Scaled Inference, a cloud AI startup by ex-Googlers, gets Khosla Ventures $8M funding

By Vasudev Ram

Saw the news via this tweet by @asenkut - Aydin Senkut, Google's first product manager, and founder of Felicis Ventures.

Here is a TechCrunch article about the funding of Scaled Inference by Khosla Ventures:

Excerpts from the article:

[
Scaled Inference, a startup founded by two ex-Googlers that is building a cloud-based platform for third parties that want to use artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to run their apps and services – has raised another round of funding to continue its development and hiring, a Series A round of $8 million from Khosla Ventures.
...
has been putting together some of the first products (or services) that will run on top of that platform: pattern recognition, anomaly detection, prediction, and predictive ranking, which will be accessible by developers by way of a set of APIs.
...
As an example of where pattern recognition might be applied, he says, take a bank or credit card company like Visa.
...
“The pattern recognition APIs can then be used to detect correlations such as increased spending during certain time periods, at certain locations, by certain customers, on certain items, for certain combinations of these attributes,” he says. In turn, this type of insight can help guide important business decisions
...
this is a long-term vision, but this is one of the reasons that Scaled Inference went with the investors that it has done, Sercinoglu says. “Vinod Khosla is a long term investor, one of the longest-term thinkers in the business, and ours is a long term vision for AI and machine learning. That really resonated with him.”

Longer term, he says, “We seek to offer the same powerful technology as a public cloud API to everyone and for virtually any application; anything from personalized magazines to intelligent context-sensitive address books, app launchers, e-commerce sites,
]
They are not open to the public yet.

The idea seems interesting, not just for the applications mentioned, but also for the fact that they plan to offer the service as a public cloud API, available to everyone, so looks like it could have a lot of potential.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Prolog-like logic programming in Python - pyDatalog

By Vasudev Ram

pyDatalog is a tool for "logic programming in Python" (*).

I installed and tried it out with this small program, a modified version of the one on the pyDatalog home page. That program calculates factorials; I added calculation of squares.

Here is the program, test_pydatalog.py:

from pyDatalog import pyDatalog
pyDatalog.create_terms('factorial, N')
 
factorial[N] = N*factorial[N-1] 
factorial[1] = 1
 
print(factorial[2]==N) 
print(factorial[3]==N) 
print(factorial[4]==N) 

pyDatalog.create_terms('square, N')
square[N] = N*N

print(square[3]==N)
print(square[4]==N)
print(square[5]==N)

Run the program with the command:

python test_pydatalog.py

That gives the following output:

pyDatalog version 0.14.0
N
-
2
N
-
6
N
--
24
N
-
9
N
--
16
N
--
25

I've only tried out pyDatalog out a little so far. Will try it out more later and may post again about it.

Interesting concept. pyDatalog seems to be inspired by either Datalog or LogicBlox.
Datalog in turn is a subset of Prolog, one of oldest logic programming languages.


- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises



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Google is building an artificial brain

By Vasudev Ram

Google is building an artificial brain, says WIRED.



[ The above image is not what they are building. ]

Saw it via this tweet by Ned Taleb.

Here are two posts about it:

Computer Chips That Work Like a Brain Are Coming — Just Not Yet.

The above post links to this one:

The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Baxter, a modern robot

Rethink Robotics :: How Baxter is Different

via Will Baxter be the Model T of robotics?

- Vasudev Ram

A talk with Cleverbot

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

I just had a talk with Cleverbot. http://cleverbot.com

The talk is here:

http://cleverbot.com/j2log-kTgLZfSOIELHQARQNQKE-detail

Or just read it below:

-------------------------------------------------------------------

User: You are not clever.

Cleverbot: I am very clever.

User: Those who are not clever think they are.

Cleverbot: Those that forget the past, have no future as a geneologist.

User: Your replies show that you are a bot.

Cleverbot: What is my name?

User: Nom du un nom.

Cleverbot: What are you eating?

User: Eats.

Cleverbot: Yes. I ate you.

User: Got indigestion?

Cleverbot: Let's go rupture his spleen.

Cleverbot (To myself): How? You're dead!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

There are paid Cleverbot apps for iOs (iPhone) and Android here:

http://www.cleverbot.com/app

The apps cost about US $1.

On Android, you can "speak it" out loud, and hear its voice in reply (says the site).

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- Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison

Free Stanford Online AI Class - Official Registration is open

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

I had blogged earlier about the Free Online Stanford AI Class to be taught this fall (autumn) by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun.

This may be the largest class in the world.

I just saw on Hacker News that the official registration for the course is now open.

Note: According to the FAQ ( see http://www.ai-class.com/registration/faq ), it is not enough that you signed up earlier with your name and email address - the earlier signup was only to show that you were interested. You still have to go through the official registration at this page:

https://www.ai-class.com/registration

Also see current Hacker News thread about this news:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941185

There is also a Twitter account for the AI class: @aiclass

There is also a subreddit for the AI class:

http://www.reddit.com/r/aiclass

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- Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison