Diablo Winds

Buenos dias.

The “diablo” winds have pushed CA’s Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to an unprecedented power shut-off that will affect up to 600K customers.

Those dry, warm winds can reach speeds upwards of 70 MPH, especially coming down mountain slopes,. P&E is playing offense by shutting the power down to try and avert any fire catastrophes like those witnessed in Paradise, CA last year.

Stay safe, my western amigos.

Meanwhile, Wired is reporting on a braindrain of astrophysicists leaving academia to work in the data science realm (particularly in machine learning). The lure? Job security, no tenure-track bottlenecks, money, and interesting work.

More interesting than studying the cosmos?! Apparently, as studying human beings can be just as complex and complicated as the heavens.

Back here at home on our little blue marble, right here in Austin, Austin AI startup SparkCognition has raised $100M in a Series C led by March Capital Partners, making that a total of $175M.

SparkCognition focuses on AI for specific industries, including oil and gas, defense, utilities, aviation, and financial services, and recently partnered with Boeing to form SkyGrid, a joint venture focused on unmanned aircraft system traffic management.

#whyaustin

FarmBots

If you thought automation was limited to e-commerce warehouses and factory floors, think again. TechCrunch is reporting that a number of robotics and autonomy firms are looking next to agriculture.

From farm to C3P0 to table.

According to a report from TechCrunch, Ag robotics firm FarmWise just raised $14.5M to continue development of an autonomous weeding vehicle.

Though they are currently prototypes, the large machines scan the ground for invasive weeds among crops and carefully pluck them out. 

From the company’s press release on the fund raise: “FarmWise’s autonomous, AI-enabled robots are designed to solve farmers’ most pressing challenges by performing a variety of farming functions — starting with weeding, and providing personalized care to every plant they touch.”

The company suggests that machine learning models, computer vision and high-precision mechanical tools will allow sophisticated robots to cleanly pick weeds from fields, leaving crops with the best opportunity to thrive while eliminating harmful chemical inputs.

FarmWise is supported by a team of 25 farming and AI experts from MIT, Stanford, and Columbia. 

Droning On A Bad Santa

Trying to get ready for the holidays?

You’re not the only ones.

United Parcel Service and FedEx Corp. are having a hard time keeping up with holiday shipping volumes that have “blown past expectations,” writes The Wall Street Journal. And the delayed delivery of millions of orders could rapidly become the Cyber Grinch that stole this Christmas.

Meanwhile, back at the Santa’s workshop located in Cambridge, U.K., Amazon has apparently made its first customer delivery by drone. It’s cargo? Some popcorn and — of course — a Fire TV video-streaming device.

Also according to the Journal, the drone made the trip in about 13 minutes, well ahead of the promised 30 minute windows for its “Prime Air” drone delivery service.

“But can it keep the pizza warm for that duration?” we ask.

If you’re tired of waiting for the drones to arrive, perhaps you’d like to learn more about our coming machine overlords?

The New York Times Magazine goes deep and long on the “Google Brain,” and the advances the company has made with its neural network capabilities for human language translation.

Before you get too excited about all these machines doing all this learning, however, you might want to take a second look at your vendor’s privacy policy.

As an example, Evernote is slated to announce a new policy on January 23, writes TechCrunch, one that is expected to “let its machine learning algorithms crunch your data” and also “let some of its employees read your notes so it can ensure that the machine learning is functioning properly.”

But worry not, Evernote responds, they’ve got someone watching the watchers: “Evernote claims that only a limited number of employees who have undergone background checks will be able to access user data and that users can encrypt notes they consider sensitive to prevent employees from reading them.”

How reassuring! If only I had my smart Amazon drone that I could hire out to keep an eye out on all those Evernote monitors?!!!