Artificial intelligence… Two words which together conjure up so much wonder and awe in the imagination of programmers, sci-fi fans and perhaps just about anyone with an interest in the fate of the world! Thanks to man's best friend the dog R2-D2, the evil Skynet, the fantastical 2001: A Space Odyssey, post-apocalyptical androids dreaming of electric sheep, and maybe also Gary Numan, everyone is pretty well familiar with the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Yep, books, the big screen, comics, er… mashed potato advertisements – AI is in all of them in a big way. It also features heavily in the marketing materials of recently-appearing and exceptionally-ambitious cybersecurity companies. In fact, there's probably only one place today where you can't find it.

Google buys machine vision startup focusing on'instant object recognition' It's a good time to be a machine learning startup. Two weeks after Twitter bought, has purchased . The acquisition was made for an unknown sum, and seems primarily a grab for talent. Moodstocks' engineers and researchers will move to Google's Paris R&D site, and the startup's primary commercial product -- an image recognition API for smartphones -- will be phased out. "Ever since we started Moodstocks, our Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Machine intelligence Machine learning Places: Americas North America United States Google today announced it has acquired French machine learning startup Moodstocks for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the next few weeks and seems to be focused primarily on the talent, with the team at Moodstocks moving to Google's Paris R&D site, and its image recognition API for smartphones to be gradually phased out.

"BioTime harnesses the largest collection of highest-quality gene expression data coming from scrupulously designed and controlled cell differentiation experiments we have seen to date. It was large enough to train a complex architecture of deep neural networks to work as a classifier and a predictor of the embryonic state. We recently tested Embryonic.AI using mouse data and noticed surprising results showing the capabilities of this system in cross-species analysis. Research projects using Embryonic.AI may transform our understanding of cancer and other diseases and possible developments in reinforcement learning may help navigate and control cellular differentiation states", said Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D., CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc. The system utilizes a sophisticated architecture of multi-class deep neural networks (DNNs) and DNN ensembles trained on thousands of samples of carefully selected cells of multiple classes: embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, progenitor stem cells, adult stem cells and adult cells to recognize the class and embryonic state of the sample, achieving high accuracy in simulations.

Halfway into 2016, it is clear that we are living in a new era of innovation. Beyond Silicon Valley, corporations and startup hubs worldwide are tackling big problems like water scarcity and cancer. The concept of the "next big thing" is becoming redundant because breakthroughs have become normal. Artificial intelligence that can learn and function independent of human overlords seems like science fiction. Yet, this may become our new reality within the next 3–5 years.

Deep clustering is a recently introduced deep learning architecture that uses discriminatively trained embeddings as the basis for clustering. It was recently applied to spectrogram segmentation, resulting in impressive results on speaker-independent multi-speaker separation. In this paper we extend the baseline system with an end-to-end signal approximation objective that greatly improves performance on a challenging speech separation. We first significantly improve upon the baseline system performance by incorporating better regularization, larger temporal context, and a deeper architecture, culminating in an overall improvement in signal to distortion ratio (SDR) of 10.3 dB compared to the baseline of 6.0 dB for two-speaker separation, as well as a 7.1 dB SDR improvement for three-speaker separation. We then extend the model to incorporate an enhancement layer to refine the signal estimates, and perform end-to-end training through both the clustering and enhancement stages to maximize signal fidelity. We evaluate the results using automatic speech recognition. The new signal approximation objective, combined with end-to-end training, produces unprecedented performance, reducing the word error rate (WER) from 89.1% down to 30.8%. This represents a major advancement towards solving the cocktail party problem.

Chip maker Intel Corporation has acquired Itseez, a company specializing in computer learning and machine learning. Itseez is said to bring its expertise in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for automobiles to Intel. The move is likely a part of Intel's growing IoT-related ambitions. The firm recently acquired Yogitech, an Italian company manufacturing safety measures for semiconductors. The value of the deal it's not been disclosed.

Philippines' outsourcing industry races to expand higher-end services as hedge against automation, which is shaking up India

More than 1.5 billion people use Facebook. And only half speak English. The rest speak so many dozens of other languages, effectively silo'd off from the English speakers and, in many cases, from each other. If you stumble onto a Facebook post in a foreign language, Facebook lets you instantly translate it--in a semi-effective way. And beginning today, millions of people will have the option of instantly translating their own posts into any one of 44 other languages, so that they will automatically show up in your News Feed in your native tongue.

Between the Terminator movies, Ava from'Ex Machina', Google's AlphaGo beating the world's best human Go players, machines mimicking Rembrandt's style to paint portraits, debates about morality and privacy, and Stephen Hawking's warnings about the consequences of intelligent machines manned by idiot humans; it's no wonder that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made people a little uncomfortable. In the marketing world, it's caused the customary outbreak of confusion. Thus resulting in a series of obtuse declarations like "AI will change everything. EVERYTHING!" that are typical of the industry. Any time anything new threatens to upset business as usual, comrades in the marketing and advertising industry especially lunge headlong into an existential crisis. For instance, "Will AI make the creative kind obsolete?"

Alibaba's own news site Alizila reports that the company's goal is to connect all cars to the IoT ecosystem, where they can share data to create better experiences for users at home or on the go. The RX5 supports voice commands and navigation tools, and it will allow drivers to reserve and pay for parking spaces, gas station trips and coffee runs via Alibaba's payment service, Alipay. The "intelligent map" won't require WiFi or GPS to track the vehicle's location, the company says. Plus, the RX5 will save a unique "internet ID" for each driver that enters the vehicle, allowing the system to recommend specific music, air temperature or restaurants based on previous trips. The SUV features three LED screens and room for up to four detachable, 360-degree cameras perfect for recording drives or taking selfies, Alizila says.