SRI has appointed Robert Mandelbaum as senior vice president of strategic initiatives. In this role, Mandelbaum will drive major growth initiatives across SRI's research divisions, focusing on programmes spanning AI, autonomous systems, healthcare, space-based architectures, and security. Mandelbaum brings three decades of experience in advanced technology R&D. He most recently served as general manager and director of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories, where he led applied research labs working in spectrum systems, informatics, AI, human systems augmentation, and autonomy. Earlier in his career, Mandelbaum worked at Sarnoff Corporation, now part of SRI, pioneering real-time computer vision applications. He also served as programme manager at DARPA. Mandelbaum holds a PhD in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Valence AI, an emotional intelligence infrastructure company, has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Differential Ventures, with participation from Difference Partners, Willowtree Ventures, Change Paradox Ventures and SRI International. The company has also secured two US patents on identifying emotional state from live speech in real-time conversation using deep learning. Founded by Chloe Duckworth and Shannon Brownlee, Valence AI's Pulse Emotion model analyses live calls and classifies emotional state from speech in real time. The company reports 92% accuracy on internal benchmarks and claims handle time reductions of 30% in production deployments. The funding will support expansion of Pulse's language coverage, deeper integrations across voice AI platforms and new hires. Valence AI's customers include Harte Hanks, CustomerHD and Fortune 500 retailers across healthcare and clinical research environments.