If you own a Roomba, you can thank Rodney Brooks, because he's the co-founder of iRobot. He launched the company almost three decades ago when he was a professor at MIT. He's trying to disrupt the world of industrial robotics with his new startup, Rethink Robotics. While I was in Boston a few weeks ago, I visited Rod at his home in Cambridge and captured some great stories. His extensive experiences over his career inspired the new company.

UPDATED with expert analysis WASHINGTON: The Pentagon has created a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) that will have oversight over almost all service and defense agency AI efforts. This coordination function is crucial to the emerging AI arms race with Russia and China, experts told us. The JAIC will report to Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy, the establishing memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan says. Its ambit is not quite untrammeled; any projects under $15 million remain the authority of the service or agency. The JAIC will establish a common set of AI "standards…. Undersecretary for Research & Engineering Mike Griffin, a far more prominent proponent of AI and other cutting-edge technologies who has warned China and Russia are catching up to the US, "will continue to promote development of new AI technologies, systems, and concepts" but without any clearly specified role in the new center. CIO Deasy has 30 days to consult the rest of the department ...

Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them. Think of your immune response as a giant machine-learning problem, with your body as the computer. Immune cells travel around your body, sampling all sorts of matter they come into contact with, from your own cells to the cells of organisms that definitely shouldn't be there. If immune cells encounter something they know shouldn't part of your body -- bacteria or a virus, say -- the body scales up the cells that know how to deal with that interloper.

Insurers need to become the home page for their customers. A home page is a source of meaningful, targeted and useful content that the customer seeks out. Technology can now deliver innovative solutions directly to insurance customers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are delivering targeted content continually from multiple sources, including data generated from IoT devices owned by customers, in real time. Focusing on the customer will make the relationship more valuable to the consumer, and will increase the number of interactions with the insurance company.

The API provides pre-trained object detection models that have been trained on the COCO dataset. COCO dataset is a set of 90 commonly found objects. See image below of objects that are part of COCO dataset. In this case we care about classes -- persons and soccer ball which are both part of COCO dataset. The API also has a big set of models it supports. See table below for reference. The models have a trade off between speed and accuracy. Since I was interested in real time analysis, I chose SSDLite mobilenet v2. Once we identify the players using the object detection API, to predict which team they are in we can use OpenCV which is powerful library for image processing.

What trousers should i wear this shirt with? What bag goes well with this dress and these boots?This is a sort of question that would require a fashion brain. Standard way to find a vector image representation would be fine tune a pre-trained CNN (Inception Model) with fashion tags in a multi-label training environment. If we can assemble deep tags like neck types and skirt lengths etc, we can create a CNN based tag classification engine and use the fully connected last layer as the image representation.That representation can be used via transfer learning into multiple problems like similarity recommendations. The problem with such representations is that they contain only the visual cues on the image, i.e that all round neck t-shirts will be closer to each other in that vector space.This does not capture syntactic information or information based on things that co-occur.

Now that nearly every company is considering how artificial intelligence (AI) applications can positively impact their businesses, they are on the hunt for professionals to help them make their vision a reality. According to research done by Glassdoor, data scientists have the No. 1 job in the United States. The survey looked at salary, job satisfaction and the number of job openings. If you have recent experience looking for AI specialists to join your team, it's quite clear that we're facing an AI skills crisis. In order to move AI projects from ideation into implementation, companies will need to determine how to close the AI skills gap so they have experts on their team to get the job done.

What happens when you mix killer robots and Communists? It sounds like the punch line to a Cold War joke, but there are reasons to wonder whether China's Communist government, which likes to make decisions for its citizens, can work with autonomous armed robots that make their own decisions. Ditto for the People's Liberation Army and its Soviet-style centralized command and control system. "In a military context, questions of trust will be paramount," China expert Elsa Kania told The National Interest. "Will the PLA be more or less inclined to trust machine intelligence, relative to human intelligence? Will a military organization that often seems unwilling to grant autonomy to its officers and enlisted personnel be willing to embrace the autonomy of AI systems?"

Natural selection has been a cornerstone of evolutionary theory ever since Darwin. Yet mathematical models of natural selection have often been dogged by an awkward problem that seemed to make evolution harder than biologists understood it to be. In a new paper appearing in Communications Biology, a multidisciplinary team of scientists in Austria and the United States identify a possible way out of the conundrum. Their answer still needs to be checked against what happens in nature, but in any case, it could be useful for biotechnology researchers and others who need to promote natural selection under artificial circumstances. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. A central premise of the theory of evolution through natural selection is that when beneficial mutations appear, they should spread throughout a population.

PTC (NASDAQ:PTC), a IoT, Industry 4.0 and control software provider to government and industry, has partnered with Rockwell Automation (NYSE:ROK), the world's largest company dedicated to industrial automation and information, "to accelerate growth for both companies and enable them to be the partner of choice for customers around the world who want to transform their physical operations with digital technology." Rockwell is making a $1 billion equity investment in PTC as part of the deal in which the two agreed to align their respective smart factory technologies and industrial automation platforms. JD (JingDong) (NASDAQ:JD), the Chinese equivalent to Amazon and China's 2nd largest e-commerce provider, raised $500 million from Google/Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG). Like Amazon, JD is heavy in the automated logistics business and now, with this investment, JD plans to open restaurants staffed by robots starting this August and ramping up to 1,000 by 2020. JD is also involved in last mile deliveries and just launched 20 mobile robot carts in the Beijing area (each robot can deliver up to 30 different parcels).