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Silicon Valley investor and web pioneer Marc Andreessen said in 2011 that "software is eating the world." The explosion of app ecosystems seems to prove his point, but things have changed dramatically even since then. These days, it might be more accurate to say that "AI is fueling the software that's eating the world," but I've never been very quotable. In any case, it's not impossible to ignore the normalization of artificial intelligence at this year's Mobile World Congress -- even if a resurrected 17-year-old phone did end up stealing the show. When it comes to the intersection of smartphones and AI, Motorola had the most surprising news at the show.
We shall fight them on the Xbox: a short history of Nazi-shooting video games
For a while it seemed like all we ever did in video games was shoot Nazis. In 1997, Steven Spielberg, post-Schindler's List, pre-Saving Private Ryan and apparently in the midst of a second world war fixation, met with a team at DreamWorks to outline an idea for a first-person shooter set in 1944. In the resulting game, Medal of Honor, you played as protagonist Lieutenant Jimmy Patterson, who parachutes into Nazi territory in a bid to single-handedly turn the tide of war. In this way, Spielberg's game was reminiscent of Hollywood's most jingoistic postwar output. Like 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima or 1965's Battle of the Bulge, Medal of Honor used the theatre and mud-flecked aesthetic of the war to present a revisionist, nationalistic yet deeply cathartic take on the war of our grandparents.
Drone strikes kill suspected al-Qaeda fighters in Yemen
A US drone strike killed two suspected members of al-Qaeda in southern Yemen, said a security official and residents. Saturday's raid in Ahwar, in the southern province of Abyan, killed two suspected fighters on a motorbike, the security official said. It came after two days of intensive air strikes by US warplanes on fighters in the war-torn country. Tribal sources and residents said another drone fired at a crowd of suspected al-Qaeda militants in al-Saeed, in the adjacent province of Shabwa, but there were no reports on casualties in that incident. On Friday, the Pentagon said it carried out "somewhere over 30" strikes against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in two days, conducted in partnership with the Yemeni government.
CKGSB Knowledge Series: AlphaGo, AI and Finance with Dr. Huining (Henry) Cao
Join us as Dr. Huining (Henry) Cao explores the impact of artificial intelligence on financial markets. Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing driverless car technology, speech recognition, image processing, automatic translation, big data analysis and many other sectors in marketing and finance. One striking example is Google's AlphaGo, a recent algorithm based on AI that has defeated the best human players in Go and Texas Poker, previously thought the last strongholds of human intelligence. Much of the progress comes from the connectionism approach, which models behavior as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units. A major representation of the connectionist approach uses artificial neural networks to simulate human perception, cognition and decision making.
Nintendo Switch: 5 Things Missing From The New Console's Library
I like the Nintendo Switch. Conceptually, it is the most intelligently designed console in the past 15 years. However, a console is only as strong as its library, and The Switch's selection of games looks a little thin for the foreseeable future. Nintendo is to gaming what Major League Baseball is to major sports leagues. They are so established, revered and covered by a hardcore following that they are often resistant to stepping outside of their normal profile.
Hottest areas in Artificial Intelligence
IDC sees widespread adoption of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence (AI) across a broad range of industries will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020. According to a new Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide from International Data Corporation (IDC), the market for cognitive/AI solutions will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.1% over the 2016-2020 forecast period. "Near-term opportunities for cognitive systems are in industries such as banking, securities and investments, and manufacturing," said Jessica Goepfert, program director, Customer Insights and Analysis at IDC. "In these segments, we find a wealth of unstructured data, a desire to harness insights from this information, and an openness to innovative technologies. For instance, cognitive technologies are being used in the banking industry to detect and combat fraud โ consistently a top industry pain point. Meanwhile, in manufacturing, executives cite improving product quality as a top initiative. In this case, cognitive systems recognize and know how to respond to dynamic fluctuations in product specs by adapting the production to stay within quality targets."
Spectral Clustering via Graph Filtering: Consistency on the High-Dimensional Stochastic Block Model
Pydi, Muni Sreenivas, Dukkipati, Ambedkar
Spectral clustering is amongst the most popular methods for community detection in graphs. A key step in spectral clustering algorithms is the eigen-decomposition of the $n{\times}n$ graph Laplacian matrix to extract its $k$ leading eigenvectors, where $k$ is the desired number of clusters among $n$ objects. This is prohibitively complex to implement for very large datasets. However, it has recently been shown that it is possible to bypass the eigen-decomposition by computing an approximate spectral embedding through graph filtering of random signals. In this paper, we prove that spectral clustering performed via graph filtering can still recover the planted clusters consistently, under mild conditions. We analyse the effects of sparsity, dimensionality and filter approximation error on the consistency of the algorithm.
Google uses AI to help diagnose breast cancer
Google announced Friday that it has achieved state-of-the-art results in using artificial intelligence to identify breast cancer. The findings are a reminder of the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, and its potential to improve global health. Google used a flavor of artificial intelligence called deep learning to analyze thousands of slides of cancer cells provided by a Dutch university. Deep learning is where computers are taught to recognize patterns in huge data sets. With 230,000 new cases of breast cancer every year in the United States, Google (GOOGL, Tech30) hopes its technology will help pathologists better treat patients.
Google and IBM: We Want Artificial Intelligence to Help You, Not Replace You
In an era of maturing artificial intelligence technology, what does the future of the corporation look like? Will the rise of robots help us do our jobs better, or harm them? This dynamic has become a mainstay of the dialogue around AI, with voices from technology visionaries such as Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking weighing in. But at Fortune's Most Powerful Women International Summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday, leaders at two of the world's most powerful tech giants pushed back on those concerns. AI is intended to help--not hinder--the human workforce, they said.
Why no job is safe from the rise of the robots
The highly intelligent machines that will be unleashed in the near future won't be coming for our lives. They'll be coming for our jobs. Being rendered obsolete by technology has been a concern among the flesh-and-blood set for hundreds of years -- cars put many in the horse industry out of work, for example -- but the speed and types of recent advances are about to give the issue an exceptional urgency. Previously, it was repetitive blue-collar jobs that were at risk, such as those in manufacturing. In the near future, however, the leaps in artificial intelligence will soon make it possible for machines to do all sorts of jobs, including those that require thinking skills we once believed beyond the reach of machines.