Big banks invest $13.5M in machine learning startup Context Relevant

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Gigaom

Context Relevant, a Seattle-based company pushing a set of specialized machine learning applications, has added to its series B round of venture capital with $13.5 million from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Formation 8, New York Life, and Bloomberg Beta. In a world of data science and open source libraries, Context Relevant’s approach of focusing on a select set of algorithms, and making them easy to implement, is pretty smart. It certainly seems to have struck a chord with financial services customers, which has historically been a lucrative market for software vendors.

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AlchemyAPI now recognizes famous faces (and can learn yours, too)

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Gigaom

AlchemyAPI, the cloud computing company that uses deep learning to analyze text and images, has added facial recognition to its portfolio of services. The company released its first computer vision service in May.

Using the company’s face API, users can now process their collections of images and tag the set of 45,000-and-growing famous people on which AlchemyAPI’s system has been trained. Users can also train the system on their own corporate networks or other internal systems in order to recognize faces within the organization. Faces the system doesn’t recognize, because it hasn’t trained on labeled images of them, still receive tags for gender and age range.

For famous people that the system recognizes, it will also provide a knowledge graph of information about the person culled from other sources on the internet.

The way the face API trains itself, AlchemyAPI Founder and CEO Elliot Turner explained, is by crawling the…

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Here’s what you missed at Gigaom’s ‘Future of AI’ meetup

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Gigaom

Last week, Gigaom held a sold-out meetup in San Francisco featuring some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence and deep learning. Today, we’re happy to share videos of the talks so those who missed it live can still absorb the 2.5 hours of information about one of the hottest fields in tech right now.

All of the talks are embedded below and as a playlist, titled “Future of AI,” on the Gigaom YouTube channel.

Andrew Ng on deep learning and Baidu’s big plans

Andrew Ng — chief scientist at Baidu, co-founder of Coursera and associate professor at Stanford — kicked off the night with a talk about why deep learning is so hot right now and how Baidu is using it to power some very interesting ideas. Sure, there’s image and voice search, and the new Baidu Eye wearable computer, but Ng also discusses a project dubbed the…

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