Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic. But when it comes to benefiting your customer experience, it's not all science fiction. When you combine automation and AI with the power of the human touch, you can create magnificent customer experiences to propel your business goals. Join this webinar to meet "Kate", understand Blended AI, and learn about: This is a global webinar, presented live in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Choose a session that works best for you!

US officials have decided to allow a group of Afghan girls - whose visa applications had been twice rejected - to travel to the country and participate in an international robotics competition, ending a saga that had sparked international backlash. Homeland Security Department spokesman David Lapan said the US Citizenship and Immigration Services approved a State Department request for six girls from the war-torn country to be allowed in, along with their chaperone, so they can participate in the competition. The non-profit organising the competition celebrated the reversal in a statement on Wednesday. "I truly believe our greatest power is the power to convene nations, to bring people together in the pursuit of a common goal and prove that our similarities greatly outweigh our differences," said Joe Sestak, the president of First Global. He credited "the professional leadership of the US State Department" for ensuring that all 163 teams from 157 countries, including a team of Syrian refugees, would be able to participate.

Over two years ago, Joshua Browder, now a junior at Stanford University, created a chatbot that could contest parking tickets in New York City and London. By June of 2016, DoNotPay had successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets -- a 64 percent success rate -- and earlier this year, Browder added capabilities to assist asylum seekers in the US, UK and Canada. Now, the bot is able to assist with over 1,000 different legal issues in all 50 states and across the UK. To use DoNotPay's AI-assisted help, you just type your problem into its search bar and links to relevant aid pop up that are specific to your location. After you navigate through different options, a chatbot then asks you questions and puts together a letter or other legal documentation.

Look, you probably clicked on this story in the hope of reading about an actual robot lawyer who wears an old-timey wig and shoots evidence out of his Gatling gun fists of justice. Not least because we spent the best part of 10 minutes expertly photoshopping the image you see above. This is not what you will be getting, and for that we can only apologise – but the reality of the story is even better and way less terrifying. According to Mashable, celebrated legal aid chatbot DoNotPay has just announced an expansion that will help low-income users tackle over 1,000 legal matters for free. Launching on Wednesday, the chatbot will lend insight over consumer and workplace rights and will be available across the UK and America.

Microsoft's vision for AI (artificial intelligence) is about people. It's about amplifying human ingenuity through intelligent technology that will reason with, understand and interact with people and, together with people, help us solve some of society's most fundamental challenges. This was the message shared earlier today at an event in London by Harry Shum, Executive Vice-President of Microsoft's AI and Research Group. The event was attended by scientists, technology experts and journalists, who gathered to learn more about Microsoft's AI intentions from Shum and other Microsoft executives, including Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Director at Microsoft Research Labs, Chris Bishop, Technical Fellow and Laboratory Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and Emma Williams, General Manager at Bing. During the discussion, a number of announcements were made that further reinforced Microsoft's focus on AI, including a new programme that will make technology available to those working to tackle the planet's toughest environmental problems.

The historic transformation of the automobile industry will generate billions to trillions of dollars for companies and investors. But for traditional automakers, the road ahead will be bumpy, risky and expensive. That's the assessment of consulting firm AlixPartners, which released an extensive report Wednesday that uses market research and consumer surveys to lay out some of the major challenges facing automakers -- with some interesting findings about Tesla. The report includes a near-term industry outlook with a darker forecast for U.S. auto sales than most other prognosticators have put forth. Record-high vehicle sales in 2016 will dive 13% from 2017 through 2019, the firm predicted -- to 15.2 million vehicles from 17.5 million -- in what it calls a cyclical but ill-timed downturn made worse by a "used car time bomb" as hundreds of thousands of vehicles come off lease all at once.

An academic who is a vocal critic of the price of renewable power is the government's preferred choice to head a review of the financial cost of energy in the UK. Dieter Helm, an economist at the University of Oxford, has been chosen by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to carry out the review, the Guardian has learned. The Conservative manifesto promised that the resulting report would be the first step towards "competitive and affordable energy costs". Theresa May is among those in the government taking an interest in the cost-of-energy review, which will examine how power prices can be kept down while meeting the UK's carbon targets and keeping the lights on. But the choice of Helm, author of a new book on the slow demise of oil companies in the face of energy trends, will be controversial in some quarters because of his criticism of wind and solar power.

Video Researchers have crafted algorithms that can take an audio recording of someone talking and map it to a video clip of them speaking to create a new convincing lip-synched video with the replacement sound. In other words, the resulting video carries the injected audio, rather than its original sound, and the frames are manipulated so that the speaker's face and mouth movements match the new audio. You can be forgiven for seeing this as a vital stepping stone to creating the ultimate fake news – highly believable forged videos. Imagine taking a clip of someone important speaking at a private event, and using the aforementioned software to dub in a completely new script, voiced by a skilled impersonator or generated by another AI such as Lyrebird, and then distributing that fraudulent footage. Thankfully, technology is nowhere near that level right now.

Professor Nick Bostrom doesn't need a crystal ball to predict the future; he's got an institute for that. The institute works with researchers and tech companies like Google's Deep Mind, and Facebook, in the Partnership on AI. It's purpose is to answer the big picture questions on humanity and ensure we don't accidentally get destroyed by our own creations -- among other things. Bostrom thinks that we're entering a new age in human civilization; the AI era has arrived. He predicts machine-learning will represent a fundamental change in how humans exist in the world, similar to the dawn of agriculture or the industrial revolution.

In this paper, we study the trade-offs of different inference approaches for Bayesian matrix factorisation methods, which are commonly used for predicting missing values, and for finding patterns in the data. In particular, we consider Bayesian nonnegative variants of matrix factorisation and tri-factorisation, and compare non-probabilistic inference, Gibbs sampling, variational Bayesian inference, and a maximum-a-posteriori approach. The variational approach is new for the Bayesian nonnegative models. We compare their convergence, and robustness to noise and sparsity of the data, on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Furthermore, we extend the models with the Bayesian automatic relevance determination prior, allowing the models to perform automatic model selection, and demonstrate its efficiency.