Automation was supposed to help R&D labs run more smoothly, freeing scientists from repetitive work so they could focus on discovery. And sometimes it does do that. But the reality now is messier. In a recent survey of 856 biopharma R&D professionals, 31% cited lack of flexibility and 30% pointed to poor integration as top…
Hands-on with Patsnap’s Eureka Scout: Strong features meet evolving AI backbone
Patsnap, a Singapore-based AI platform for patent and R&D intelligence, hit unicorn status in 2021 with a valuation over $1 billion after a $300 million Series E round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent. High-profile clients include NASA, Tesla, Vodafone, MIT and General Electric. The company was founded in 2007. After the CEO…
New offering from Labviva streamlines research procurement workflows
It’s long been a fact of life: Procurement tasks are a persistent burden for researchers, often demanding hours of manual effort each week and prone to errors. To counter that, the research-oriented procurement software company Labviva is launching an AI-enabled Inventory Management System (IMS) designed to automate tasks such as reordering and real-time stock monitoring.…
Apple’s AI gets mixed reviews ahead of formal launch
Reviews are in for a beta version of Apple’s AI, following its iPhone 16 announcement. And experts are less than impressed. Vox called the tech “magically mediocre” after testing a developer beta. While AI Supremacy described Apple Intelligence as “late, unfinished & clumsy.” Critics point out that many of the touted AI features are not…
OpenAI unveils ‘o1,’ a new AI model family that ‘thinks’ before responding
After a wave of media attention about rumored OpenAI models codenamed Strawberry and Orion, OpenAI has announced the launch of OpenAI o1, a new series of AI models designed to handle complex problems requiring advanced reasoning. According to an announcement from the company, the model family represents a significant leap forward from previous models in…
Decoding Lubrizol’s AI-driven beauty R&D
At Lubrizol, the quest for better skincare has taken a decidedly high-tech turn, culminating in the recent opening of a new Beauty Research Institute in Shanghai. This facility will serve as a global hub for in-vivo beauty testing. It will also aid the company in developing next-generation ingredients designed to cater to the specific needs…
New tool accelerates computer simulations across scientific disciplines
Sandia National Laboratories and Brown University researchers have developed a new method to accelerate computer simulations, significantly speeding up research across various scientific fields. It was recently published in the journal npj Computational Materials and presents a universal approach to enhancing the performance of virtually any type of simulation — from researching drugs to sending…
What embeddings are and how to explore them in R&D
One of the unsung heroes of the recent explosion in interest in AI — especially in terms of large language models and natural language processing — is the word embedding. Representing a vector of real numbers, embeddings have been around in one or another since for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers explored a…