Change detection is the study of detecting changes between two different images of a scene taken at different times. By the detected change areas, however, a human cannot understand how different the two images. Therefore, a semantic understanding is required in the change detection research such as disaster investigation. The paper proposes the concept of semantic change detection, which involves intuitively inserting semantic meaning into detected change areas. We mainly focus on the novel semantic segmentation in addition to a conventional change detection approach. In order to solve this problem and obtain a high-level of performance, we propose an improvement to the hypercolumns representation, hereafter known as hypermaps, which effectively uses convolutional maps obtained from convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We also employ multi-scale feature representation captured by different image patches. We applied our method to the TSUNAMI Panoramic Change Detection dataset, and re-annotated the changed areas of the dataset via semantic classes. The results show that our multi-scale hypermaps provided outstanding performance on the re-annotated TSUNAMI dataset.

This year is off and running with some extraordinary companies starting to make a name for themselves. I attend countless conferences and meetups. Over the course of my travels I meet with some of the most promising companies in the world. They've lead me over the years to discover three billion dollar unicorns before anyone else had written about them. Rather than opting to emulate what's on the market, here are a few companies that have stood out to me and I believe could be unicorns in the future.

IBM unveils Power8 Linux servers for deep learning IBM Linux server for high-performance computing. IBM has launched three Power8 Linux servers designed to accelerate artificial intelligence, deep learning, and advanced analytics applications. The new systems tap the Nvidia NVLink technology to move data five times faster than any competing platform, said Stefanie Chiras, an IBM vice president, in an interview with VentureBeat. These systems and their operating systems are part of a larger business group that generates about $2 billion a quarter for IBM. And the A.I. markets they're going after have exploded in the past couple of years.

You probably haven't heard of Mobileye, but in the past couple of years it has become one of the most important players in the emerging self-driving car industry. And that means Intel's $15 billion acquisition of the company, announced Monday, makes Intel one of the most important tech companies in the car industry. Intel powered the PC revolution by providing the computer chips that allowed PCs to become ever more powerful. Mobileye has positioned itself to do the same for self-driving cars: Currently, conventional car companies put Mobileye sensors, chips, and software into their vehicles in order to give them advanced driver-assistance capabilities. The company says its hardware is already embedded in more than 300 car models from 27 different car companies, and the company is reportedly working with giants such as GM and Volkswagen.

The operator of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear complex said Tuesday it suspended its plan to start examining the inside of reactor 1 with a self-propelled robot after having camera trouble. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. is checking the cause of the problem and hoping to resume the survey Wednesday in its latest attempt at ascertaining the condition of melted fuel debris in order to extract it. While preparation was underway to send the robot inside the containment vessel after launching the day's work shortly after 10 a.m., a camera monitoring inside a box containing the robot, cables and other related equipment was found to be showing no images, it said. The box is located just outside the containment vessel. The malfunctioning camera is separate from one attached to the survey robot and is used to check whether the devices are functioning properly, according to the utility. Tepco has been hoping to view the debris through a camera embedded in the shape-shifting robot in order to decide how to extract the deposits of fuel presumed to have penetrated the reactor pressure vessel and melted through the containment vessel, which is supposed to hold the fuel.

This shift was underlined on Monday when Intel said it would pay $15.3 billion to acquire Mobileye, an Israeli company that makes chips and cameras for cars and trucks, including the self-driving variety. The purchase will be Intel's second largest ever, following its $16.7 billion billion acquisition of chip-maker Altera in 2015. The Altera buy was also driven, in part, by the recent rise of machine learning, where machine learn can discrete tasks on their own. These are enormous acquisitions in many respects. After acquiring Mobileye, Intel will move its autonomous driving team to the Mobileye's headquarters, not vice versa.

Technology innovations meet greatest success in business when these are entirely'client focussed'. Developments in the retail sector, which is consumer-led, are addressing client demand for more personalised, faster and competitive services. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis are changing the way in which these services are offered. In particular Financial Organisations are creating and leveraging such innovation in the domain of wealth management. This trend is now being taken on board by multiple innovators: academia, start-ups, technology companies and financial market participants.

The automobile is being dismantled, reimagined, and rebuilt in Silicon Valley. Intel's proposed $15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye, an Israeli company that supplies carmakers with a computer-vision technology and advanced driver assistance systems, offers a chance to measure the scale of this rebuild. In particular, it shows how valuable on-the-road data is likely to be in the evolution of automated driving. While the price tag might seem steep, especially with so many players in automated driving today, Mobileye has some key technological strengths and strategic advantages. It's also developing new technologies that could help solidify this position.

Chatbots are exploding in the finance industry, and it's no surprise why. With the ability to automate operations, reach more customers, and provide a more friction-free banking experience, chatbots are streamlining and optimizing many banks' digital services. Here's how the world's biggest banks are using chatbots to boost their business. As one of the largest U.S. banks, Bank of America (BofA) is leading the charge for artificially intelligent chatbots in financial services. Last year, the company announced Erica, a voice- and text-enabled chatbot for BofA customers.

For many years, computers could play mathematical games like chess and the sheer computing horsepower was the key to their success. Last year, for the first time ever, a computer was able to play the complex board game of Go and win! "AlphaGo", the artificially intelligent player developed by Google, won the game by defying millennia of human instinct and intellect. What is most interesting about this is that it was not preprogrammed to play Go: rather, it learned using a general-purpose algorithm which allowed it to interpret the game's patterns and came up with entirely new ways of approaching the game that originated in China more than two thousand years ago. Clearly, machine learning and the larger world of artificial intelligence (AI) are no longer the stuff of science fiction. They're here–and many businesses are already taking advantage.