DRS DC office

Digital Reasoning Systems has opened a Washington, DC, office. The Brentwood company's business origins are in the intelligence community. Link.

DigitalReasoning & Cloudera

Brentwood-based Digital Reasoning Systems and Cloudera (Palo Alto) announced further enhancement of their data-analytics partnership. Release here.

VU-linked Robotics venture sets raise

Universal Robotics is going after its third private-capital raise, hoping to get to market with its advanced AI systems, by next year. They've also optioned some property in Davidson County for a small R&D campus. Read about it here.

Campus spin-out SAS braces itself

The New York Times' Sunday story of the top-workplace culture of SAS Institute Inc., based in Cary, N.C., is a good read, with lessons about freeing the workplace from distractions that create a drag on creativity...as well as how success in analytics and predictive modeling breeds new competitors, such as Big Blue. fPrivately owned SAS resulted from university faculty research and development.

Dream Systems 'overnight success'

Typical in Music City, this tech company has moved from seed-stage to growth company over ten years, without barely a peep on the local tech scene. Here's our report on Dream Systems, based on 3rd Avenue, and it's very focused founder.

'Wired for War'

Brookings Fellow Peter Singer discussed his latest book, Wired for War, during this week's meeting of the Nashville Committee on Foreign Relations. Plenty of discussion of the ethics, human values, economics and socio-economic consequences of automation and artificial intelligence on the battlefield...including how our enemies see us, when we rely increasingly on robotic proxies.