The numerous reports on the growth, potential and effects of artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and machine learning have caused many businesses to question what it will all mean for them. Automation, in one form or another, is already a part of our daily lives. A recent ADP report said Asia Pacific business leaders are increasingly recognising how AI technology can translate into higher productivity for organisations. While there has been a lot of discussions and analysis into how AI will disrupt and transform Australian business, cognitive computing, which is the hidden backbone of AI, hardly gets a mention. Cognitive computing is essentially the simulation of human thoughts through processes in a computerised model.

Atomic and thermonuclear bombs are now things of the past, as self-learning artificial intelligence systems could become the new super weapon of the 21st century, French futurist Jean-Christophe Boon said. "To me, it seems that it will be artificial intelligence systems," Bonn said during a press conference in Kaspersky Lab. "For their function, unlike an atomic bomb, there is no need for uranium, or factories or other hard-to-reach materials. Only silicon and electricity are needed." He further explained that artificial intelligence systems could not be traced, unlike uranium, plutonium, and other radionuclides.

Domain adaptation algorithms are useful when the distributions of the training and the test data are different. In this paper, we focus on the problem of instrumental variation and time-varying drift in the field of sensors and measurement, which can be viewed as discrete and continuous distributional change in the feature space. We propose maximum independence domain adaptation (MIDA) and semi-supervised MIDA (SMIDA) to address this problem. Domain features are first defined to describe the background information of a sample, such as the device label and acquisition time. Then, MIDA learns a subspace which has maximum independence with the domain features, so as to reduce the inter-domain discrepancy in distributions. A feature augmentation strategy is also designed to project samples according to their backgrounds so as to improve the adaptation. The proposed algorithms are flexible and fast. Their effectiveness is verified by experiments on synthetic datasets and four real-world ones on sensors, measurement, and computer vision. They can greatly enhance the practicability of sensor systems, as well as extend the application scope of existing domain adaptation algorithms by uniformly handling different kinds of distributional change.

We discuss some recent advances in machine learning and how combining machine learning and IoT gives rise to new opportunities for solving problems. EVENT SCHEDULE: • 7:00: Networking w/ Beer & Pizza • 7:30: Opening Remarks, Demos & Pitches • 7:50: Speakers' Talks w/ Q&A • 8:50: Networking w/ Beer & Pizza This event is supported by: • Startup Launchpad - Asia's largest hardware startup tradeshow held in Hong Kong that gives new companies access to 60,000 distributors and retailers worldwide. Please note that this is a Hardware Massive event for Hardware Massive members. If you attend and are not directly RSVP'd through the Hardware Massive event page, you will need to provide your name & email & approval for permission to register you onto our site at the door.

This article was posted by Xiu-Shen Wei. Xiu-Shen Wei is a 2nd-year Ph.D. candidate of Department of Computer Science and Technology in Nanjing University and a member of LAMDA Group. Deep Neural Networks, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. These methods have dramatically improved the state-of-the-arts in visual object recognition, object detection, text recognition and many other domains such as drug discovery and genomics. In addition, many solid papers have been published in this topic, and some high quality open source CNN software packages have been made available.

That is until last year, when Microsoft built one that could. Automatic speech recognition, or ASR, is an area that has gripped the firm's chief speech scientist, Xuedong Huang, since he entered a doctoral program at Scotland's Edinburgh University. "I'd just left China," he says, remembering the difficulty he had in using his undergraduate knowledge of the American English to parse the Scottish brogue of his lecturers. "I wished every lecturer and every professor, when they talked in the classroom, could have subtitles." In order to reach that kind of real-time service, Huang and his team would first have to create a program capable of retrospective transcription.

Paramount Pictures has retooled its decade-old "Transformers" franchise with a new mythology that ties the giant alien robots to the legend of King Arthur, Stonehenge and World War II. Still, after four previous movies, the Michael Bay franchise may be looking rusty to American audiences. The fifth in the series, "Transformers: The Last Knight," should gross $70 million Wednesday through Sunday in the United States and Canada, according to people who have reviewed audience surveys. Though that number will almost certainly be enough to unseat "Cars 3" from the No. 1 chart position, it will represent a steep drop from the previous installment. "Transformers: Age of Extinction," released in 2014, opened with $100 million in its first three days.

OCBC Bank has launched a comprehensive human resource mobile application, HR In Your Pocket, which includes an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that is integrated with the bank's HR information system to provide immediate and personalised responses. This places OCBC as the first bank in Singapore to have launched such an app. According to a media release, HR In Your Pocket was developed in-house and through feedback from employees wanting to be able to access HR information and perform HR-related matters anywhere and anytime, without having to contact the HR team or be seated at their desks. The app will benefit the bank's employees in Singapore by giving them access to a holistic HR resource centre for leave applications, tracking of employee medical and lifestyle expense reimbursement claims, internal job postings and OCBC Bank's people directory. It will be rolled out in OCBC Malaysia by the end of the year. Additionally, the app will feature an in-built chatbot, "Buddy", which will be able to answer employees' HR-related questions instantly.

This is a class in data visualization. But before we leap into making charts and maps, we'll consider the nature of data, and some basic principles that will help you to "interview" datasets to find and tell stories. This is not a class in statistics, but I will introduce a few fundamental statistical concepts, which hopefully will stand you in good stead as we work to visualize data over the next few weeks -- and beyond. We're often told that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." But data visualization and statistics provide a view of the world that we can't otherwise obtain. They give us a framework to make sense of daunting and otherwise meaningless masses of information. The "lies" that data and graphics can tell arise when people misuse statistics and visualization methods, not when they are used correctly. The best data journalists understand that statistics and graphics go hand-in-hand. Just as numbers can be made to lie, graphics may misinform if the designer is ignorant of or abuses basic statistical principles. You don't have to be an expert statistician to make effective charts and maps, but understanding some basic principles will help you to tell a convincing and compelling story -- enlightening rather than misleading your audience. I hope you will get hooked on the power of a statistical way of thinking. As data artist Martin Wattenberg of Google has said: "Visualization is a gateway drug to statistics." Download the data for this session from here, unzip the folder and place it on your desktop.

Dubai, also called the Future City, will start testing aerial taxi transportation later this year. Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority announced the flying drones at the 2017 World Government Summit in February. The agency revealed plans Monday to start trials of its Autonomous Aerial Taxis during this year's fourth quarter. The agency also announced an agreement with the German company Volocopter to operate the autonomous passenger drones. When the project was first announced, the agency was working with drone company EHang for single-passenger autonomous flying vehicles. EHang was then replaced with Volocopter.