyeQuant offers a solution here by helping companies to decipher how the majority looks and feels about their site.

Inner workings of EyeQuant

EyeQuant is a Berlin-based startup founded by a group of neuroscientists. It was developed with the single motive of teaching a system to look through the eyes of a human being. Their tool Clarity was fed with data from thousands of random users over the net. The users were given questionnaires to rate the top 10000 websites (based on footfall) on the cleanness and elegance of their overall design.

EyeQuant learns through the data and feedback and can prop itself to predict how a website would look to an average human with 95 percent accuracy. For example, Apple's iPhone online store gets a score of 94 out of 100, which means that the site is very well designed and is seen favorably among the people.

Simpler designs make more impact

EyeQuant's CEO Fabian Stelzer believes that the best design would be the simplest one that can be designed. When a lot of information is being forced into a single screen, the site becomes cluttered. This leads to a bad score on the Clarity tool. Also, EyeQuant is not advocating for websites to adopt similar designs which rate higher on its tool. Rating just goes on to say that simpler designs are well received and experimentation should always be there, to improve on existing designs. It might so happen that sometimes, a cool feature might completely turn the table in its favor and set a new norm to website judging.

EyeQuant helps its customers by pointing out design flaws and gives them tips on how to rectify them to suit the general audience. This tool effectively does the work of A/B testing and thus can save time and money for the company. It also helps people in understanding how their competitors fare on their sites and about the best practices that can be brought in to hack through the competition. EyeQuant's services start at 499€ a month.

Original post: EyeQuant Judges Website Design at Artificial Intelligence in Organizations - Machian Future