Amazon Web Services is increasingly gaining industry attention, and the company's recent hire of Alex Smola to lead the artificial intelligence initiative for AWS is expanding even more its infrastructure as a service cloud offerings. While Amazon Web Services has been around since 2006 its customer base varies widely from that of large cloud leaders Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and IBM (NYSE:IBM). Additionally, a large part of the Amazon Web Services business includes its own web business Amazon.com In the first quarter, Amazon reported sales of 29.13 billion with sales from Amazon Web Services accounting for 2.57 billion. The majority of AWS customers are startups seeking low-cost solutions without the burden of a full suite of enterprise infrastructure.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will announce its first rules permitting businesses to fly drones for limited purposes Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. The move is likely to spark further demands for easing restrictions on unmanned aircraft. The announcement, which will allow drones weighing roughly 50 pounds to fly at low altitudes only in daylight and within sight of operators, is imminent, agency officials reportedly said. The Journal reported that the rules are unlikely to please some proposed commercial operations of drones, which would like the aircraft to be allowed to operate at nights and outside the operator's line of sight. Millions of new users have been attracted annually by commercial drone operations in the U.S. alone.

Wealth management firms, among the least tech-literate sectors of the financial services industry, might become obsolete with high net-worth individuals (HNIs) increasingly adopting digital technologies that provide algorithm-based portfolio management advice. A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that surveyed 1,000 HNIs in Europe, North America and Asia, found only 25 per cent of wealth management firms globally offering digital channels beyond emails. The Tokyo office of McCann has created what it is claiming to be the first ad to be made by artificial intelligence. An ad for mint candy brand Clorets Mint Tab has been creative directed by AI-CD ß, which became the first machine member of McCann Japan's creative department at the beginning of April. "If we have been living in rigid ice, this is liquid-a new phase state.

Note: This article originally appeared in our sister publication, HPCwire. Greg Diamos, senior researcher, Silicon Valley AI Lab, Baidu (the China-based web services and search engine company), is on the front lines of the reinvigorated frontier of machine learning. Before joining Baidu, Diamos was in the employ of NVIDIA, first as a research scientist and then an architect (for the GPU streaming multiprocessor and the CUDA software). Given this background, it's natural that Diamos' research is focused on advancing breakthroughs in GPU-based machine learning. He answered questions about his research and his machine learning vision.

In the land rush to digitize the world, the home is the new frontier. Over the past few years, practically every household item within reach has been technologically upgraded and rendered "smart": toothbrushes, cutlery, baby monitors, refrigerators, thermostats, slow cookers, sprinkler systems, sex toys, even the locks in doors. Before they achieved enlightenment, they could perform only their rote, mechanical duties; now they can do so while connected to the internet. In the case of the telephone, this has been nothing short of revolutionary, but no other "smart" object has managed to replicate its success. The absurdity of the phenomenon was made unavoidably apparent in May, when a start-up unveiled a "smart tampon," called my.Flow.

New research suggests that computer models could help doctors achieve greater accuracy in the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. A research team from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system which is able to train computers to analyse pathologic image data [PDF]. The scientists hope that the programme could one day aid in diagnosing disease. 'Our AI method is based on deep learning, a machine-learning algorithm used for a range of applications including speech recognition and image recognition,' explained Andrew Beck, director of bioinformatics at the Cancer Research Institute at BIDMC and associate professor at HMS. He added: 'This approach teaches machines to interpret the complex patterns and structure observed in real-life data by building multi-layer artificial neural networks, in a process which is thought to show similarities with the learning process that occurs in layers of neurons in the brain's neocortex, the region where thinking occurs.'

Young people may have their first sexual encounter with robots in the near future, according an expert, which could hinder their ability to form meaningful relationships. Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, professor Noel Sharkey from Sheffield University cautioned that android sex dolls may have damaging reverberations for society. "Sex robots are accessible now and certainly [will be common] within the next 10 years. I think there will be an age limit. Certainly there should be, but if your dad or mum had one, you could sneak in and use it," he said.

The ability to represent complex high dimensional probability distributions in a compact form is one of the key insights in the field of graphical models. Factored representations are ubiquitous in machine learning and lead to major computational advantages. We explore a different type of compact representation based on discrete Fourier representations, complementing the classical approach based on conditional independencies. We show that a large class of probabilistic graphical models have a compact Fourier representation. This theoretical result opens up an entirely new way of approximating a probability distribution. We demonstrate the significance of this approach by applying it to the variable elimination algorithm. Compared with the traditional bucket representation and other approximate inference algorithms, we obtain significant improvements.

The researcher hired by Toyota Motor Corp. to spearhead its robotics and artificial intelligence efforts says the automaker's production principles can be applied to build affordable helper robots for rapidly aging societies. Robot makers are struggling with the same scale challenges that the auto industry overcame with the "miracle" that occurred when Henry Ford developed the assembly line, according to Gill Pratt, the chief executive officer of Toyota Research Institute. Toyota's vaunted production system later showed how to make cars both more cheaply and reliably, despite mistake-prone humans' role in manufacturing, he said. "My thought is, if the Toyota production system can be applied to cars, maybe it can also be applied to robots, because they're quite similar," Pratt told reporters Friday in Tokyo. He's particularly sanguine about the prospects for devices that would help the elderly age where they live.

Drowning in data is a real hazard with the Internet of Things (IoT). How should decisions be made with this flood of sensor data? A hybrid approach combining human intelligence and computing power works well. People are good at making decisions that require nuance and judgement, such as identifying hate speech in online postings. Computerized analytics is better at quickly processing large volumes of data.