Each week we will share the latest artificial intelligence news and insights, curated for professionals, board members, and entrepreneurs, as we learn to navigate together the opportunities and threats arising from the evolution of AI and technology.
This week in AI
In AI news this week, we review the role of AI in cyber security and share the latest funding news.
AI in cyber security
Imagine a world without technology – no phones, no smart watches, no streaming services, no in-car navigation. Imagine also a world where water, power and even sewage treatment goes down. Our entire modern way of life depends on technology. However, technology has a dirty secret, its fragility.
Technology needs to send and receive data, and this essential feature creates a weakness, what is termed an “attack surface” where unauthorised access can change software and steal data. With half of all internet traffic originating from software, also called “bots”, the task to defend against malicious activity is beyond human capabilities.
The good news is that cyber security is the perfect use case for Machine Learning, but with a large obstacle to success – Learning Data availability. As attack vectors mutate and evolve, so too do the observable characteristics. Therefore, cyber security products that protect large scale networks and mission critical applications have to ingest billions of data points every day, to avoid baselines that are quickly out of date.
Companies that naturally offer the best chance of success are those who can re-purpose the data flowing between applications. Companies such as Cloudflare, which is best known for its market leading Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) product. A client testimonial from Cloudflare sums up the value of this data, “The great thing about Cloudflare Bot Management solutions is I don’t need to spend time fine-tuning. The machine learning algorithms just work because Cloudflare has such great data”
As one might expect in the Machine Learning industry, open source data sets are available to get started. For example, from the excellent Papers with Code website, a network intrusion detection dataset shares one hundred and seventy five thousand records for training and eighty two thousands records for testing, defined as UNSW-NB15. Many other resources exist on Kaggle (for example “DF1920”) and for the Internet of Things, the IEEE data portal has Learning and Testing Data sets for data transferred between IoT sensors, leveraging the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol (designated as IOT-IDS2020).
Cyber security offers probably the purest example of the value proposition for AI, a use case that simply cannot be managed by humans. As technology continues to reach every part of our lives, AI needs to increase the supply of Learning Data to stay ahead of bad actors.
AI Funding News
Sima AI, based in California, USA, raised one hundred and ten million US dollars in Series B led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, Dell Technologies Capital, along with a major breakthrough with Lip-Bu Tan joining as an investor and Board member. Along with EdgeQ, Hailo and Knernon the AI Edge Chip industry continues to raise hundreds of millions of US dollars, despite the macro headwinds in markets. Forecasts for growth in embedded edge markets means this sector has sufficient growth for most of the incumbents to thrive, if forecasted growth materialises.
Kaid Health are based in Boston, MA, USA and closed their Series A funding of four point three million US dollars, led by Activate Venture Partners. From Kaid Health’s website, the role of AI is explained, “the KAID platform automates multiple elements of collaborative care by leveraging all available patient data. Rather than relying on non-specific and untimely claims feeds, KAID employs AI & Natural Language Processing to ensure all care coordination activities are driven by the entirety of the medical record.”
Digital Diagnostics is an AI diagnostics healthcare company based in Iowa, USA. According to a recent SEC filing, the firm raised forty six point three million US dollars from qualified investors. From their website, the firm “became the first company to ever receive FDA clearance for an AI diagnostic platform that makes a diagnosis without physician input at the point-of-care”.
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