ML/DL

Product enhancements, customer references, partnerships, acquisitions, financials, or other significant news for ML/AI vendors in August 2018.

Alteryx

• Announces general availability for Release 2018.3. Key new bits: interactive visualization; enhanced Spark integration; a Jupyter notebook for Python scripting. Andrew Brust opines.
• Releases Q2 financials, revealing 54% YOY topline growth.

Amazon Web Services

• Adds support for custom attributes to SageMaker model deployment endpoints.
• Updates SageMaker prebuilt containers to support Apache MXNet 1.2, TensorFlow 1.9.
• Announces SageMaker support for S3 datasets in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.
• Publishes a Quick Start for SageMaker and a data lake.
• Announces AI Application Hackathon, with cash prizes. Submissions due November 7.

CognitiveScale

• Dell selects CognitiveScale to provide AI for customer experience management.

Databricks

• Announces strategic partnership with Snowflake Computing. In Forbes, Janakiram MSV reports.

DataRobot

• Announces general availability of DataRobot Time Series for automated time series analysis and forecasting.

Domino Data Lab

• Lands a $40M “D” round led by Sequoia Capital. In Forbes, Alex Konrad explains Domino’s appeal.

Google Cloud Platform

• Publishes a roundup of recently added AI capabilities.
• From July: GCP announces BigQuery ML, currently available in beta. Product Manager Sudhir Hasbe summarizes the new bits.

IBM

• The Wall Street Journal reports IBM struggles with Watson. It seems that oncology is a little more difficult than winning a rigged game show. Medscape, Slate, pile on.

Oracle

• Releases GraphPipe for model serving. Stephanie Condon reports.
• Offers sneak peek at Autonomous Data Science (DataScience.com, rebranded)

RapidMiner

• Releases RapidMiner 9.0. New bits include interactive data prep, improved time series analysis, new security and governance features, and new operators in Radoop.

Salesforce

• Releases TransmogrifiAI, an automation harness for Spark ML, to open source.

SAS

• SAS touts a new customer for SAS Viya in the public sector, the Wake County (NC) Revenue Department. SAS is a major employer in Wake County, FWIW.