Applied AI Pod

Unity, the world's leading game engine, is leveraging the latest advancements in deep learning through the Unity Machine Learning Agents Toolkit (one of the most popular open source toolkits for deep learning) to empower game developers and creators to solve gaming's biggest challenges. In a conversation with Jeffrey Shih, Lead Product Manager with the AI team at Unity Technologies. Tune in to understand more about the gaming industry, AI advancements and their relation to the gaming industry, challenges in real game situations, AI progress and what's next for game AI.

Jeff is responsible for driving product strategy and partnerships for Unity Machine Learning Agents, a toolkit that allows Unity game developers to leverage the latest advancements in deep learning. Prior to joining Unity Technologies, Jeff was a lead for cloud intelligence products at Microsoft and a core contributor to Deloitte’s Advanced Analytics practice. Jeff has spent his entire career at the intersection of data, technology, and business. Jeff holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

AI today is a catchall term. I’ve invited Virgil to catch a bit on some of the hottest 2021 trends, games and moves.

Virgil Ilian, PhD - Senior Research & Strategy Consultant (Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain) is an educator and techie having fun at the limit of art and technology. He is a former AI teacher that currently helps the industry to bridge AI and Blockchain research and work in their products and initiatives. He also helps build an ecosystem in his role as Program Manager at BeAI, Europe's AI Pre-Accelerator.

#BeAI Startup and Netherlands-based, WIYO, aims at matching professionals with potentially interesting network, and

helping build communities of likeminded people. Its targeted solution helps entrepreneurs, business school alumni, professional coaches, developers, digital nomads, and other people that depend on doing business with important network assets to get connected in a more efficient, safe and economical way.

The current solution uses content-based filtering and clustering methods to provide recommendation of matches to users based on Location (current or travelling), Interests, Business school and Work experience. Let’s find out from their founder, Olga Pantchenko, about what they do, current struggles and how a pandemic changed their focus or not.

In a conversation with a scientist-turned-product-manager at the intersection of emerging technology, product and design. Hear Wendy Tay, Product Manager at Borealis AI dive into topics like working as a product manager in a research environment, AI in Banking, women in tech, D&I and her top things to make a difference in a PM role for research oriented teams and projects. Wendy left the academic life behind to take on various product and tech roles at Thomson Reuters, Microsoft and Microsoft Research previously. She has a strong interest in AI technologies as well as the ethical and fairness implications of AI.

Borealis AI is Royal Bank of Canada’s Institute for Research focused at world-class research lab for applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to finance. It dedicates to applied research in areas such as reinforcement learning, natural language processing, deep learning, and unsupervised learning to solve ground-breaking problems.

#BeAI Startup and Estonian-based, EVAAI, is a machine and deep learning platform that allows mental health professionals to replicate their personalities as AI assistants. Its goal is to use this platform to create AI assistants for different mental health issues such as depression, social anxiety, paranoia, etc. Currently, they create a solution for social anxiety.

In a conversation with Fardan Qureshi, their Co-Founder & CEO. We discuss how is EVAAI solving a complex problem that can benefit billions of people around the world.

With 1 psychiatrist for 100,000 people around the world and expensive therapy, depression may become the leading disease by 2030. EVAAI's growth can help solve this problem. Their interactive journaling tool to be soon released. The journaling tool will act like an artificial human brain, and create thought networks for organising and connecting thoughts to find patterns within a mind. AI neural networks to power the journaling tool. Tune in to hear more.

#BeAI Startup and Romanian-based, Factide, is on a mission for knowledge over data - through insights. They believe that knowledge sharing and cooperation is the most efficient way to progress.

The startup is focused to extract knowledge from raw data across the dark and clear web. The team is heavily focused on domain knowledge (threat and business analysts) and we virtually sit down with Marius Stanciu- Co-Founder & Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing enthusiast with a background in Software Engineering, and Alexandru Patru - Co-Founder & Business Development Specialist with in-depth insights in foreign affairs and corporate / public sectors.

Research spin-off of the Grenoble Alpes University in France, Emoface, joins the #BeAI Pre-Accelerator. They propose apps that train social skills for people on the autistic spectrum by interacting with AI-driven emotional avatars. Its mission is to help the social inclusion of people with autism and other populations that present difficulties in social interactions.

In a conversation with Adela Barbulescu, Emoface - CEO & Co-Founder, intrinsically touched by the topic. Part of the #BeAI program Emoface is looking to reinforce know-how to advance their existing AI technology on emotion generation and to add new modules related to complex emotion recognition.

Monetizing during coronavirus, what do potential clients want to hear in a ratio of technology, use-cases or process flows, and what should a typical sales & growth team look like for driving a technological or AI-driven product? This and more, as we virtually sit down and talk to Tudor Goicea from TypingDNA.

Tudor is Chief Revenue Officer, heading sales, growth and strategic partnerships at TypingDNA, the business that provides proprietary AI based typing biometrics technology (a.k.a. keystroke dynamics) to identify users by the way they type on their keyboards. Tudor's previous experience is in venture capital and consulting. And you’re about to tap into a real conversation where actionable takeaways are available.

AI is here to solve real world and serious problems. In this episode we explore reinforcement learning applied to the automotive industry. We focus on autonomous systems and do a deep dive into data, challenges, methods to evaluate robustness of a solution, deploying into the real world and the role of simulators in training agents in this space.

We're joined by Praveen Palanisamy, Senior AI Engineer in Autonomous Systems with Microsoft AI + Research. Praveen is working on developing the core end-to-end platform and services for real-world AI applications using Simulation, Reinforcement Learning and Machine Teaching. Prior to that, Praveen was an Autonomous Driving AI Researcher at General Motors R&D in Michigan, and he was also with the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked on Autonomous Navigation, Perception and Artificial Intelligence

Read more about Praveen's contributions in this space: https://praveenp.com/

Going global from day 0, and now onto mature growth. This is TypingDNA.

Part of the #BeAI Pre-Accelerator, I am in a lightning conversation with Raul Popa, CEO & CoFounder @TypingDNA - a revolutionary startup providing proprietary AI-based typing biometrics technology (a.k.a. keystroke dynamics) to identify users by the way they type on their keyboards.

TypingDNA won multiple awards and was featured in top publications. As a tech innovator and a Techstars alumnus (NYC'18), Raul was invited to speak about topics including AI, Biometrics, Identity Access Management and entrepreneurship at global events such as TEDx, Applied Machine Learning Days, World Summit AI, International Biometrics Summit, Future of AI (at European Parliament) any many others. Prior to TypingDNA he co-founded other startups, helped launch several innovative software products and coded core software components used by millions of end users.