Amazon, Baidu and Illumina top 2016 list of 50 “smartest companies”
MIT Technology Review has released its 2016 list of 50 "smartest companies" (www.technologyreview.com/lists/companies). According to the list, Amazon holds the first place among 50 ‘"smartest companies" in the world. MIT Technology Review says that last year it included Amazon on its list of the 50 Smartest Companies for incorporating robots into its fulfillment centers. "This year the standout is the surprising success of its Alexa Voice Service and the growing family of devices it powers (the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Tap). Alexa makes it easy to search the Web, play music, and adjust your lights and thermostat—just by speaking inside your home. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing operation, also deserves notice as the industry leader and Amazon’s fastest-growing and most profitable division. $89.99 What the Echo Dot, the most affordable device to feature Alexa Voice Service, sells for."
Baidu took the second place in the list of 50 "smartest companies." Outside its core business of Internet search and ad sales, Baidu is doing notable work on speech recognition and conversational interfaces. In 2015, it announced the development of a speech recognition engine called Deep Speech 2 that uses deep learning to recognize spoken words, sometimes more accurately than a person can. Baidu conducts AI research in part to improve its products and services and better compete with rivals such as Alibaba and Tencent. The company is also aggressively pursuing the autonomous-car market and recently established a team in Silicon Valley to lead research and engineering in computer vision, robotics, and sensors, among other areas. Baidu plans to employ more than 100 autonomous-car researchers and engineers in California by year’s end.
Illumina holds the third place in the list of 50 "smartest companies." The world’s largest DNA-sequencing company hopes to expand its technology’s role in diagnosing illness. This year it formed a new company to develop blood tests that cost $1,000 or less and can detect many types of cancer before symptoms arise, greatly improving the chances of survival. The spinoff, called Grail, is being headed by Jeff Huber, a former senior Google executive who lost his wife to colon cancer. The testing concept, sometimes called a "liquid biopsy," uses Illumina’s high-speed sequencing machines to scour a person’s blood for fragments of DNA released by cancer cells. Note that Illumina reached $2.2 billion revenue last year, up 19 percent from the previous year.
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