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Convex Regularization in Monte-Carlo Tree Search Tuan Dam Carlo D'Eramo Jan Peters Joni Pajarinen 2020-07-01 Aligning Superhuman AI and Human Behavior: Chess as a Model System | Reid McIlroy-Young Siddhartha Sen Jon Kleinberg Ashton Anderson 2020-06-02 Think Too Fast Nor Too Slow: The Computational Trade-off Between Planning And Reinforcement Learning Thomas M. Moerland Anna Deichler Simone Baldi Joost Broekens Catholijn M. Jonker 2020-05-15 Neural Machine Translation with Monte-Carlo Tree Search | Jerrod Parker Jerry Zikun Chen 2020-04-27 Warm-Start AlphaZero Self-Play Search Enhancements Hui Wang Mike Preuss Aske Plaat 2020-04-26 Accelerating and Improving AlphaZero Using Population Based Training Ti-Rong Wu Ting-Han Wei I-Chen Wu 2020-03-13 Learning to Resolve Alliance Dilemmas in Many-Player Zero-Sum Games Edward Hughes Thomas W. Anthony Tom Eccles Joel Z. Leibo David Balduzzi Yoram Bachrach 2020-02-27 Polygames: Improved Zero Learning Tristan Cazenave Yen-Chi Chen Guan-Wei Chen Shi-Yu Chen Xian-Dong Chiu Julien Dehos Maria Elsa Qucheng Gong Hengyuan Hu Vasil Khalidov Cheng-Ling Li Hsin-I Lin Yu-Jin Lin Xavier Martinet Vegard Mella Jeremy Rapin Baptiste Roziere Gabriel Synnaeve Fabien Teytaud Olivier Teytaud Shi-Cheng Ye Yi-Jun Ye Shi-Jim Yen Sergey Zagoruyko 2020-01-27 Three-Head Neural Network Architecture for AlphaZero Learning Anonymous 2020-01-01 Self-Play Learning Without a Reward Metric Dan Schmidt Nick Moran Jonathan S. Rosenfeld Jonathan Rosenthal Jonathan Yedidia 2019-12-16 Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model | Julian Schrittwieser Ioannis Antonoglou Thomas Hubert Karen Simonyan Laurent Sifre Simon Schmitt Arthur Guez Edward Lockhart Demis Hassabis Thore Graepel Timothy Lillicrap David Silver # 1 ATARI GAMES ON ATARI 2600 ROBOTANK 2019-11-19 Multiplayer AlphaZero | Nick Petosa Tucker Balch 2019-10-29 Exploring the Performance of Deep Residual Networks in Crazyhouse Chess | Sun-Yu Gordon Chi 2019-08-25 Performing Deep Recurrent Double Q-Learning for Atari Games Felipe Moreno-Vera 2019-08-16 Multiple Policy Value Monte Carlo Tree Search Li-Cheng Lan Wei Li Ting-Han Wei I-Chen Wu 2019-05-31 Learning Compositional Neural Programs with Recursive Tree Search and Planning Thomas Pierrot Guillaume Ligner Scott Reed Olivier Sigaud Nicolas Perrin Alexandre Laterre David Kas Karim Beguir Nando de Freitas 2019-05-30 Deep Policies for Width-Based Planning in Pixel Domains | Miquel Junyent Anders Jonsson Vicen Gmez 2019-04-12 Improved Reinforcement Learning with Curriculum Joseph West Frederic Maire Cameron Browne Simon Denman 2019-03-29 Hyper-Parameter Sweep on AlphaZero General | Hui Wang Michael Emmerich Mike Preuss Aske Plaat 2019-03-19 -Rank: Multi-Agent Evaluation by Evolution Shayegan Omidshafiei Christos Papadimitriou Georgios Piliouras Karl Tuyls Mark Rowland Jean-Baptiste Lespiau Wojciech M. Czarnecki Marc Lanctot Julien Perolat Remi Munos 2019-03-04 Accelerating Self-Play Learning in Go | David J. Wu 2019-02-27 ELF OpenGo: An Analysis and Open Reimplementation of AlphaZero | Yuandong Tian Jerry Ma Qucheng Gong Shubho Sengupta Zhuoyuan Chen James Pinkerton C. Lawrence Zitnick 2019-02-12 The Entropy of Artificial Intelligence and a Case Study of AlphaZero from Shannon's Perspective Bo Zhang Bin Chen Jin-lin Peng 2018-12-14 Assessing the Potential of Classical Q-learning in General Game Playing | Hui Wang Michael Emmerich Aske Plaat 2018-10-14 ExIt-OOS: Towards Learning from Planning in Imperfect Information Games | Andy Kitchen Michela Benedetti 2018-08-30 Ranked Reward: Enabling Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Combinatorial Optimization | Alexandre Laterre Yunguan Fu Mohamed Khalil Jabri Alain-Sam Cohen David Kas Karl Hajjar Torbjorn S. Dahl Amine Kerkeni Karim Beguir 2018-07-04 Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm | David Silver Thomas Hubert Julian Schrittwieser Ioannis Antonoglou Matthew Lai Arthur Guez Marc Lanctot Laurent Sifre Dharshan Kumaran Thore Graepel Timothy Lillicrap Karen Simonyan Demis Hassabis # 1 GAME OF SHOGI ON ELO RATINGS 2017-12-05

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AlphaZero | Papers With Code

A Group of scientists from the group of DeepMind and University College London have developed artificial intelligence, able to self-learn the game and improve in three challenging Board games. In his work, published in the journal Science, the researchers describe their new system and explained why I think it is a big step towards the development of future AI systems.

20 years have Passed since then, as the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Gary Kasparov and showed the world how far advanced calculations in the field of AI. Since computers became smarter and today beat people in games such as chess, Shogi and go. However, each of these programs is tuned specifically to become a master in a single game. In his new work, the researchers described the creation of artificial intelligence that is not only good in a few games, but also to teach this to improve yourself.

The New system is called AlphaZero is a system of reinforcement learning, that is learning, repeatedly playing the game and learning from their experiences. This, of course, very similar to the process of teaching people. Specifies a basic set of rules and the computer plays a game with himself. He even does not need partners. He plays with himself a lot of times, noting the good and victorious moves. Over time it gets better and better, is superior not only people, but other AI systems designed for Board games. This system also used a technique called "search tree search Monte-Carlo". The combination of two technologies has allowed the system to learn how to improve in the game. Scientists tested the strength of the program, and providing a large capacity 5000 tensor of processors and is paired with a large supercomputer.

At the moment AlphaZero has mastered chess, Shogi and go. The next step will be the popular video games. As for performance, AI, in, for example, AlphaZero beat legendary AlphaGo in 30 hours.

What do you think, when the blast of artificial intelligence? Tell us in our

See the article here:
AlphaZero learns to play the game at the highest level

On July 4, the day the United States of America celebrates its independence, let's take a look at the best chess players in American history.

The United States has long produced top chess talent, with some of the game's finest players, authors, and theoreticians calling the U.S. home.

In recent years, the U.S. has been a force on the international chess scene, and its "big three" grandmasters are staples at the world's top tournaments. The United States had a world-championship contender in 2018, with GMFabiano Caruana coming up just short against the world champion, GMMagnus Carlsen.

Caruana obviously makes the list of the best-ever U.S. players, but where does he rank? And who is ahead of him?

There are many ways to make a "best-of-all-time" list. Your selections will be different from mine. I am using peak playing strength as my primary metric, not overall career achievement because I am most interested in the best possible chess produced by each American on this list.

Peak rating: 2763

Gata Kamsky is a true chess prodigy. He became a strong grandmaster at age 16 and reached his peak in the 1990s. His career pinnacle was in the 1996 FIDE world championship bracket, where he made the finals but dropped the championship match against the reigning FIDE world champion, GMAnatoly Karpov.

Kamsky was born in the Soviet Union but moved to the United States early in his career. Kamsky won the U.S. chess championship five times (1991, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2014), cementing his status as an American chess legend.

Here is a 22-year-old Kamsky beating the super-GM Nigel Short in 26 moves.

Peak rating: 2768

Even with much recent success, Leinier Dominguez Perez remains an underrated American chess talent.

Dominguez Perez officially became an American chess player less than two years ago, in December 2018, when he transferred federations to the United States. Before that, he was the five-time Cuban chess champion.

His career peak was likely his sole first place in the 2013 FIDE Grand Prix leg in Greece, finishing ahead of 11 other super-GMs, including three others on this list.

Dominguez Perez's attacking prowess was on full display in 2014 when he practically wiped future-compatriot GMWesley So's kingside off the board in this brutal miniature.

Peak rating: 2811 (estimated by Edo)

It's not a stretch to call Paul Morphy the father of American chess.

A true prodigy, Morphy was not just a chess force at an early age. His game was also about 100 years ahead of its time in terms of style and even tactical strength.

GM Bobby Fischer called Morphy "the most accurate player who ever lived," which should tell you something because many chess fans give that title instead to Fischer.

Morphy's game peaked quite early, and the apex was his European tour in 1858 at age 21. Morphy pretty much destroyed every strong player the European continent could throw at him, and by the time he returned to the United States, he was recognized as the unofficial world champion.

Morphy retired from competitive chess a year later to begin his law practice, never returning to the game before his death at age 47.

Morphy is the author of arguably the most famous chess game ever played, an exhibition against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard at an opera house in Paris. If you're going to show a chess beginner one game, use this one.

Peak rating: 2816

Hikaru Nakamura, while quite a formidable traditional chess force, is truly a chess player of the modern age.

Nakamura has made his mark as unquestionably the best American blitz chess player ever, and also the best American online chess player ever. Since most chess games in 2020 are both played online and at fast time controls, these are fairly important arenas.

Nakamura has also established a tremendous following on the live-streaming site Twitch and was called "the grandmaster who got Twitch hooked on chess" by Wired magazine. On Chess.com, Nakamura has won the two most recent editions of the Speed Chess Championship (2018-2019).

Of course, Nakamura has enjoyed solid over-the-board success as well, winning the U.S. championship five times.

No game quite captures the modern, fun, and online-friendly nature of Nakamura's style like his thorough trolling of the computer engine Crafty back in 2007, when Crafty was one of the world's strongest engines and Nakamura was just 20 years old.

Peak rating: 2822

Wesley So transferred to the United States federation six years ago, and since then he has established himself as one of the world's best players.

So is 26 years old and it's reasonable to think that his chess peak is just getting started. So's style of play is precise and safe, rarely getting himself into trouble. This less-risky approach has been cited (mostly unfairly) as evidence that So is not an exciting chess player.

That argument went right out the window last November when So destroyed the classical world chess champion, Carlsen, in the finals of the first FIDE world Fischer random chess championship. So ran up the score, winning the match 13.5-2.5, putting to rest any doubts of his brilliance and creativity.

In this famous game against the top Chinese GM Ding Liren, So answers any lingering questions you might have about whether three pieces are better than a queen.

Peak rating: 2844

Fabiano Caruana is currently at the top of his career and sits just 28 rating points behind Carlsen on the live list. Caruana and Carlsen are the only players above 2800. The pair fought a close battle in the 2018 world chess championship, with Carlsen needing the tiebreaks to retain his title.

Caruana is still in contention for the next world championship whenever that process resumes, with the American one game off the lead of the 2020 candidates' tournament at the time of its postponement halfway through the schedule.

Caruana's chess highlight reel is too extensive to fully appreciate in this space. He won the U.S. chess championship on his first try in 2016, and he was the four-time Italian chess champion before transferring to the U.S. federation.

Why pick a draw for Caruana's showcase game, when all the other players get wins?

This game against Carlsen in the 2018 world chess championship represents the peak of chess on two levels. On the surface, you have the tremendous underdog Caruana outplaying and pressuring the world champion Carlsen, who was lucky to escape with the draw and maintain an even match.

On a deeper level, there is a beautiful and inscrutable endgame lurking in this game that astounded everyone who analyzed it. The chess super-computer "Sesse" found a forced checkmate for Caruana in 30 moves in real-time, as millions watched the game around the world. The legendary former world champion GMGarry Kasparov said no human could ever spot the win. Yet it was in there, on the board as surely the 64 squares themselves.

I still get goosebumps playing over this endgame.

Peak rating: 2785

Bobby Fischer stands as the most legendary U.S. chess player ever and is universally considered one of the three greatest world champions, along with Carlsen and Kasparov.

Fischer was responsible for a renaissance in American chess in the 1970s as he racked up ridiculous winning streaks on his way to the world title over GMBoris Spassky in 1972. Fischer elevated the game of chess to geopolitical philosophy, representing American individualism against the Soviet chess machine.

The most striking aspect of Fischer's chess was how far ahead he was of his competition. His peak rating of 2785, earned before the considerable rating inflation in the 50 years since would place him near the top of the chess world even today.

Computer studies have confirmed Fischer's strength and accuracy as other-worldly for his time. His style was universal, elegant and above all, accurate. His fierce competitive spirit is something the computer engines can't measure; Fischer had one of the strongest wills to win in chess history.

Fischer's career was cut short by disagreements with chess organizers along with mental and physical health problems. Nonetheless, in the short time he spent at the top of the game, he changed it forever with the millions of American players he inspired.

Almost as a side note, Fischer invented Fischer random chess (chess 960), which is considered one of the most creative chess variants. Fischer also held a patent for a chess clock with an increment, which is the preferred time control today of many players.

The below game, one of the most famous in chess history, shows the stunning chess clarity possessed by Fischer even as young as age 13 when he eviscerated a leading American chess master, Donald Byrne.

Peak rating: 3500+

I can already see the objections in the comment section. But the headline in this article said "chess players," not chess humans, and I am a big fan of non-human chess.

AlphaZero is an artificial intelligence project that plays chess. Given just the rules of the game, AlphaZero taught itself to play chess to superhuman levels in mere hours using machine-learning techniques.

It stormed onto the chess scene in late 2017 when its operators released the results of a 100-game match with Stockfish, the traditional champion chess engine.

AlphaZero plays chess differently from most computers, possessing an almost-intuitive understanding of the game and handling many positions in a beautiful, human-like manner. Of course, AlphaZero is stronger than any human, but if you played through its games you'd think it had a distinct personality. Maybe it does.

AlphaZero inspired a whole wave of neural-network chess engines, including the international open-source project Lc0, which currently sits second behind Stockfish on the computer ratings list. The machine-learning approach pioneered by AlphaZero transformed the scientific basis of computer chess, and it will be the neural-network engines that evolve the game to its next levels, wherever that may be.

Is AlphaZero American? AlphaZero runs on American TPUs. The project's inventor, the AI company DeepMind, is headquartered in the United Kingdom, but the company has been owned by an American corporation (Google/Alphabet) since before there was an AlphaZero.

If George Washington was born a British subject but can still be considered a founding father of the United States, we can extend that same leeway to AlphaZero, especially on the American day of independence from Great Britain.

Of course, there are many other American chess engines, most of them far stronger than the human players on this list, but here they are collectively represented by the intrepid AlphaZero, which changed computer chess forever.

I'll never forget where I was when I saw this game by AlphaZero against the reigning top computer engine Stockfish, and if you care about the evolution of chess, you might not either.

Who do you think are the top chess players in American history? Let us know in the comments.

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Who Are The 8 Best U.S. Chess Players Ever? - Chess.com

Welcome to Part 2 ofBitmovins Video Tech Deep Dive series: Super-Resolution with Machine learning.Before you get started, I highly recommend that you readSuper Resolution: Whats the buzz and why does it matter?. But if you would rather prefer to directly jump into it, here is a quick summary:

The focus of this series of blog posts will be on machine learning-based super-resolution.

In this post, we will examine:

Super-resolution, Machine learning (ML), and Video Upscaling are a match made in heaven. The three factors coming together is the reason behind the current popularity inMachine-learning based super-resolutionapplications. In this section, we will see why.

The concept of super-resolution has existed since the 1980s. The basic idea behind super-resolution was (and continues to be) tointelligentlycombinenon-redundant informationfrom multiple related low-resolution images to generate a single high-resolution image.

Some classic early applications were finding license plate information from several low-resolution images.

Several low-resolution snapshots of a moving car provides non-redundant but related information. Super-Resolution uses this related non-redundancy to create higher-resolution images, which can be useful in finding information such as license plate information or driver identification [Source].

But the recent wave of interest in super-resolution has been primarily driven by ML.

So, why ML and what changed now?

ML, in essence, is about learning theintelligencefor awell-defined problem. With the right architecture and enough data, ML can be significantly moreintelligentthan a human-defined solution (at least in that narrow domain). We saw this demonstrated stunningly in the case ofAlphaZero(for chess) andAlphaGo(for the board gameGo).

Super-resolution is awell-defined problem, and one could reasonably argue that ML would be a natural fit to solve this problem. With that motivation, early theoretical solutions were already proposed in the literature.

But, the exorbitant computational power and fundamental unresolved complexities kept the practical applications of ML-based super-resolution at bay.

However, in the last few years, there were two major developments:

These developments have led to a resurgence and come back for ML-based super-resolution methods.

It should be mentioned that ML-based super-resolution is a versatile hammer that can be used to drive manynails. It has wide applications, ranging frommedical imaging, remote sensing, astronomical observations, among others. But as mentioned inPart 1of this series, we will focus on howthe ML super-resolutionhammer can nail the problem ofvideo upscaling.

The last missing puzzle piece in this arc of the story isVideo upscaling.

When you think about it, video upscaling is almost a perfect nail for the ML-based super-resolution hammer.

Video provides the core features needed for the ML-based Super-Resolution. Namely:

The convergence of these three factors is why we are witnessing ahuge uptick in theresearchin this area, and also thefirst practical applicationsin the field of ML Super-Resolution powered Video upscaling.

I provided a historical timeline and the factors that lead to ML Super-Resolution powered Video upscaling. But, it might still not be clear on why it is superior to other traditional methods (bilinear,bicubic,Lanczos, among others). In this section, I will provide a simplified explanation to provide an intuitive understanding.

The superior performance simply boils down to the fact that the algorithm understands the nature of the content it is upsampling. And how it tunes itself to upsample that content in the best way possible. This is in contrast to the traditional methods where there is no tuning. In traditional methods, the same formula is applied without any consideration of the nature of the content.

One could say that:

ML-based super-resolution is to upsampling, whatPer-Titleis to encoding.

InPer-Title, we use different encoding recipes for the different pieces of content. In a similar way, ML-based super-resolution uses different upsampling recipes for different pieces of content.

The recipes can adapt itself on both at the:

Hopefully, by now, you are already excited about the possibilities of this idea. In this section, I would like to provide some suggestions on how you can incorporate this idea into your own video workflows and the potential benefits you might expect from it.

Broadly speaking, a video processing workflow typically has three steps involved:

Typically, there is a heavy emphasis on the encoding block for visual quality optimizations (Per-Title,3-Pass,Codec-Configuration, among others).

But, the other two (often overlooked) blocks are as important when it comes to visual quality optimization. In this instance, upsampling is a preprocessing step. And by choosing the right upsampling methods, such as super-resolution, one can improve the visual quality of the entire workflow. Sometimes, significantly more than that could be provided from the other blocks.

In the Part-3 of this series, we will delve more deeply into this. We will quantify how much quality improvements one could expect from tuning the pre-processing block with super-resolution. And use some real-life examples.

(This specific section is primarily meant for advanced readers who understand whatPer-Title,VMAF,convex-hullmeans. Please feel free to skip this section).

Like explained earlier, there are broadly three blocks in a video workflow. Roughly speaking, they work independently. But if we are smart about the design, we can extract synergies and use that to improve the overall video pipelines, that otherwise would not have existed.

One illustrative example is how Per-Title can work in conjunction with the Super-Resolution. This idea is depicted in the following figure.

VMAFvs Bitrate Convex hulls of video content. Green => 360p, Red => 720p, Blue => 1080p. BC : Bicubic, SR : SuperResolution.

In the above figure, for the illustrated bitrate: When using the traditional method the choice is clear. We will pick the 720p rendition. But, when using Super-Resolution, the choice is not very clear. We could either pick

The choice is determined by the complexity (vs) quality tradeoff that we are willing to make.

The takeaway message is two blocks synergistically working together to give more options and flexibility for the Per-Title algorithm to work with. Overall, a higher number of options translate to better overall results.

This is just one illustrative example, but within your own video workflows, you could identify regions where super-resolution can work synergically and improve the overall performance.

If your entire video catalog is a specific kind of content (anime for example), and you want to do a targeted upsample of these contents, then without doubtML Super-Resolution is the way to go!

In fact, that is what many companies alreadydo.This specific trend will only accelerate in the future, especially considering the popularity of consumer 4K TVs.

Visual quality enhancements,Synergies, andTargeted upsamplingare some ideas on how you can incorporate Super-Resolution into your video workflows.

Super-Resolution applied for targeted content such as Anime [Source]

We continued the story fromPart 1. We learned that :

In the follow-up, Part 3 of this series, we will look at how to do practical deployments, tools to use, and some real-life results.

This article was originally published as a blog post on the Bitmovin website byAdithyan Ilangovanand is re-published here with kind permission.

Originally posted here:
Super-Resolution: Why is it good and how can you incorporate it? - Display Daily

And then the pandemic hit.

It was a common phrase heard in the first half of 2020, and even shining stars of the local tech galaxy werent immune to the economic fallout that followed COVID-19s U.S. debut.

At the beginning of this new decade, Technical.lys editorial team called out the top 10 startups in each of our markets that showed the most promise as innovators and as companies that would elevate our respective cities tech communities.

In Philadelphia, we selected 10 RealLIST Startups all founded in the past three years as current movers and shakers of the tech and entrepreneurship ecosystem ranging in industry from data to robotics to biotech to jobs training.

The founders and leaders of these companies have varying backgrounds: Some are first-time founders, while others well dub serial entrepreneurs. Some companies have a small staff of a few employees while others are rapidly hiring.

As we do every year (although, nothing is quite normal in 2020), we reached out to our 2020 RealLIST startup companies to see how things have changed for them six months later. Heres what they told us.

This precision medicine company is run by two former venture capital investors,Tracy WarrenandTammi Jantzen, who have since taken their savvy in raising money for others to their own startup. The team had an especially banner year in 2019 raising a $5 million Series A round in May and an additional $3.5 million in November.

When the pandemic hit, it was hard to get medical centers to focus on the companys flagship product, NICUtrition, a suite of digital tools and diagnostics that supports feeding protocols, practice and decision making in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) for premature babies, Jantzen told Technical.ly.

We were thrilled to double the size of the team in early 2020 and then the pandemic hit. Selling our NICUtrition solution to hospitals was challenging as they were all laser-focused on COVID-19, however we are now seeing movement from our hospital clients and are optimistic about the remainder of 2020, she said. In addition, we have completed analysis of our NICUbiome dataset and plan to introduce the solution by the end of the year.

The on-demand graphic design startup, founded in 2017, became a go-to for companies looking for design services and has some mass appeal from its unique subscription model: unlimited design services managed through proprietary software for a flat rate per month. Its been heralded for extending those services to Camden nonprofits that couldnt afford them for a single dollar. It earned enough clout to land on theInc. 5000list last year at number 1,006.

Penji set up shop in Camden near the waterfront two years ago, but its significant staff growth up to about 60, as of November, cofounder and CEO Khai Transaid was cause for the startup to move operations over the Ben Franklin Bridgeto Phillyin fall 2019. Tran told Technical.ly at the time: The mission didnt change. Just the location did.

Because of the planned move, Tran told Technical.ly the team had already been working remotely, and have continued to do so during the pandemic.

Penjis graphic design membership model actually grew so much within the last six months that we are expanding and building several new products, he wrote in an email. We are launching an SEO content marketing membership and a SaaS software both scheduled to launch first quarter of 2021.

Three-time founderBob Moorejumped into his latest project, LinkedIn for data startup Crossbeam, in 2018 with cofounderBuck Ryan. The duo raiseda $12.5 million Series Ain August led byFirstMark Capitalwith participation from existing investorsFirst Round Capital,Uncork CapitalandSlack Fund.

Since we talked to the company at the beginning of this year, Moore said that the startups focus on partnerships has made for good business in 2020, when you cant make connections IRL. Moore said the team has broken its own records this past quarter, picked up some exciting new clients and grown to a team of 28 (about double this time last year) with plans for a few more additional roles.

To keep our team connected, weve tried to be creative: Everyone has an Oculus Go headset for VR social events and gaming, we have had several Zoom trivia nights, and everyone received a custom snackathon snack box in the mail for our recent fully virtual hackathon, Moore said.

And, hey, it looks like the company wrote an ebook:

This news subscription startup was born in Brooklyn, but lured to the City of Brotherly Love for the 2019LIFT Labsaccelerator class andhas since decided to make Philly its home. NICKL, and its productNICKLpass, found success in the idea of bundling and selling news outlet subscriptions to groups, namely companies

Since we talked to Zaza in early 2020, the founder has been busy, especially since everyone has seemed to be tuning in for more news during the pandemic.

People arent just interested in the breaking news, but also what [the virus] means fortheir team,their jobs,their life, he told us in May. Because of that, its created a lot of demand.

The startup now has more than 150 publishers on board and raised recent round of bridge fundraising, $225,000.

The Northeast Philly startup is run by two childhood friends,Yossi LeviandJake Levin, with years of experience in traditional auto sales and a stint atgoPufffor Levin, who helped launch the local delivery service companythat got a $750 million investment in 2019.The pair launched the showroom-less auto seller in 2018, essentially an online platform where folks could shop for a used, reasonably priced car and get it delivered the next day.

The company raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2018 which included San Francisco-basede.ventures. A Gettacar spokesperson told Technical.ly in December that it employed 100 people locally and operates a 25,000-square-foot reconditioning center in Northeast Philly.

Early this month, the company announced it expanded to the Washington, D.C. area, six months after it expanded to Baltimore.

Even before the pandemic we saw a huge demand from consumers looking for an easy and accessible way to get in the drivers seat without spending hours at a dealership, the cofounders said in a statement. Now that demand is growing even more as car buyers look to practice social distancing and take advantage of our contactless delivery. People feel even more uncomfortable going to a traditional dealership during the pandemic, so our experience makes a lot more sense because of how easy, fast, and safe it is.

QuotaPath made the2019 RealLISTfor reasons that remain true in 2020: It raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Austin-basedATX Seed Venturesand angel investors, and the companys profile is raised with cofounderAJ Bruno. His first company,TrendKite, was acquired in 2018 in a nine-digit deal. The companyalso raised $3.5 million, doubled its employee headcount and had a company kickoff in Philadelphia where it flew its Austin employees up for a hackathon and a day of strategic sessions.

Six months into 2020, Bruno told Technical.ly that the pandemic forced the company to push back its paid launch because of COVID, but finally went live with it in June. The company had one its most productive quarters to date, and is now 25% above its early March high in terms of total users. The team has also added two people to its headcount.

No job losses from us and Im thankful the team responded so quickly and well to the work from home change, Bruno said.

ThisPennovation Center-based medtech startup was founded byUniversity of PennsylvaniagradRui Jing Jiangin 2017 while she was atThe Wharton School.The companys product,VisiPlate, aims to treat open-angle glaucoma with an ocular implant thats designed to remove excess fluid from inside the eye. The device releases pressures that damage the optic nerve.

In 2019, the company said it was funded via non-dilutive grants and awards including a $225,000 federal government grant from theNational Science Foundationand additional funding from Penn,Ben Franklin Technology Partners and VentureWell E-Teams, among others. Last year, Avisi went through theMedTechInnovator Acceleratorbased in San Francisco.

And since we last checked in, the company was one of 13 accepted to the UCSF Rosenman Institute startup cohort, and had its patent issued and trademark approved, Jiang said.

This job training and reskilling company was started in NYC, but its founder, Pennsylvania nativeKristy McCann Flynn, told Technical.ly last year thatshe was coming hometo run the business from Philly.McCann Flynnlaunched the company in 2018 to offer a SaaS and customer-facing solution to the professional development market.

The app relies on a network of customers and career coaches who work together to bring folks up to speed on current workforce trends and skills. It tracks KPIs, has behavioral assessments and brings in a range of coaches for various industries. The company is remote friendly, and has a handful of employees in Philly, New York, California, Washington and North Carolina.

Since the start of the pandemic, business for virtual job training has been up, McCann Flynn said. The company has trained 3,500 future leaders, helped more than 300 displaced coachees and getting at least 25% of them back into the workforce, and is planning to announce a new partnership toward the end of summer.

Former professional chefJared Cannonlaunched this line of jarred, ready-to-go meals stored in connected smart fridges at the end of 2017, and has seen slow but steady success with the venture since. Cannon was chosen for New York-basedFood-X, an accelerator program for food-related startups, in 2019, and said Simply Good Jars had tapped a handful of Fortune 500companies as customers.

Since the beginning of 2020, Cannon has had to shift the companys business model, since many office buildings and meeting locations (where many of the smart fridges were located) have been empty. The company has started offering at-home delivery service, and recently partnered up with delivery startup goPuff to expand its reach.

Cannon also said the biz has completed full commercialization of the products for regional distribution, launching in more than 60 locations in Chicago over Easter weekend and secured placement in 175 Sheetz locations on Memorial Day weekend. The company is also opening up bridge round of fundraising for $750,000 to achieve annual revenue of $1.7 million in 2020.

With the closing of salad bars and buffets pretty much everywhere, we believe the second half of 2020 will provide a new opportunity to help bridge the gap between shuttered salad bars and catered events, Cannon said in an email. We also have some new exciting partnerships underway utilizing our vending technology in entirely different ways and also expanding our regional distribution footprint.

The one-year-old company is a spinout ofHumanistic Robotics, which was founded in 2004 and created devices to keep humans safe from landmines which were deployed in areas such as Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. In about a year, FORT, which has a mission to create a secure, end-to-end wireless platform that ensures human safety around dangerous machines, grew from its original team of 10 to about 25 employees and raised $4 million in seed funding in 2019.

The company didnt respond to requests for comment about an update, but its LinkedIn and careers pages shows the company is hiring for a handful of roles like embedded software engineer and senior hardware engineer. Back in March, it also announced a next-generation platform,Oversight. The control system enhances worker safety and machine security with built-in encryption, safety-certified communications, and advanced software features with seamless connectivity through web and mobile applications, the company said in a statement.

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Six months later, where are the 2020 RealLIST Startups now? - Technical.ly