This will reduce attrition, hiring costs and the effort.

Imagine pulling into a Starbucks drive-thru and seeing not just your drink order but your name on the screen -- along with the suggestions of what foods you might like with your drink, automatically generated by the weather, your buying history, and the choices that others with similar preferences have made. Coming soon to a Starbucks drive-through near you -- and to your smartwatch, and possibly to each store's cash register -- are serving suggestions generated by artificial intelligence. It's all part of the coffee giant's plan to use AI and the cloud to drive sales and growth, as laid out in a 45-minute presentation this month at Starbucks Investor Day in Manhattan. "I hope you're convinced we're continuing to set the bar for digital in brick-and-mortar," said Matt Ryan, Starbucks chief strategy officer, after laying out the company's technology plans. It gives us the advantage we have moving forward." Seattle-based Starbucks is going strong -- growing steadily and last month ...

Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick wears a helmet as he speaks at an event in New Delhi on Dec. 16. Uber's puzzling defiance of a California requirement that it get a $150 permit to operate self-driving cars in San Francisco came to an end with the ride-hailing company announcing it was suspending the program. Uber had little choice: California's Department of Motor Vehicles revoked registrations for its 16-vehicle test fleet earlier in the day. "We're now looking at where we can redeploy these cars, but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules," the company said in a statement. Uber's stance began with the start of the test program on Dec. 14, acknowledging from the get-go that it had decided not to seek Autonomous Vehicle Testing permits, despite the fact that they aren't particularly difficult to get.

Would you have sex with a robot? Would a robot have the right to say no to such a union? These were just a few of the questions being asked at the second Love and Sex with Robots conference hastily rearranged at Goldsmiths University in London after the government in Malaysia - the original location - banned it. It has proved controversial, not only to countries with conservative views. There were no representatives from the sex industry in attendance and no sex robots on display, leading some to question the point of the event.

The report anticipates economic effects across several fronts. AI, like any new technology, is key to growth because it increases output without requiring increases in labor or capital. "In the last decade, despite technology's positive push, measured productivity growth has slowed in 30 of the 31 advanced economies, slowing in the United States from an average annual growth rate of 2.5% in the decade after 1995 to only 1.0% growth in the decade after 2005," the report states. Any increase in aggregate productivity from adopting artificial intelligence would be a welcomed change. But the resultant job automation is causing alarm.

Most of the existing studies on voice conversion (VC) are conducted in acoustically matched conditions between source and target signal. However, the robustness of VC methods in presence of mismatch remains unknown. In this paper, we report a comparative analysis of different VC techniques under mismatched conditions. The extensive experiments with five different VC techniques on CMU ARCTIC corpus suggest that performance of VC methods substantially degrades in noisy conditions. We have found that bilinear frequency warping with amplitude scaling (BLFWAS) outperforms other methods in most of the noisy conditions. We further explore the suitability of different speech enhancement techniques for robust conversion. The objective evaluation results indicate that spectral subtraction and log minimum mean square error (logMMSE) based speech enhancement techniques can be used to improve the performance in specific noisy conditions.

You can almost hear the whooshing sound as the technology industry is sprinting to the marketplace with new solutions to help the enterprise garner useful and intelligent insights from their data. Analytics, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) delivered in a simplistic form is what companies are demanding. To meet this mandate, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE) has developed Haven OnDemand, which offers the latest technology in a simplified platform for developers. Jeff Veis, VP of Big Data Platform Solutions, HP Software, at HPE, spoke to John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover 2016 Las Vegas to discuss Big Data and the needs of the enterprise. Furrier began the interview by asking Veis about the driving force behind the need for machine learning.

IMAGE: Figure 1 shows three kinds of patterns, "I ", "C ", and "T ", expressed in 3x3 blocks used for the associative memory operation experiment. Researchers at Tohoku University have, for the first time, successfully demonstrated the basic operation of spintronics-based artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, which emulates the information processing function of the brain that can quickly execute complex and complicated tasks such as image recognition and weather prediction, has attracted growing attention and has already been partly put to practical use. The currently-used artificial intelligence works on the conventional framework of semiconductor-based integrated circuit technology. However, this lacks the compactness and low-power feature of the human brain.

Honda Motor Co. is the latest carmaker that plans to outfit its vehicles with self-driving technology from Waymo, the company born out Alphabet's Google Car research project. Honda has already announced plans to put vehicles with automated driving capabilities on the road sometime around 2020, but said today it will also explore putting Waymo's technology in its vehicles as a different approach to bring fully self-driving technology to market. The discussions are in the early stages. As a first step, Honda R&D Co., the research and development subsidiary of the Japanese company, said it could provide Waymo with vehicles modified to accommodate Waymo's self-driving technology. These vehicles would join Waymo's existing fleet, including 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans announced earlier this week, which are currently being tested across four U.S. cities.

Thirty of the world's top scientists are scheduled to meet at UC San Diego in February to discuss the toughest challenges in robotics and automation, including how to make driverless cars safe for a mass audience. The experts are being brought together by Henrik Christensen, the prominent Georgia Tech engineer who was hired in July to run UC San Diego's young Contextual Robotics Institute. Christensen said at the time, "I want to build a research institute that, ideally, will be in the top five in the world five years from now. Why not see if we can make San Diego'Robot Valley.'" The February forum is being eyed as a step toward raising the university's visibility in robotics, a field defined by grand advances and embarrassing setbacks.