SHANGHAI--Baidu Inc. will share software technology it is developing for self-driving cars in a bid to catch up with competitors including General Motors Co. and Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc. Open sourcing Baidu's capabilities in functions such as route planning, vehicle control and operating systems will help Baidu and the autonomous-vehicle industry develop more rapidly, Baidu group President Qi Lu said...

Move over, managers, there's a new boss in the office: artificial intelligence. The same technology that enables a navigation app to find the most efficient route to your destination or lets an online store recommend products based on past purchases is on the verge of transforming the office--promising to remake how we look for job candidates, get the most out of workers and keep our best workers on the job. These applications aim to analyze a vast amount of data and search for patterns--broadening managers' options and helping them systematize processes that are often driven simply by instinct. And just like shopping sites, the AIs are designed to learn from experience to get an ever-better idea of what managers want. A company can provide a job description, and AI will collect and crunch data from a variety of sources to find people with the right talents, with experience to match--candidates who might never have thought of applying to the company, and whom the company might never have thought of seeking out.

Google's DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shows that AI doesn't only learn from human knowledge, but also creates new knowledge. AlphaGo has it own creativity and intuition, inventing new knowledge and strategies about Go Game for human professionals to study in 2017. Go game was invented in ancient China more than 2,500 years ago, is an abstract strategy board game, aiming to surround more territory than the opponent for two players. It is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played today.Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is very complex, even more so than chess, and possesses more possibilities than the total number of atoms in the visible universe. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move.

With just a tap of the turn signal, Daimler's self-driving S-Class changes lanes in dense highway traffic. The specially trained driver keeps his hands on the wheel, just in case. But he doesn't need to use his feet at all. The car keeps a safe distance from other vehicles, and accelerates and brakes automatically. What's more, the driver needn't worry about traffic tickets either, since the car can be programmed to obey speed limits at all times.

Eighty-four percent of large companies around the world say they are using artificial intelligence, and 62% say AI is important to remaining competitive in the year 2020. Tata Consultancy Services polled 835 executives and IT managers in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and South America at companies that averaged $20 billion in revenues. It found AI to be almost universally important, but the average investment in it was one-third of one percent of revenues, or $67 million. Only 7% said they spent $250 million or more in 2016. The average was $67 million; the median for the whole group, only $3 million.

In recent times, adaptive machine learning has grown in demand among the marketing fraternity. Also, the availability of vast amounts of data when churned through a machine learning algorithm creates meaningful and proactive marketing decisions and communications relevant to the customer's wants. Our 4th part of Marketing Week Series speaks on the ability of Machine learning in solving problems of marketing. Machine learning is a discipline combining science, statistics and computer coding that aims to make predictions based on patterns discovered in data. It is a great way to automate marketing activities to make them less time consuming and to provide better experiences for your customers.

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is one of the most important methods in machine learning, and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is often used to obtain maximum likelihood estimates. However, EM heavily depends on initial configurations and fails to find the global optimum. On the other hand, in the field of physics, quantum annealing (QA) was proposed as a novel optimization approach. Motivated by QA, we propose a quantum annealing extension of EM, which we call the deterministic quantum annealing expectation-maximization (DQAEM) algorithm. We also discuss its advantage in terms of the path integral formulation. Furthermore, by employing numerical simulations, we illustrate how it works in MLE and show that DQAEM outperforms EM.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 18, 2017 –Socionext Inc. and SOINN Inc. today announced initial results of collaboration started in 2016, in which Socionext extracts and delivers biometrics data to the "Artificial Brain SOINN". The companies achieved initial results in reading ultrasound images from Socionext's viewphii mobile ultrasound solution by Artificial Brain SOINN. The results will be introduced at Medtec Japan, held in Tokyo Big Sight, April 19-21, at booths 4505 & 4507. In this initial trial, SOINN learned to read subcutaneous fat thickness from abdominal ultrasound images. The estimations by SOINN were then compared with the reading results by ultrasound technicians.

Summary: We are swept up by the rapid advances in AI and deep learning, and tend to laugh off AI's failures as good fodder for YouTube videos. But those failures are starting to add up. It's time to take a hard look at the weaknesses in AI and where that's leading us. Trying to spot new themes and directions I was trolling through some data and I found this. This is the Google Trends chart of searches for'Artificial Intelligence' for the last four years.

They were revealed at Facebook's F8 conference. SAN JOSE -- Last year Facebook Messenger oversold how soon chat bots would be able to carry on a human-like conversation to respond to your every need. This year at Facebook's annual F8 conference for software developers, the chat app has a new message for its 1.2 billion users: Chat and chat bots can be very useful in your daily lives. On Tuesday Messenger introduced the capability to have a group chat with a business, meaning you can plan a play list on Spotify, share highlights from NBA games, make a dinner reservation on Open Table or pick flights on Hipmunk for a summer getaway with a group of friends on Messenger without leaving the app. A discover tab now allows you to search for chat bots on Messenger.