Artificial Intelligence

for
Africa
at Wits
Table of Contents
Cirrus Introduction 4

1 Introduction

Artificial Intelligence, AI, it’s overhyped and oversold, a trending buzzword and a
destination for easy money seeking the next big thing. However, when the sun
sets on the halcyon day and a new dawn breaks over the disillusioned, those
whose AI efforts are grounded in delivering value in implementations across a
variety of domains will continue to prosper. Gone will be the snake-oil salesman
peddling AI elixirs churned out by euphoric marketing and PR departments,
bankrolled by the venture capital brigade. Gone will be the magical black box
thinking. Present will be investors more informed as to what constitutes AI.
Present will be the truth that AI requires human ingenuity to design, develop
and implement.

Currently most AI efforts are comprised of four constituents; a dataset, a model,

a cost function and an optimization procedure, with each constituent presenting
its own set of challenges. Looking at datasets for example, the challenges are
frequently not that dissimilar to the Ancient Mariners feelings toward the ocean
“…water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink”. In the legal field this has
led to the CaseLaw Access Project, an undertaking to digitize the entire historical
record of U.S. court opinions. In material science, efforts are underway like The
Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD) containing data pertaining to
hundreds of thousands of crystalline compounds. Both lay the groundwork for
future AI projects.

These and other undertakings are characterised by interdisciplinary

collaboration spanning academia and industry. And the collaboration extends
beyond the four constituents to the underlying AI technology platforms
themselves. The open source deep learning frameworks commonly used in AI,
such as Theano, originated from Université de Montréal and Caffe from UC
Berkeley, while TensorFlow was developed by the Google Brain team, PyTorch
by Facebook AI Research, and the latest ONNX, is collaborative project by
Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. These universities and companies all have
their own or close affiliation to one or more AI laboratories.
 Cirrus AI MIA 5

These AI labs are part of and play a role in fostering an ecosystem enabling the
design, development and deployment of AI. Examination of the Canadian AI
ecosystem [Appendix, 1] for example shows a vast array of participants.
Populating such an architecture for Africa leaves one with a representation that
is sparse if not completely desolate.

Therefore, this document puts forward the establishment of Cirrus in

collaboration with Wits University as a necessity. With the establishment of this
operation Africa will not be absent from the global AI landscape as it was with
the internet revolution. While the establishment of Cirrus is not trivial, requiring
the orchestration of many individuals and entities to form the ecosystem, this
document provides a starting point by addressing the strategy for such.

2 AI MIA in Southern Africa

The current state of AI in Africa does not present a sterling picture. A review
of the papers published at the annual Neural Information Processing Systems
(NIPS) conference from 2006 through 2016 [Appendix, 2] shows not a single
paper originating from an African institution. Drudging through repositories
of NIPS, ICML, AAAI, IEEE, ICLR and arXiv, to compute the percentage of papers
published by African institutions on the topic, one finds that it is less than
0.5%. To put some context around the papers covered, that is more than 30
years and 44 000 published papers.

For a more graphical representation consider a view of the GitHub

repositories for TensorFlow. TensorFlow is an open-source machine learning
framework developed by the Google Brain team and currently one of the
predominant frameworks used particularly in deep learning.

China: As China Marches Forward on A.I., the White House Is Silent

AI developments in The New York Times, February 2018
China, Canada Canada: Growing Canada's Advantage in Artificial Intelligence
and France Department of Finance, Canada, March 2017

France: Macron Unveils $1.9 Billion Technology Push to Rival U.S., China
Bloomberg, March 2018
 Cirrus Leading AI Labs 6

Figure 1: A map showing the broad distribution of TensorFlow users

Visually there is more going on in Surfers Paradise than in Southern Africa. The results are no
different when start-up activity is examined. For example, examining the acquisition of AI
start-ups covered by CB Insights beginning in 2012 through to the end of February 2018
[Appendix, 3], there are zero Southern African start-ups listed.

Leading AI Labs
3
Labs dedicated to AI are nothing new. MIT’s AI lab for example was established in 1959. Herewith are just
some of the leading AI labs established thus far.

Carnegie Mellon University: CMU

Example Course
CS 681
Artificial Intelligence: Representation and Problem Solving
Course site: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15381-f17

Lab Lab Partners

CMU AI Yes, but not publicly disclosed

Website: https://ai.cs.cmu.edu
 Cirrus Leading AI Labs 7

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT

Example Course Course Partners
MIT 6.S094 Nvidia Google
Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars Autoliv Amazon Alexa
Course site: https://selfdrivingcars.mit.edu Auto Toyota CSRC

Lab Lab Partners

MIT CSAIL BASF BT

Established: 2003, Project MAC (1963) and AI Project (1959) Scotiabank Microsoft
Website: https://www.csail.mit.edu Salesforce Schlumberger
Element AI JPM Morgan Chase & Co
Nokia Bell Labs

Notable spin-offs

Akamai Boston Dynamics

iRobot ITA Software
Nimble VR OKCupid
RSA Security Cambridge Mobile Telematics
Dropbox

Stanford University
Example Course Course Partners
CS 224n Microsoft Azure
Natural Language processing with Deep Learning
Course site: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n

Lab Lab Partners

SAIL Panasonic UST Global

Established: 1962 Tencent DiDi
Website: http://ai.stanford.edu OPPO Google
Toyota
 Cirrus Leading AI Labs 8

University of California, Berkeley

Example Course
CS 188
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Course site: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Courses/CS188

Lab Lab Partners

BAIR Facebook Microsoft

Website: http://bair.berkeley.edu Sony Samsung
A9 Adobe
Yahoo Nvidia
Intel Siemens
Two Sigma UniCredit
Huawei Nokia
Tencent Citris
360 Netflix
Google Cloud

University California, Berkeley

Example Course
CS 249
Deep Reinforcement Learning
Course site: http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeprlcourse

Lab Lab Partners

RISELab Amazon Web Services Ant Financial

Established: 2017 Capital One Ericsson
Website: https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu GE Digital Google
Huawei IBM
Intel Microsoft Research
VMware
 Cirrus Leading AI Labs 9

Université de Montréal
Example Course
IFT 6085
Theoretical principles for deep learning
Course site: http://mitliagkas.github.io/ift6085-dl-theory-class

Lab Lab Partners

Mila Nvidia IBM

Website: https://mila.quebec/en/mila Google Facebook
D-Wave Imagia
Qualcomm Intel
Sulfur Heron ApSTAT
Huawei Nuance
Amazon Maluuba
Druide Microsoft
University of Toronto Panasonic Tencent
Example Course
CSC 321
Intro to Neural Networks and Machine Learning
Course site: https://bit.ly/2H5GK2n

Lab Lab Partners

Vector Institute Accenture BMO

Google Loblaw
Established: 2017
Nvidia RBC
Website: http://vectorinstitute.ai
Scotia Bank Shopify
TD Thomson Reuters
Uber Air Canada
CIBC Deloitte
EY Georgian Partners
Intact KPMG
Magna Manulife
PWC Sun Life Financial
Telus Thales
EllisDon Linamar
Cirrus An Ecosystem Approach 10

4 An Ecosystem Approach

Cirrus needs to foster the creation of an ecosystem in order to be successful.

Drawing on the work from the Canadian technology sector and the book
Innovation Nation: Canadian Leadership from Java to Jurassic Park, the
ecosystem can be described as comprised of the following constituents,
none more important that the other, and each necessary to sustain the
other:

- Serial entrepreneurs
- Financiers
- Coaches
- Academic bridges
- Infrastructure builders
These constituents will be woven into the operational fabric of Cirrus with
this document providing a glimpse of how that will be done.

Serial entrepreneurs

Individuals with creativity and resilience, seasoned by success and failure in

launching companies. These individuals are experienced in defining
opportunity, finding markets, securing funding, designing organisations, and
networking. Serial entrepreneurs are continuously active in the ecosystem in
one or more roles of founding, financing and coaching start-ups.

Financiers

Unfortunately, in Africa there is still no collective belief that technology is

crucial to building wealth, with most investment still targeting sectors such
as natural resources. This leaves most technological ideas orphaned at the
idea stage – an idea that counts for nothing absent the necessary resources
to implement it.

Financiers are critical partners as entrepreneurs interact with a complex

environment to develop their ideas, secure funding, recruit technical and
managerial talent, go to market and move to the next stage of business
development. Financiers provide entrepreneurs with a wide array of
investment sources beyond mere funding to create synergies, thought
partnership and guidance that is productive in growing companies through
each phase of their life.
Cirrus An Ecosystem Approach 11

Coaches

A hallmark of the leading technology nations of the world are entrepreneurs

willing to give back through coaching and mentoring and to rally other
entrepreneurs to assist in the development of a strong community.
Frequently start-up financiers have been entrepreneurs themselves with
many having built a string of successes and failures along the way, and
contribute valuable experience through coaching and mentoring to the
business effort.

Academic bridges

Academic bridges provide the critical link between universities, corporations

and entrepreneurs. Academic bridges go beyond the traditional university
focused on student-in and graduate-out. Instead, academic bridges are
universities that are integrated into the surrounding corporate and
entrepreneurial environment. These institutions are critical in producing
highly capable human talent, the engineers, researchers, and scientists who
are the source of ideas that can be commercialised into new companies.

The ongoing pressures for universities to contain costs and change the way
they fund themselves, places emphasis on disciplined technology programs
to accelerate the transfer of knowledge developed within their labs into
social and economic impacts.

Infrastructure builders

Infrastructure builders pave the way for future success by providing the
necessary backbone for germinating and growing innovation on top of a solid
and stable infrastructure.

Cirrus performance assessment

In the context of this ecosystem approach the high-level performance

assessment of Cirrus may be considered across the following areas:

- papers published (NIPS, ICML, AAAI, IEEE, ICLR)

- start-up exits from the FOUNDRY
- spin-offs
- projects undertaken with Cirrus partners
- open source technology released
Cirrus Mission 12

5Mission

In fostering an AI ecosystem, Cirrus will have as its mission:

Strategic
To be a part of the future of AI, to design it.
Attract
Attract thinkers who dream of and apply new AI approaches that improve
the world around them for social and economic benefit.
Inspire
A centre of excellence in AI, inspiring and educating future generations
through interdisciplinary research and education efforts spanning basic
research to technology deployment, supporting open publication and open
software.
Collaboration for the real world

Create a collaborative university and industry platform supporting an

ecosystem that fosters innovation and entrepreneurialism. Through
sharing infrastructure and human resources, providing funding and a start-
up FOUNDRY, to reduce the latency between research and the deployment
of real world applications.
Cirrus Unprecedented Collaboration 13

6 Unprecedented Collaboration

The collaboration program will be responsible for proactively developing and

managing substantive relationships covering all that Cirrus has to offer, from
research and talent to start-up development. As Cirrus collaboration efforts
are focused on solving real world problems, relationships with industry are
essential to ensure that faculty and students are engaged in relevant work.
These complementary relationships benefit the university, corporate
participants and broader society through development of talent, knowledge
and application.

Collaboration among universities and industry creates an ecosystem

supporting:

- Interdisciplinary research teams engaged in advanced collaborative

research projects
- Exposure to new technology and business ideas
- High-impact research and innovation
- Knowledge and technology transfer
- Recruitment of students
- Start-up development

Collaboration policy: Open innovation

It is the intent that collaborative work originating from Cirrus be placed in the
public domain and that contracts involving exclusivity constraints be avoided
in general. The intent of this policy is to ensure that research is done across
Cirrus, in a fully collaborative manner, and not restricted to individual
corporate entities.

Cirrus will provide a structure for industry to engage effectively with the
university and vice versa. Cirrus will have at least two programs through which
this engagement takes place; the Affiliate and Partnership programs. Should
an organisation wish to collaborate with Cirrus under a collaboration plan
different to those offered, a collaboration plan that benefits all stakeholders
can be drafted depending on the project requirement, timeline and budget.
Cirrus Unprecedented Collaboration 14

Affiliate program

The Affiliate program will enable corporate entities to interact with Cirrus and
take advantage of a variety of Cirrus programs and activities.

Affiliates provide R 500,000 ZAR per year with an expected three-year

commitment. These funds are used to support the operations and programs
of Cirrus.

Affiliate benefits:

- Website and publication exposure

- Annual orientation covering all Cirrus resources, activities and programs
- Insight into Cirrus research and student projects and ability to engage
with faculty and students
- Invitations to lectures and workshops
- Direct interaction with students and student groups for recruitment and
ability to host recruiting events such as tech talks and roundtables
- Connection to other university recruiting focused departments
- Discounts on professional education
- Engagement with the FOUNDRY start-ups providing insight into
transformative new technologies and business opportunities
- Networking events and the opportunity to connect with leaders from
other top universities, companies and start-ups from around the world
- Ability of the affiliate to leverage the sponsorship in terms of publicity

Partnership program

The Partnership program supports close engagement with a small number of

corporate entities and is focused on active research collaboration and on
participation on the Advisory Council.

Partners provide R 900,000 ZAR or more per year with an expected three-year
commitment. These funds are used to support the operations and programs of Cirrus
including research activities of faculty and students.
Cirrus Unprecedented Collaboration 15

Partnerships under the Partner program are tailored to ensure mutual benefit
and include all of the benefits of the Affiliate program, with the addition of:

- Insight and access to Cirrus research and technology prior to public

release
- Access to the Pitch, a networking event where the FOUNDRY start-ups
present to Partners
- Workshops to explore joint research opportunities
- Hosting of Partner data for research projects including training systems
and deriving insights
- Targeted support for student researchers and research projects
- Participation in seed-funded projects
- Placement for visiting fellow
- Seat on Advisory Council
- Company day at Cirrus

Examples of Collaboration

Caltech and AWS:

AWS and Caltech Partner to Accelerate AI and Machine Learning Through a

New Research Collaboration

Stanford AI Lab and Toyota:

SAIL – Toyota Center for AI Research at Sanford

Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Argo AI

How We’re Working with Universities to Stay on the Cutting Edge of Research

The Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms and Facebook

Facebook invests over $7M U.S. in MILA and AI research in Montreal

University of California, Berkeley and the BDD Consortium

Berkeley DeepDrive
Cirrus FOUNDRY 16

7 The FOUNDRY

The FOUNDRY will create a collaborative environment connecting start-ups to

Cirrus students, researchers, faculty, corporate partners and capital concerned
with real world AI innovation. By leveraging Cirrus resources start-ups will be
better able to tackle challenging problems across a range of industries and drive
innovation toward a significant impact on society. Importantly the FOUNDRY will
specialize in fostering support for early stage innovations and in helping start-ups
make the transition from science to real world application. The FOUNDRY will
ensure that start-ups have the necessary resources, people and skills, as well as
create a vibrant community of innovative problem-solvers, working across
disciplines to advance AI research and drive the application, adoption and
commercialization of AI technologies. The FOUNDRY will also provide those that
want to lead AI research with the flexibility to work on commercial applications
with companies or in their own start-ups. Further, collaboration with the Wits
Business School will enable WBS programs to be integrated into the FOUNDRY’s
start-up projects. This will provide WBS graduates with necessary hands on
experience in real world start-ups, and the FOUNDRY benefiting from the talent
flowing from WBS.
Cirrus FOUNDRY 17

At its core the FOUNDRY will support building knowledge and skills surrounding
entrepreneurship and the development of innovative AI ideas originating from
Cirrus for deployment. Students, researchers and faculty, will visit the program
each month for classes, events, and workshops.

Monthly classes, events and workshops provide:

- case studies on AI companies

- business coaching
- interactive brainstorming
- pitch competitions
- meeting potential project partners

All start-ups that are part of the FOUNDRY will receive assistance with:

- seed funding
- mentorship
- capital raising from angel investors, venture capital and crowdfunding
campaigns
- navigating the process of company formation
- work space
- legal resources
- business planning tools
- proof of concept for product validation and market identification

Corporate partners in the Cirrus ecosystem can support start-ups with industry-
specific knowledge and resources to reduce the latency in bringing innovations to
market in addition to providing entrepreneurs with added visibility and
mentorship. Corporate partners will also gain insight into transformative new
technologies and business opportunities.
Cirrus FOUNDRY 18

FOUNDRY fund
The intent is to establish a self-sustaining fund supporting FOUNDRY start-up
opportunities that have high potential social and economic impact.

Eligibility

For the majority of investments capital will be allocated at the pre-seed stage. The
FOUNDRY Fund will also follow a lead investor in seed rounds. The FOUNDRY Fund
will invest in start-ups that have:

- Cirrus student or alum

- Cirrus research scientist
- Participating university faculty member
- As well as any start-up using technologies based on Cirrus research

Length of stay
There will be no predefined program length, instead milestone reviews of start-
ups will be conducted to determine if they are still a fit for the program, with
milestones defined at the beginning of the program.

Examples

The Garage, Northwestern University

INVO, Innovation and New Ventures at Northwestern

INVO | N.XT Fund, Northwestern

Purple Arch Ventures, Northwestern

Incubator launches AI-focused accelerator to help start-ups out of UC

Berkeley
Cirrus Tea Time at the Salon 19

Tea time at the Salon

8
Salons and tea time sessions are open gatherings for the exchange of knowledge
and ideas intended to facilitate the growth and development of a vibrant AI
community

Salons

Inspired by the enlightenment-era salons, the monthly Cirrus salon will provide an
opportunity to bring all Cirrus participants and stakeholders together in a face-to-
face exchange of ideas through conversation, devoid of modern entanglements
such as PowerPoint presentations and time constraints. The salon will be open to
all Cirrus members and the public. Registration will be required for public
participants.

Tea time sessions

Tea time sessions will be organised on a weekly basis as talks/presentations/show-

and-tell on various topics pertaining to AI. These sessions will be presented by
Cirrus members or visitors to Cirrus. All tea time sessions will be open to the public
through registration and all material from the session will be made available
online.

Research to Communication

Research taking place at Cirrus will be rendered mute if the results of that research
are not clearly and concisely conveyed to a broad audience. Such communication
skill is of vital importance and Cirrus will therefore offer programs to researchers
that provide assistance and coaching to enhance their presentation skills in
communicating the results of their work.

Examples:

NECSI Salons
Northwestern RSG
Cirrus Open and Online 20

9 Open and Online

Open Learning

All material originating from Cirrus and used in the teaching of internal
courses will be made freely available through the web.

This approach ensures:

- open dissemination of knowledge and ideas pertaining to AI

- enables prospective students to fully assesses the quality of the
programs offered
- ensures the quality of programs is kept to the highest standard as
they are open to benchmarking

It is essential that Cirrus caters for students on campus and online, with
no preference or distinction between in person or online programs.
Global teams engaged in online collaboration operating across diverse
geographies and time zones are a common occurrence in the real world.
By utilising an online collaborative platform for learning and
engagement Cirrus will ensure its members are well versed in dealing
with an environment reflective of many real world projects.

Initially Cirrus will leverage existing education programs in the AI field

to ensure that the academic program of Cirrus is up and running as
quickly and efficiently as possible. This will be followed by collaboration
with education partners on the development of new programs and later
by the development of Cirrus own programs.
Cirrus Open and Online 21

The academic portfolio of Cirrus will be constructed in the following

sequence in collaboration with existing leading AI programs:
1) Master’s program
2) PhD program
3) Final year undergraduate courses which serve as an introduction to
the Master’s program
4) Internships, research assistants, postdoc and fellowship programs

Examples

MIT OpenCourseWare

Stanford Online, Lagunita

Potential platform technology:

The Open Education Consortium

MIT Open Learning

Open edX

Potential partners:

Coursera

Udacity

fast.ai

Lemma

Khan Academy

3blue1brown
 Cirrus AI Applied 22

10 AI Applied

This section touches on some of the applications of present day AI projects in areas

0
including law, academic research, organic chemistry, medical research, energy
management, finance and materials science, in an attempt to convey the diverse
application and reinforce why an interdisciplinary approach is necessary. Cirrus
will undertake projects in all of these fields among others, with the focus on using
the best resources available, implementing a working application and then making
improvements. Cirrus purpose is therefore in providing interdisciplinary teams
with the best possible environment for undertaking AI.

Materials Science

Can artificial intelligence create the next wonder material?

Nature, May 2016

A general-purpose machine learning framework for predicting properties of inorganic materials

Nature, August 2016

Using machine learning to understand materials

TechXplore, September 2016

Automated Data Analysis Strategy for Synchrotron Experiments

International Journal of Applied Science, August 2017

Artificial intelligence accelerates discovery of metallic glass

Northwestern Now, April 2018
 Cirrus AI Applied 23

Organic Chemistry

Berkeley Lab ‘Minimalist Machine Learning’ Algorithms Analyze Images From Very Little Data
Berkeley Lab, February 2018

A way to use artificial intelligence to predict chemical reactions

Phys.org, December 2017

Academic Research

Microsoft Academic

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquires and will free up science search engine Meta
TechCrunch, January 2017

These Robots Are Learning to Conduct Their Own Science Experiments

Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 2018

Law

Lawyer-Bots Are Shaking Up Jobs

MIT Technology Review, December 2017

Medical

Machines see the future for patients diagnosed with brain tumors
Northwestern, March, 2018

Finance

JPMorgan Brings Amazon’s Alexa to Wall Street Trading Floors

Bloomberg, March 2018

Energy Management

Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill With DeepMind-Powered AI

Bloomberg, July 2016
 Cirrus Governance 24

11
Governance

0
Governance is the foundation of Cirrus permeating and directing every aspect of
operations. Cirrus will be governed by a Board of Directors with candidates drawn
from a diversity of fields including academic and research communities and the
private sector. The Board of Directors will represent the diversity of Cirrus
collaborative efforts and its approach to creating a sustainable ecosystem in which
the mission of Cirrus can be fulfilled. The Board of Directors will therefore be
composed of persons experienced in the five areas identified as constituting
components of the ecosystem mentioned earlier in the document, namely;
entrepreneurship, financing, coaching, academic bridges and infrastructure
builders. The Board of Directors will be established by the founding members of
Cirrus.

In addition to the Board of Directors Cirrus will also have an Advisory Council. The
Advisory Council will contribute input to Cirrus, research areas and research
projects.
Cirrus Conclusion 25

Conclusion
12
0
There is currently no AI ecosystem in Africa, presenting a very real risk to the
regions ability to participate in and benefit from the advances that are being
realised from AI. Wits University can change that through the creation of an
operation that itself is the catalyst that fosters an AI ecosystem as outlined in
this document.

Cirrus will concern itself with addressing each of the constituents of the
ecosystem; entrepreneurship, financing, coaching, academic bridges and
infrastructure builders, with unprecedented collaboration through
partnerships across academia and industry, the creation of the Affiliate and
Partner programs, the establishment of a FOUNDRY, open and online
academic programs and a strong governance foundation that ensures a focus
on the Cirrus mission.

Although such an endeavour is by no means trivial and not without risk, given
the history and success of the example labs referenced in this document, the
risk of not undertaking the establishment of Cirrus is far more significant.
Cirrus Appendix 26

13 Appendix

0
[1] Canadian AI Ecosystem
Cirrus Appendix 28

[2]

Missing continents a study using accepted-nips-papers:

https://bit.ly/2GWDKos

NIPS Accepted Papers Stats:

https://bit.ly/2IsLXO0

[3] AI acquisitions

Company Country M&A Date

Harvest.ai United States 1/9/2017

Angel.ai United States 9/20/2016
Orbeus United States 10/1/2015
Evi Technologies United Kingdom 4/17/2013
Sqrrl United States 1/23/2018
Siri United States 4/9/2010
SensoMotoric Germany 6/27/2017
Regaind France 9/29/2017
Init.ai United States 10/5/2017
Pop Up Archive United States 12/5/2017
Lattice United States 5/15/2017
RealFace Israel 2/20/2017
tuplejump India 9/22/2016
Turi United States 8/5/2016
Emotient United States 1/7/2016
Perceptio United States 10/6/2015
Vocal IQ United Kingdom 10/2/2015
Novauris Technolgies United Kingdom 4/3/2014
Ozlo United States 7/31/2017
Zurich Eye Switzerland 11/10/2016
Masquerade Technologies Belarus 3/9/2016
Wit.ai United States 1/5/2015
Cirrus Appendix 29

Company Country M&A Date

Mobile Technologies United States 8/13/2013

Face.com United States 5/29/2012
AIMatter Belarus 8/16/2017
Banter United States 11/1/2017
Halli Labs India 7/12/2017
Api.ai United States 9/19/2016
Moodstocks France 7/6/2016
Timeful United States 5/4/2015
Granata Decision Systems Canada 1/23/2015
Jetpac United States 8/16/2014
Emu United States 8/6/2014
DeepMind Technologies United Kingdom 1/27/2014
DNNresearch Canada 3/13/2013
CleverSense United States 12/14/2011
Vision Factory United Kingdom 10/23/2014
Dark Blue Labs United Kingdom 10/23/2014
Movidius United States 9/6/2016
Nervana Systems United States 8/9/2016
Itseez United States 5/27/2016
Saffron Technology United States 10/26/2015
Indisys Spain 9/13/2013
Cosmify United States 8/15/2017
Algo Norway 8/29/2017
Wrapidity United Kingdom 2/21/2017
Encore Alert United States 3/29/2016
OCULUSai Sweden 3/18/2013
Maluuba Canada 1/13/2017
Genee United States 8/22/2016
SwiftKey United Kingdom 2/19/2016
Equivio Israel 1/20/2015
Netbreeze Switzerland 3/20/2013
MetaMind United States 4/4/2016
Cirrus Appendix 30

Company Country M&A Date

PredictionIO United States 2/19/2016

MinHash United States 12/14/2015
Tempo AI United States 5/29/2015
Magic Pony United Kingdom 6/20/2016
Whetlab United States 6/17/2015
TellApart United States 4/28/2015
Madbits United States 7/30/2014
Cirrus Reference 31

Reference

14
0
Brody, L. Cukier, W. Grant, K. Holland, M. Shortt, D. Middleton, C. (2002). Innovation nation: canadian
leadership from java to jurassic park. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. [ISBN: 978-0-470-83202-8]

CB Insights. (2017). AI acquisitions. (table). Retrieved from CB Insights. (2017).

The race for ai: google, intel, apple in a rush to grab artificial intelligence startups. [webpage]. Retrieved from
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/top-acquirers-ai-startups-ma-timeline

Coleridge, S, T. (1834). The rime of the ancient mariner. Retrieved from

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834

Viscomi, R. (2017). A map showing the broad distribution of TensorFlow users. (figure). Retrieved from
http://jrvis.com/red-dwarf/?user=tensorflow&repo=tensorflow
 Cirrus
Gregg Barrett, Johannesburg
Wits University
Contact Roy Forbes, Johannesburg
Email: gregg.barrett@cirrusai.net
Contact
Email: Roy.Forbes@wits.ac.za
Copyright Cirrus AI (Pty) Ltd