IAG kickstarts search for best budding aviation start-ups June 6, 2019 British Airways owner IAG has launched its latest global accelerator programme for budding aviation startups. The Hangar 51 programme, launched in collaboration with IAG brands Iberia and Vueling, will be based in Spain this year. It will seek out start ups from around the world who will work with mentors and experts from IAG to [...]
Games round-up: Observation and Heaven’s Vault reviews June 5, 2019 Observation Platform: PC, PS4 Observation is one hell of a proposition: a follow-up to the superlative indie horror game Stories Untold, set in a space station designed by alumni of Alien: Isolation, in which you control a rogue AI inspired by HAL from 2001. And for the most part, it lives up to that promise. [...]
Softbank earns $11bn for selling some of its huge Alibaba stake June 4, 2019 Japan’s Softbank will book a pre-tax profit of $11.1bn (£8.75bn) for selling part of its stake in Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba. The sale forms part of a three-year-old deal to sell assets in order to buy British chip designer ARM for $32bn in 2016. Read more: Uber IPO: Shares slide on second day of trading [...]
Twitter buys fake news-fighting startup Fabula AI June 4, 2019 Twitter has acquired London-based startup Fabula AI, which uses machine-learning to detect fake news online. Read more: Twitter suspends 170,000 accounts in hate speech battle Founded in 2018, Fabula has developed an AI system that can analyse and learn from large datasets from social media sites. The tool can analyse how fake news spreads across [...]
David Cameron takes up role with US artificial intelligence firm June 1, 2019 Former Prime Minister David Cameron has been appointed by US artificial intelligence company Afiniti to chair its advisory board. Cameron has kept a low profile since resigning as Prime Minister following the 2016 EU referendum in which the UK voted to leave, and is one of his most prominent appointments since. Read more: Donald Trump's [...]
Malevolent superintelligence? That’s science fiction, not reality May 22, 2019 In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 was an all-knowing robot that decided to destroy a spacecraft and its crew. Naturally enough, the crew didn’t care for this. The film was an important crossover moment from science fiction to science fact. Many who saw HAL came to believe that there are indeed such computers [...]
The robots are coming – and they’re (potentially) after your job May 22, 2019 By Ian Hall (City AM, for the CFA Institute) ‘You want your robot to be smarter than the other team’s robot’: advice that sounds like it belongs to a participant in combat competition TV show Robot Wars. But, actually, it’s the increasingly competitive and technology-affected situation that many investment professionals will face in the workplace [...]
Don’t let trust become the next plaything of the cyber criminals May 21, 2019 The last 200 years have been a whirlwind of technological invention. Aeroplanes have allowed us to transcend borders, MRI scanners have enabled us to explore the innermost workings of our brains, and the internet has put the world at our fingertips. Our dependency on connected services is more extreme than ever, but between the Cambridge Analytica [...]
Mobility software firm raises $4.6m from Amadeus and Global Brain May 21, 2019 Artificial intelligence mobility startup Immense Simulations has closed its series A funding round at $4.6m (£3.6m), after spinning out from the government’s Catapult tech programme in 2016. The round was co-led by Amadeus Capital Partners, previously named one of Europe’s most active AI investors, and Japanese venture capital giant Global Brain. Additional investment was provided [...]
Tencent backs top AI startup in $24m injection May 20, 2019 A host of major businesses and venture capital firms have joined in a $24m (£18.9m) funding round for a Prowler.io, valuing the Cambridge artificial intelligence (AI) startup at $100m. Chinese media giant Tencent led the round, with publishing house Pearson and Monzo-backer Passion Capital also joining. Other investors included Amadeus Capital Partners, Atlantic Bridge, Cambridge [...]