After falling to the eventual NBA champs during the Eastern finals, the Toronto Raptors are hungry for a championship title. Thursday's draft will be crucial in crafting a winning lineup, and when it comes to deciding who makes the team, the Raptors will be able to consult their newest recruit: IBM's Watson. The partnership dates back to February, when the Raptors' parent company Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment announced they were partnering with IBM, making the Raptors the first NBA team to use the Watson supercomputer to analyze players. "Watson doesn't answer questions of who the best trade pick would be--rather it compares them on different dimensions," explained Jon Lenchner, the scientist who led the IBM Sports Insights Central project. IBMers collaborate through interactive touch screens as part of IBM Sports Insights Central.

Samsung Medison's new ultrasound system quickly screens for abnormalities. Artificial intelligence may be the new face of medical diagnostics. For the first time, a flavor of A.I. called deep learning is being implemented in new ultrasound imaging equipment to aid in breast exams and help patients avoid unnecessary biopsies. A new feature in Samsung Medison's ultrasound system uses a deep-learning algorithm to make recommendations about whether a breast abnormality is benign or cancerous. The "S-Detect for Breast" feature is now included in an upgrade to the company's RS80A ultrasound system and is commercially available in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Korea and is pending FDA approval in the U.S., according to PR manager Doug Kim.

Computer vision systems typically learn how to recognize an object by analyzing images of thousands of examples. But scientists at Disney Research have shown that computers also can learn to recognize objects they have never seen before, based in part on studying vocabulary. People, after all, can get an idea of what things might look like based on reading a book. Similarly, a computer that already has been taught to recognize certain objects - apples, for instance - can analyze word use to get hints about the existence of fruits such as pears and peaches, and how they might differ from apples, said Leonid Sigal, senior research scientist at Disney Research. The knowledge that other fruits exist also is helpful in teaching the computer about important characteristics of apples themselves, he added.

NIIT, a global leader in skills and talent development, today launched a course in Web App Development with MEAN Stack under the DigiNxt Series. The company has recently ventured into Digital Transformation to offer pioneering programs to young aspirants wishing to enter the digital services industry, as well as to IT professionals wishing to reskill themselves for the new digital world. The cutting-edge program will use the student-centred pedagogy of project-based learning to help them carve a successful career in the emerging digital era. Some of the famous web applications like LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber, Paypal, etc. have been built using MEAN Stack. AngularJS, Node.js (MEAN) represents a group of open source technologies which are known to synergize well together, thereby empowering students to launch their own web and mobile apps.

By the end of this article, you'll understand how Numerai is using advances in cryptography like homomorphic encryption to allow for open participation in the problem of stock market efficiency. Over the last few years, machine learning algorithms solved big problems in computer vision. One such problem was getting an algorithm to learn how to recognize handwritten digits in the MNIST dataset. Everyone writes digits differently, so the problem was difficult for computers to grasp. When the dataset first became available in 1998, machine learning algorithms for computer vision were not very accurate.

IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course available free online. By the time the course began in October, 160,000 people in 190 countries had signed up for it. At the same time Andrew Ng, also a Stanford professor, made one of his courses, on machine learning, available free online, for which 100,000 people enrolled. Both courses ran for ten weeks. Such online courses, with short video lectures, discussion boards for students and systems to grade their coursework automatically, became known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Last weekend, a drone flown by Pakistan's air force crashed just shy of four miles from an airbase in the Punjab. The drone appears to have been a Chinese-made Wing Loong. The drone, also known as the Pterodactyl, serves with the Chinese military, as well as that of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Until this crash, Pakistan was not a known operator of the Wing Loong. The drone resembles America's iconic Predator drone, and like how the Predator begat the Reaper, there's likely an improved version in the works, which might be what Pakistan is really after.

Despite the sophistication of their products, video game publishers are just as susceptible as less technically inclined brands to finding their carefully organised media coverage turning on them. This month, the trailer for upcoming game of drones and shooting people Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare became the second most disliked video in YouTube history, while fellow online first-person shooter, Battlefield 1 became one of the 150 most liked. One reason posited for this vast discrepancy is that players have finally got bored with the glib futurism of many current military games, their fatigue at yet more satellite strikes and exoskeletons brought into sharp relief by Battlefield 1's earthy, steampunk alternate first world war. While there may be an element of truth in that, it's mostly the result of vote-brigading by rabidly contrarian posters on games forums, and demonstrates that even with rigorous planning and budgetary figures normally associated with money laundering operations, you can still be the victim of unintended consequences. Capcom, makers of the Resident Evil series, also found out that publicity can create unpredictable knock-on effects.

The Year Without a Summer is why Robert Walton is important to Frankenstein: Like the newspapers, he's concerned about surviving climate chaos. He says that in the Arctic "the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. Frankenstein begins with the search for new, more habitable lands because of environmental anxieties. People did not know that the cooling trend was a temporary result of volcanic activity. Rather, they thought the summer of 1816, with its famine, social unrest, and winter eternal, was the new normal.

A university professor is heading the Japanese version of a U.S.-led movement to exonerate people who have been wrongfully charged and imprisoned using DNA testing. Mitsuyuki Inaba, 51, who is neither a lawyer nor an expert in criminal law, is a professor at Ritsumeikan University's College of Policy Science. He believes Japan's criminal justice system is rife with fundamental failures that lead to wrongful imprisonment due to the "unscientific" way in which investigations are carried out. Inaba, who specializes in cognitive science, took up the post of director at the Innocence Project Japan, which was launched in April in cooperation with lawyers and other legal experts. Similar movements have sprouted in Britain, South Africa and Taiwan.