Pixar founder George Lucas may have given the world the word "Droid" before he sold the company to Apple's Steve Jobs, but Apple CEO Tim Cook makes no secret that he wants his company to play its part in making intelligence in machines a reality. Cook talked up Apple's efforts in augmented reality just last week. This week he's spilling at least some of the beans on his company's plans for Artificial Intelligence, though his vision seems more connected to machine intelligence and pattern recognition than the evolution of a smart bot like C3PO, at least right now. "A.I. is horizontal in nature, running across all products," he told Nikkei. He said it is used "in ways that most people don't even think about."

Elon Musk reveals Tesla's'ludicrous mode' is about to get even faster: World's fastest production car will go from 0-60mph in just 2.4 seconds Elon Musk has revealed the Model S P100D's special'ludicrous mode', which already makes it the world's fastest production car, it about to get a speed boost. What riding the Hyperloop will really be like: Stunning... The robots that will run the gigafactory: Tesla buys German... Electric vehicles safety crackdown: New rules will force... The microbes of Manhattan: ATM study finds New York keypads... What riding the Hyperloop will really be like: Stunning... The robots that will run the gigafactory: Tesla buys German... Electric vehicles safety crackdown: New rules will force...

Some of the world's leading technology professionals have gathered for the third World Internet Conference, being held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, and top of everyone's agenda is the booming growth of artificial intelligence (AI), as it continues to penetrate every aspect of business and daily life. From customer services to wealth management, to reshaping the jobs market by replacing low-skilled workers, the sector is growing at an unprecedented pace, said analysts gathered for the event. Big names speaking during the three-day forum include Facebook's vice president Vaughan Smith and smartphone maker Huawei's chief executive Richard Yu. Senior officials from Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, are also attending. Hyde Chen, an analyst with UBS' chief investment office, told the Post the biggest issue facing the image of the AI sector is balancing the numbers of those being put out of work by the technology, with the jobs being created in its development. "Jobs with three characteristics are at high risk of being replaced: low-skilled roles, those doing repetitive tasks, and jobs that are predictable. AI [applications] will be doing these jobs in a more effective way in future," Chen said.

A team of scientists from the National Institute of Informatics in Japan have given up on making their AI smart enough to get into the University of Tokyo. The Todai Project -- Tokyo University's local nickname is "Todai" -- began in 2011, so we're sure at least some of them were disappointed by the decision. But, hey, this means robots aren't as smart as humans yet, and we don't have to fear an uprising in the near future. The researchers were hoping that the AI would score much higher than the 511 out of 950 it got last year when it took a standardized entrance exam in the country. Unfortunately, its overall results were pretty much the same for 2016.

In this letter, a novel weighted ensemble classifier is proposed that improves classification accuracy and minimizes the number of classifiers. Ensemble weight finding problem is modeled as a cost function with following terms: (a) a data fidelity term aiming to decrease misclassification rate, (b) a sparsity term aiming to decrease the number of classifiers, and (c) a non-negativity constraint on the weights of the classifiers. The proposed cost function is a non-convex and hard to solve; thus, convex relaxation techniques and novel approximations are employed to obtain a numerically efficient solution. The proposed method achieves better or similar performance compared to state-of-the art classifier ensemble methods, while using lower number of classifiers.

In this paper, we investigate the recovery of a sparse weight vector (parameters vector) from a set of noisy linear combinations. However, only partial information about the matrix representing the linear combinations is available. Assuming a low-rank structure for the matrix, one natural solution would be to first apply a matrix completion on the data, and then to solve the resulting compressed sensing problem. In big data applications such as massive MIMO and medical data, the matrix completion step imposes a huge computational burden. Here, we propose to reduce the computational cost of the completion task by ignoring the columns corresponding to zero elements in the sparse vector. To this end, we employ a technique to initially approximate the support of the sparse vector. We further propose to unify the partial matrix completion and sparse vector recovery into an augmented four-step problem. Simulation results reveal that the augmented approach achieves the best performance, while both proposed methods outperform the natural two-step technique with substantially less computational requirements.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 16, 2016) - TechCode, a global network of startup incubators and entrepreneur ecosystems, today announces the first cohort for its new accelerator program named the Global AI Accelerator. The accelerator will help startups build their product, streamline their supply chain, find and hire the right talent, syndicate and close funding rounds, strengthen their IP portfolio and gain access to global distribution channels. The cohort comprises fifty startups from ten countries, including the United States, China, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Israel, Korea, Mexico and Spain, who are integrating artificial intelligence in their technology, such as voice recognition, machine learning, natural language processing and more. Calibrate Education, Inc. creates tools that will allow students to learn in new ways and develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter Eggcyte builds personal cloud devices that let users store, search and privately share photos and videos Jasper is an AI-powered bot which is an evolution from a freelance marketplace into an on-demand recruiting service Sereneti Kitchen uses its robotic chef, Cooki, and food ecosystem, Foodi, to help users cook fresh, modern cuisine Slick is a motorized 3-axis stabilizer for GoPros, allowing action sports lovers to better capture their experiences Smartypans, a 2017 CES Innovation Award honoree, is a pan that computes nutrition, teaches users how to cook and documents recipes via an accompanying mobile app Solidface enables teams to create 3D designs, edit and collaborate in real time through its 3D CAD solution Sutro monitors water quality in pools or spas and allows users to administer chemicals or connect with a pool technician via a mobile app Titanium Falcon is a smart ring that uses motion or gestures to control apps on smart devices Yono is the first in-ear basal body temperature thermometer to collect data comfortably and accurately Calibrate Education, Inc. creates tools that will allow students to learn in new ways and develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter "International expansion is becoming more of a priority for today's startups, especially within the artificial intelligence field as the technology grows rapidly across the globe," said Luke Tang, Head of the TechCode Global AI Accelerator Program. "Our first-of-its-kind accelerator program enables our startups, who are from all over the world, to tap into our global resources to quickly commercialize their technologies and scale up their business. In doing so, we hope to further advance the artificial intelligence industry and help these promising startups find new ways to solve existing problems."

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. How many of these 13 artificial intelligence leaders are you already using? 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.

This'aware' AI knows what you want to buy and how to make you buy it Google's Translation App Is About To Get Much Better Why machine learning could change customer engagement, as we know it. Is Machine Learning Making Your Data Scientists Obsolete? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

The former F-16 and Air Force Thunderbirds pilot took over as commander of the unit in July 2015 and continues to fly drone missions himself from Creech on the MQ-9, more commonly known as the Reaper. His tenure comes at a time of unprecedented demand for the aircraft he commands – the percentage of missions in which Reapers fire their weapons has increased fivefold since 2011, he says. Now, roughly 15 percent of all the airstrikes in the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria are conducted by drones.