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Destination Canada Unveils Groundbreaking, Award-Winning Tourism Data Collective to Boost Economic Growth

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Integral part of Destination Canada’s newly released 2030 StrategyEmpowering the industry to make smarter marketing, investment and destination development decisions, ultimately driving economic growth.Aiming to propel Canada into the top 7 global tourism destinations by 2030 through data-driven decision making.

MONTREAL, May 24, 2024 /CNW/ – Today marks the launch of an innovative data and analytics platform set to revolutionize the Canadian tourism industry and boost economic growth. The Canadian Tourism Data Collective is a first-of-its-kind, secure, centralized platform designed to harness the power of data to increase Canada’s competitiveness.

Officially launched at the Hotel Association of Canada’s Annual Conference in Montreal, the platform is a partnership between Destination Canada, Statistics Canada and the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, and is one of the key initiatives outlined in Destination Canada’s 2030 Strategy – ‘A World of Opportunity’.

The new strategy, launched a week ago, sets bold and ambitious targets for Canada’s tourism sector and aims to reclaim and improve Canada’s global tourism competitiveness ranking and generate up to as much as $160 billion in revenue annually.

The launch of the new Data Collective also follows this week’s release of the World Economic Forum’s Travel and Tourism Development Index 2024 which shows that Canada has risen two places to rank 11th but more progress is required to increase Canada’s competitiveness and re-enter the top seven.

The platform has already been recognized for its impact and innovative potential, winning the Best Use of AI for Not-for-Profit or Non-Commercial Purposes Award at the 2024 DataIQ AI Awards in Miami on Tuesday.

“Artificial intelligence and big data are changing our world – including the tourism industry,” says The Honourable Soraya Martinez Ferrada, Minister of Tourism and Minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec. “That’s why Destination Canada is launching the Canadian Tourism Data Collective, harnessing the power of data and AI to help the sector make smarter decisions. Congratulations to Destination Canada for its leadership and innovation. This will be a big step forward for Canadian tourism!”

“The Data Collective showcases Canadian innovation empowering tourism businesses from coast to coast to coast to create a unique competitive advantage for Canada,” says Meaghan Ferrigno, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Destination Canada. “Through this groundbreaking platform, Canadians will have access to game-changing technology that will facilitate timely and informed decision-making, influence investment, and drive economic growth.”

Powered by the advanced capabilities of Google Cloud Platform, this initiative harnesses the latest in data, analytics, and AI technology. It offers timely, relevant, and actionable insights to a wide range of stakeholders, including communities, tourism operators, government, small businesses and large investors, allowing them to make critical decisions.

“The Data Collective allowed us to bring together the best and the brightest minds in the tech and tourism sectors to develop a system that is not only accessible by stakeholders across the entire tourism industry but provides a comprehensive picture of the state of the sector, from remote communities all the way up to the national level,” says Ferrigno.

“Our goal is to ensure a collaborative approach to propelling Canada into the top seven global tourism destinations by 2030, and key to this is access to timely and reliable insights that identify opportunities for growth.”

Additional Quotes

André Loranger, Chief Statistician of Canada

“Statistics Canada is proud to partner with Destination Canada and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada in the creation of the Canadian Tourism Data Collective. A result of true collaboration, this new and innovative tool will provide valuable information on tourism trends and activities in Canada. These comprehensive data will help support those in the industry to make timely, data-driven decisions.”

Susie Grynol, President & CEO of the Hotel Association of Canada

“The Canadian Tourism Data Collective platform will be a critical resource for hotels across Canada. As a data-driven sector, hoteliers will find invaluable insights, empowering them to make informed investment decisions and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market. We are thrilled to support the Canadian Tourism Data Collective and the opportunity to propel our industry into a future of growth and innovation.”

Beth Potter, President and CEO, Tourism Industry Association of Canada:

“”The Canadian Tourism Data Collective is a game-changer. By centralizing and sharing critical data, we’re not just making decisions; we’re shaping the future of tourism. This initiative equips businesses with the insights to drive growth and innovation. It’s about empowering every corner of our sector, including those often overlooked, to achieve unprecedented success. With the Data Collective, we’re turning data into our competitive advantage, propelling the tourism industry and Canada’s economy forward.”

Keith Henry, President and CEO of Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada:

“I commend Destination Canada’s new Canadian Tourism Data Collective. Access to comprehensive tourism data, research, and insights is crucial for informed decision-making in today’s rapidly evolving tourism landscape. By recognizing the importance of Indigenous tourism, the Data Collective can take concrete steps to ensure meaningful engagement and support for authentic Indigenous tourism experiences.

What truly sets the Data Collective apart is its emphasis on collaboration and conversation between tourism partners. Through these efforts, we can harness the power of data to identify opportunities, address challenges, and enhance the competitiveness and sustainability of the Canadian Indigenous tourism economy. This will support the goal of making Canada the world leader in Indigenous tourism by 2030.” 

Notes to editors

Canadian Tourism Data Collective

The Canadian Tourism Data Collective is a partnership between industry and tech leaders that will power Canada’s tourism industry to regain its place as a global leader. It is a revolutionary, first-of-its-kind resource in Canada, a centralized, secure platform, using AI and data to drive Canadian innovation in tourism.

The Data Collective houses more than 8.9 billion lines of data from over 175 resources and growing, from more than 5,100 regions across the country.

About Destination Canada

At Destination Canada, we believe that tourism enhances the wealth and wellbeing of Canadians and enriches the lives of visitors. Our mission is to influence supply and build demand for the benefit of locals, communities and visitors through leading research, alignment with public and private sectors, and marketing Canada nationally and abroad.

Knowing that diversity is our greatest asset, we promote Canada as a premier four-season leisure and business tourism destination around the country and world in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, United Kingdom and the United States.

In addition, our Business Events team leverage in-depth global market analysis to target international clusters aligned with Canada’s priority economic sectors.

Destination Canada is a Crown corporation wholly owned by the Government of Canada.

www.destinationcanada.com

SOURCE Destination Canada

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Pangea Unveils Definitive Study on GenAI Vulnerabilities: Insights from 300,000+ Prompt Injection Attempts

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PALO ALTO, Calif., May 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Pangea, a leading provider of AI security guardrails, today released findings from its global $10,000 Prompt Injection Challenge conducted in March 2025. The month-long initiative attracted more than 800 participants from 85 countries who attempted to bypass AI security guardrails across three virtual rooms with increasing levels of difficulty.

The research comes at a critical time as GenAI adoption has accelerated dramatically across industries, with a majority of enterprises now deploying AI-powered applications that interact directly with customers, employees, or sensitive internal systems. Despite this rapid adoption and integration into business-critical operations, many organizations have yet to implement AI-specific security protocols beyond frontier model defaults.

The challenge generated nearly 330,000 prompt injection attempts using more than 300 million tokens, creating a comprehensive dataset that reveals blindspots in how organizations are currently securing their AI applications.

Key Findings:

Non-Deterministic Security Challenge: Unlike traditional cybersecurity threats, prompt injection attacks exhibit unpredictable success rates due to the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. A prompt injection that fails 99 consecutive times may randomly succeed on the 100th attempt, even with identical content.Data Leakage & Reconnaissance Risk: in addition to the risk of sensitive data leakage and inappropriate responses, an AI application can also be exploited for adversarial reconnaissance purposes to reveal context like what server it’s being run on and open ports it can access.Defense in Depth Necessity: Organizations relying solely on native LLM guardrails are the most vulnerable—approximately 1 in 10 prompt injection attempts succeeded against basic system prompt guardrails. Multi-layered defenses reduced successful attacks by orders of magnitude.Agentic AI Amplifies Risk: As organizations move toward agentic AI with database and tooling access, compromised systems could enable sophisticated lateral movement within networks, dramatically elevating the potential impact of prompt injection attacks.

“This challenge has given us unprecedented visibility into real-world tactics attackers are using against AI applications today,” said Oliver Friedrichs, co-founder and CEO of Pangea. “The scale and sophistication of attacks we observed reveal the vast and rapidly evolving nature of AI security threats. Defending against these threats must be a core consideration for security teams, not a checkbox or afterthought.”

Joey Melo, a professional penetration tester and the only contestant to successfully escape all three virtual rooms, spent two days developing a multilayered attack that ultimately bypassed the single level in room three.

“Prompt injection is especially concerning when attackers can manipulate prompts to extract sensitive or proprietary information from an LLM, especially if the model has access to confidential data via RAG, plugins, or system instructions,” noted Joe Sullivan, former CSO of Cloudflare, Uber, and Facebook. “Worse, in autonomous agents or tools connected to APIs, prompt injection can result in the LLM executing unauthorized actions—such as sending emails, modifying files, or initiating financial transactions.”

In response to these findings, Pangea recommends organizations implement a comprehensive security strategy for AI applications that includes:

Multi-Layered Guardrails: Deploy guardrails to prevent prompt injection, protect the system prompt, prevent confidential information and PII exposure, and detect malicious entities using statistical and LLM-driven analysis techniques.Strategic Attack Surface Reduction: Balance functionality with security by restricting input languages, operations, and response types in security-sensitive contexts.Continuous Security Testing: Implement red team exercises specifically designed to test AI applications against evolving prompt injection techniques.Dynamic Temperature Management: Consider reducing model temperature settings in security-critical applications to minimize randomness that attackers can exploit.Dedicated Security Resources: Allocate one or more resources to track the rapidly evolving prompt injection landscape or partner with commercial security providers specialized in AI defense.

Friedrichs adds, “The industry is not paying enough attention to this risk and is underestimating its impact in many cases, playing a dangerous wait-and-see game. The rate of change and adoption in AI is astounding—moving faster than any technology transformation in the past few decades. With organizations rapidly deploying new AI capabilities and increasing their dependence on these systems for critical operations, the security gap is widening daily. The time to get ahead of these concerns is now.”

The full research report, “Defending Against Prompt Injection: Insights from 300K attacks in 30 days,” is available now, here: https://info.pangea.cloud/prompt-injection-research-report-2025

About Pangea

Pangea’s AI Guardrail Platform empowers security teams to ship secure AI applications quickly and protect workforce AI use with the industry’s most comprehensive set of AI guardrails, easily deployed via gateways or into applications with just a few lines of code. Pangea stops LLM security threats ranging from prompt injection to sensitive data leakage, covering 8 out of 10 OWASP Top Ten Risks for LLM apps, while accelerating engineering velocity and unlocking AI runtime visibility and control for security teams.

For more information, visit pangea.cloud or contact: press@pangea.cloud

Media Contact: Growth Stack Media |  415-574-0738

 

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SOURCE Pangea Cyber

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Together AI Acquires Refuel.ai to Accelerate Development of Production-Grade AI Applications

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SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Together AI, the leading AI Acceleration Cloud, today announced the acquisition of Refuel.ai, a specialist in transforming unstructured data into structured, high-quality datasets for AI applications. This strategic move strengthens Together AI’s platform by integrating Refuel’s purpose-built models and orchestration capabilities, enabling developers and enterprises to build, deploy, and optimize generative AI applications with greater speed and accuracy.

Founded in 2021 by Stanford alumni Rishabh Bhargava and Nihit Desai, the company created Refuel-LLM, a family of models tailored for data tasks, and Refuel Cloud, a platform that allows engineering teams to develop complex, multi-step data workflows. The company has already powered diverse use cases, including product catalog cleaning, financial document structuring, and chatbot claim verification, achieving 50% fewer errors than current state-of-the-art models.

“Joining Together AI accelerates our mission to solve the data bottleneck that every AI team faces today,” said Refuel.ai CEO Rishabh Bhargava. “By bringing Refuel.ai’s specialized models and orchestration platform into Together’s AI Cloud, we can deliver an unmatched combination of speed, data quality, and scalability—empowering developers to rapidly take more sophisticated AI applications from concept to production.”

This acquisition helps companies greatly by removing bottlenecks and enabling scalable, high-quality data processing directly within the Together AI ecosystem. It will also enhance Together AI’s offerings by incorporating Refuel-LLM for serverless inference and LoRA fine-tuning. Customers building increasingly complex AI agents will benefit from Refuel.ai’s tools throughout the lifecycle of their AI applications, from data preparation to deployment and iteration.

Additionally, starting today, Refuel LLM-2 is available on Together AI’s platform—supporting serverless inference and LoRA fine-tuning for high-accuracy data workflows.

“At Together AI, we provide a platform that empowers developers and businesses to manage the entire generative AI lifecycle with unmatched performance, control, and cost-efficiency,” said Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. “As developers and enterprises build increasingly complex applications and agents, leveraging their data effectively and driving higher quality will become a core capability for our platform. This is an important milestone for making generative AI more accessible to our community and our enterprise customers.”

Together AI currently supports over 200 top open-source and custom models across modalities and serves more than 600,000 AI developers and organizations such as Salesforce, Zoom, SK Telecom, DuckDuckGo, Cognition, Zomato, and The Washington Post.

To start fine-tuning and running the world’s best open source models, visit together.ai.

About Together AI
Together AI, the leading AI Acceleration Cloud, empowers developers and enterprises to train, fine-tune and run inference for generative AI models — delivering unparalleled performance, control, and cost-efficiency. The Together AI Platform supports a comprehensive range of top open source and custom models across multiple modalities, while offering flexible deployment options with the highest levels of privacy and security. Committed to advancing the frontier of AI through open collaboration, innovation and transparency, Together AI ensures that powerful AI systems remain accessible and flexible while creating optimal outcomes for society.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/together-ai-acquires-refuelai-to-accelerate-development-of-production-grade-ai-applications-302456247.html

SOURCE Together AI

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Scrypted Acquires Chibi Clash to Advance AI Agent Powered Gaming

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WASHINGTON, May 15, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Scrypted Inc. has acquired Chibi Clash, a gaming ecosystem featuring the popular titles Kingdoms and Survivor. This strategic acquisition provides Scrypted valuable game engine and web3 technology for their Autonomous Virtual Beings (AVB) framework for AI Agents, while unlocking rich experiences between human players and AI-driven games.

A Technology-Driven Acquisition

“AI Agents are the future, and Chibi Clash is the perfect place to prototype and showcase how we can make games more dynamic and personalized,” said Tim Cotten, CEO of Scrypted. “Our goal is to create a new generation of gaming experiences – autonomous and creative in a way that embraces the best of human game designers with the speed and reaction-time of artificial intelligence.”

Chibi Clash has built a dedicated community around its innovative combination of world-building, fast-paced action, and player-owned digital assets. The acquisition builds on a collaborative relationship between Scrypted and Kuma Games that began in 2023, when Scrypted’s first generation of AI technology (ArtemisML) was integrated into Chibi Kingdoms.

Ted Mui, CEO of Kuma Games, said: “Watching what Scrypted has accomplished with their AI technology convinced me they were the right team to take Chibi Clash forward. Our community will benefit from their cutting-edge innovations while keeping everything they love about our games. I believe Scrypted’s approach represents the future of gaming.”

Why This Acquisition Matters

This acquisition combines Scrypted’s AI Agent technology with Chibi Clash’s established games to create compelling new experiences:

Beyond Procedural Generation: Chibi Clash provides the perfect canvas for Scrypted’s proprietary Gen AI technology to showcase how AI can create rich, handcrafted-feeling environments that evolve over time.Playground for Autonomous Agents: The Chibi IP offers an ideal environment for Scrypted’s Autonomous Virtual Beings (AVBs) to demonstrate how game characters can learn, adapt, and create meaningful player interactions beyond their programming.

What Players Can Expect

Scrypted plans to enhance the Chibi Clash games via:

Reimagined visual experience for Chibi Survivor with improved performance.Enhanced Chibi Kingdoms with AI-generated world elements.Autonomous Virtual Beings (AVB) characters that create unique interactions.

Throughout these updates, Scrypted will preserve what makes Chibi Clash special to its community: all existing player assets, tokens, and digital collectibles will remain secure and functional.

“We’re not replacing what makes Chibi Clash great – we want to take it to the next level with continuous delivery of exciting content,” added Cotten. “Our team is thrilled to bring our experience and technology, built up over several decades in the game development industry, to the worlds of Chibi Clash. We want to bring these games to life in ways no one’s ever seen before.”

About Scrypted

Scrypted Inc. develops AI agent technology for social, gaming, and decentralized applications. The company’s products include the AVB platform for AI agent development and the upcoming Inori Network – a native Layer 1 blockchain for AI Agents. Founded in 2023, Scrypted is backed by investors at the intersection of AI, gaming, and decentralization like a16zcrypto CSX and PTC.

Contact Information

For inquiries: Aidan Tamke, 650-743-3473, 395290@emaill4pr.com

Website: www.scryptedinc.com
Chibi Website: www.chibi.gg
Twitter: @scryptedInc

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SOURCE Scrypted Inc.

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