Machine learning has been one of the most exciting development we have had since the internet and its subsequent spread through smart phones. Andrew Ng likens artificial intelligence (AI: term can be used vice versa with machine learning as of this moment that AI system learns from data, but this hasn't always been the case) to electricity; that AI will be pervasive, everywhere and transformative in the way we do things. Why would it be so transformative to the way we do things? Its simply that before advent of AI, everything we built were not even stupid, they had no thoughts and take no actions, its people who gotta make all the decisions for them. My own first practical exposure to building a practical AI system was when I started working as a wind energy analyst.

Indian IT services major Infosys Ltd has invested DKK 14.92 million ($2.14 million) in UNSILO, a Danish artificial intelligence startup focussed on advanced text analysis, the company said in a stock market disclosure on Friday. The investment comes just within a week after the IT firm, through its innovation fund, backed US-based TidalScale. "UNSILO have built an impressive semantic search engine with best-in-class text intelligence, which powers a range of advanced business processes. We will partner with UNSILO to bring their artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to our global clients. They join and expanding portfolio of innovative young companies from around the world that Infosys works with to help enterprises drive their digital transformation," said Ritika Suri, executive vice-president & global head of corporate development & ventures at Infosys.

Apple's iPhones and iPads are losing the battle against Android devices. That's according to a new study by mobile diagnostics firms Blancco Technology Group (BTG), which claims that Apple's devices are less reliable and experienced a bigger failure rate than their Android counterpart, driven by bugs in the iOS 10 update. For the purposes of the report the word "failure" refers to any number of problem including instances of apps crashing, connection difficulties and overheating. About 62 per cent of iOS devices suffered performance failures in the third quarter of 2016 compared with 47 per cent of Android devices, the report found. The iPhone 6 was the main culprit with the highest failure rate of 13 per cent.

Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. FILE- In this file photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, obscured second right, attend an exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of RT (Russia Today) 24-hour English-language TV news channel in Moscow, Russia. Flynn is widely reported Thursday Nov. 17, 2016, to be a potential contender to become national security advisor to U.S. president elect Donald Trump, although his appointment may be controversial. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn walks through the lobby at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York.

LAS VEGAS: Marvin is just a few inches tall, but he has a big mouth. "What do you think of that, human?" he sneers as he ties the scores 1-1."Is that the best you can do?" he jeers as he takes a 2-1 lead. "Oh no, IBM will fire me if I lose," he says, as the score is tied 2-2. The decisive move comes up, and Marvin is beaten. "My robot mind is officially blown," he intones, making a fizzing sound as the audience laughs and claps.

First impressions are notoriously subjective (and flawed), but now machines are being trained to make similar snap judgments based on human-generated data. AI-published books may not be too far away! Researchers at Kyushu University in Japan have trained a deep neural network to study book covers and determine their category. On a hunt for interesting and high-quality datasets to use for machine learning, I stumbled upon these 20 weird and wonderful sets. Neat! Check out this open source deep convolutional neural network that is trained on transformed audio signals to recognize "ahem" sounds.

"Henn na Hotel," or "strange hotel" in Japanese, in the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, has been recognized by Guinness World Records as "the first robot-staffed hotel" in the world, the theme park operator said Thursday. "Our hotel will keep on moving with the evolution of robots and artificial intelligence, aiming to entertain our guests better and make them happy," Hideo Sawada, president of the operator under the wing of major travel agency H.I.S. Co., said at a news conference in Tokyo. "We want to boost the number of this kind of hotel to 100 over three to five years, including those abroad and under franchise," Sawada, who doubles as H.I.S. chairman, added. Henn na Hotel, which opened in July 2015, has 144 rooms, and 186 robots are working there, including multilingual receptionists and porters. The cumulative number of guests at the hotel stood at some 78,000 as of the end of October.

Google is bringing graphics processing unit (GPU) chips to its Compute Engine and Cloud Machine Learning to boost performance for intensive computing tasks like rendering and large-scale simulations. GPUs will be available from Google Cloud Platform worldwide in early 2017, according to an announcement this week. In a separate announcement on Tuesday the company announced a new Cloud Machine Learning group, and a series of moves related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Google introduced its new Cloud Jobs API, which applies machine learning to the hiring process, as well as significantly reduced prices for its Cloud Vision API, and a premium edition of its Cloud Translation (formerly Google Translate) API. A blog post outlining Google's machine learning-related updates also announces the general availability of the Cloud Natural Language API.

Editors at the MIT Technology Review recently weighed in with their annual review of the world's 50 Smartest Companies. This list celebrates the most effective pairing of innovation and business across the globe. For the first time, more than 20% of MIT's picks rely on artificial intelligence to support their business at a fundamental level, somewhat redefining what it means to be a truly "smart" company today. It's working on speech recognition intelligence called Deep Speech 2. This reduces the chance of accidents on autopilot by 50% relative to the safety record of human drivers, according to CEO Elon Musk. Now, Tesla automobiles come off the assembly line "future ready" for complete self-driving.

Book covers are usually designed to reflect what the book is all about -- which isn't exactly in line with the famous saying about judging a book by its cover. Now, a pair of researchers from Kyushu University in Japan wanted to find out just how well artificial intelligence (AI) can engage in the proverbial book judging. It turns out, neural networks perform fairly well. The task was simple: can a deep neural network, which has four layers of up to 512 neurons each, correctly identify what genre a book belongs to just by analyzing its cover? They trained their neural network using 80 percent of this data to recognize a book's genre by looking at the cover image.