It's 2050 and the world revolves around you. From the contents of your fridge to room temperature -- digital assistants ensure your home runs smoothly. Your screens know your taste and show channels you want to see as you enter the room. Your car is driverless and your favourite barman may just be an android. Predictions for an AI-dominated future are increasingly common, but Antoine Blondeau has experience in reading, and arguably manipulating, the runes -- he helped develop technology that evolved into predictive texting and Apple's Siri.

"Spoon" is to "woman" as "tennis racket" is to "man." At least, that's according to AI algorithms trained on two of the more common collections of thousands of images that are usually used by researchers to help machines understand the real world. Wired reports that a team of researchers from the University of Washington studied gender predictions made by computer vision algorithms. What's particularly interesting is that biases present in image sets--such as the fact that women were 33 percent more likely to appear in a photograph related to cooking in one data batch it studied--are amplified in the connections that the AI's neural network makes. So, trained on that data set, an AI was 68 percent more likely to predict a woman was cooking, and did so even when an image was clearly of a balding man in a kitchen. It's by no means the first time that an AI has been observed to pick up gender biases from training data.

The Chinese government has been unequivocal in its goal to become the global AI leader. Three of the largest tech companies in China -- Sougou, China's second-biggest search giant, Sinovation Ventures, and internet firm Bytedance -- have joined forces to bring that plan to fruition. The companies pooled funds and data to create the AI Challenger contest. The contest features a prize pool of 2 million yuan, or approximately $300,000. Entrants will presumably be judged on innovation in the field of AI research.

Kharagpur, (West Bengal) The IIT Kharagpur is setting up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research and extending its science-heritage initiative to boost documentation, promotion of classical and folk arts and music, with alumni support, its director said on Friday. "Two Centres are being planned. Alumni is organising support for developing these two areas," IIT Kharagpur director PP Chakrabarti said here during the institute's 67th Foundation Day. For CoE in AI, the institute requires Rs 20 crore to get started for the core infrastructure. "But it will also get linked with the supercomputing facility, cloud computing etc. Additionally we want to do some really good projects in climate change and AI, big projects on healthcare and AI so that will require augmented funds," he said.

Key Points: – Access to appropriate domain data is the dominant factor in determining speech recognition performance. For this reason, Watson offers a cloud-based API with a general model with the option to customize. This allows the client to maintain control of their critical private and proprietary information. Automatic speech recognition, the ability to identify words and phrases in spoken language and converting them to text in real-time, provides nearly endless opportunities for the humans that use these AI systems, from improving customer satisfaction or enabling remote communication between doctors and patients to improving accessibility for the deaf or the blind. Platforms and applications built on automatic speech recognition are only as good as the system's understanding of language, and the way this understanding is measured. Achieving human parity, meaning an error rate on-par with that of a human listening to two people in conversation, has long remained a significant industry challenge – as has measuring it consistently.

Andrew Ng has led teams at Google and Baidu that have gone on to create self-learning computer programs used by hundreds of millions of people, including email spam filters and touch-screen keyboards that make typing easier by predicting what you might want to say next. As a way to get machines to learn without supervision, he has trained them to recognize cats in YouTube videos without being told what cats were. And he revolutionized this field, known as artificial intelligence, by adopting graphics chips meant for video games. To push the boundaries of artificial intelligence further, one of the world's most renowned researchers in the field says many more humans need to get involved. So his focus now is on teaching the next generation of AI specialists to teach the machines.

What does artificial intelligence researcher Andrew Ng have in common with a "very depressed robot" from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"? Here are some fun facts about the man who connected graphics chips to neural networks and has taught millions of artificial intelligence students online. Google's deep-learning unit was originally called "Project Marvin" -- a possible reference to a morose and paranoid android with a "brain the size of a planet" from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Ng didn't like the association with "this very depressed robot," he says, so he cut to the chase and changed the name to Google Brain. Ng met his roboticist wife, Carol Reiley, at a robotics conference in Kobe, Japan.

Andrew Ng has led teams that have gone on to create self-learning computer programs used by hundreds of millions of people, including email spam filters and touch-screen keyboards that make typing easier by predicting what you might want to say next. As a way to get machines to learn without supervision, he has trained them to recognize cats in YouTube videos without being told what cats were. And he revolutionized this field, known as artificial intelligence, by adopting graphics chips meant for video games. To push the boundaries of artificial intelligence further, one of the world's most renowned researchers in the field says many more humans need to get involved. So his focus now is on teaching the next generation of AI specialists to teach the machines.

I had been in a years-long relationship with Siri when my affair with the Google Assistant began. Assistant made me laugh with some silly jokes, and we played a cute game she made in the Allo chat app called "Emoji Movie." Soon, Assistant popped up in more places in my life -- whether it was a smartwatch I was reviewing or the Assistant app on my iPhone. Then, for a week, I was tasked with using Assistant exclusively for all the things I would normally ask Siri to do. I thought it would be a fun change, but committing to Assistant required some big adjustments.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk fired off a new and ominous warning on Friday about artificial intelligence, suggesting the emerging technology poses an even greater risk to the world than a nuclear conflagration with North Korea. Musk--a fierce and long time critic of A.I. who once likened it to "summoning the demon" in a horror movie--said in a Twitter post that people should be concerned about the rise of the machines than they are. Reacting to the news that autonomous tech had bested competitive players in an electronic sports competition, Musk posted what appeared to be a photo of a poster bearing the chilling words "In the end, the machines will win." Musk, who is spearheading commercial space travel with his venture SpaceX, is also the founder of OpenAI, a nonprofit that promotes the "safe" development of AI. His stance puts him at odds with much of the tech industry, but echoes remarks of prominent voices like Stephen Hawking--who has also issued dire warnings about machine learning.