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Money is pouring in to A.I.-assisted drug discovery, while fewer AI startups are getting VC backing

The money committed to companies and projects in this area increased to $13.8 billion, more than 4.5 times that invested in 2019, according to the Artificial Intelligence Index, an annual report produced under the auspices of Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).


Those are a few of the insights from this year’s AI Index report, which shows adoption of the pandemic did nothing to dent adoption of the technology.

CrownBio and JSR Life Sciences Partner with Cambridge Quantum Computing to Leverage Quantum Machine Learning for Novel Cancer Treatment Biomarker Discovery

Crown Bioscience (CrownBio), JSR Life Sciences and Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) today announced a partnership agreement to explore the application of quantum technology to drive the identification of multi-gene biomarker discovery for oncology drug discovery.

Insect-Inspired Flying Robots: Researchers Introduce a New Generation of Tiny, Agile Drones

The technology could boost aerial robots’ repertoire, allowing them to operate in cramped spaces and withstand collisions.

If you’ve ever swatted a mosquito away from your face, only to have it return again (and again and again), you know that insects can be remarkably acrobatic and resilient in flight. Those traits help them navigate the aerial world, with all of its wind gusts, obstacles, and general uncertainty. Such traits are also hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has built a system that approaches insects’ agility.

Chen, a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has developed insect-sized drones with unprecedented dexterity and resilience. The aerial robots are powered by a new class of soft actuator, which allows them to withstand the physical travails of real-world flight. Chen hopes the robots could one day aid humans by pollinating crops or performing machinery inspections in cramped spaces.