London's Science Museum has rebuilt Eric the robot -- Britain's first robot, and one of the first seen anywhere in the world. He was originally built in 1928 and was capable of standing up, and moving his arms. Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that raised over 50,000, Eric has been reconstructed by the Science Museum and will be on display as part of the Robots exhibition beginning in February next year. While I don't mind the humanoid, "knight-in-armour" look, nobody has explained why Eric has been given glowing red eyes and sharp metal teeth. Nor do they know where the original Eric vanished to.

Join The Brussels Data Science Community, Spark Summit Europe attendees, and Spark ML and machine learning experts Nick Pentreath and Jean-Francois Puget for a talk on an Apache Spark–based, end-to-end machine learning system. A round of Spark and machine learning lightning talks will follow. Many resources are available for building basic recommendation models using Spark. But how does a practitioner go from the basics to creating an end-to-end machine learning system, including deployment and management of models for real-time serving? In this session, we'll demonstrate how to build such a system based on Spark ML and Elasticsearch.

Artificial intelligence is changing the world. At least, the White House thinks so. Last week, the Obama administration released a 60-page report titled Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. It paints with a broad stroke the current state of A.I. in several different fields -- health, education, the environment -- and proposes ways in which industry and government can work together to advance the public good. It's a remarkable document, if only for the fact that it's being issued by an outgoing administration in its final months in office.

Eric was built in 1928, but he mysteriously disappeared a few years later. He is Britain's first robot. Now, with money raised through a Kickstarter campaign, Eric has been brought back to life.

I had the honor to be one of the warmup acts for President Obama at the White House Frontiers Conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here is the prepared text and slides from the talk I delivered there. As you'll see if you watch the video, what I ended up saying isn't exactly what I had written out in advance, but it is reasonably close. Hearing that Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, how could I not begin this talk with his famous line, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" The future is full of amazing things.

Clinically-led artificial intelligence (AI) company Deontics has appointed Nick Beard as a non-executive director, adding to its growing pool of strategic health, science, and technology expertise. Beard is a physician and former hospital chief information officer. Over a 30-year career, he has held numerous senior executive positions at leading electronic health records and clinical guidelines companies in both the US and UK. He will work closely with the Deontics executive team to help shape the future strategy of the company and the marketing of its state-of-the-art clinical pathways and decision modelling products into payer, provider and B2B healthcare IT markets. Based in Seattle, Nick was SVP of Strategy at Milliman Care Guidelines, sold to the Hearst Corporation; CMO at the Healthy Communities Institute, sold to Xerox Corporation, and CMO and VP of health informatics and product marketing at IDX, which was sold to GE for 1.2bn.

Newswire) Investorideas.com, a global news source and investor resource covering actively traded sectors announces it has added new distribution for the Investor Ideas Newswire with a new site hosted on the Grid https://thegrid.io/, a newly launched artificial website building company. Investor Ideas was one of the founding members and beta testers of the personal AI web developer. The Grid has finalized beta testing and recently went live, add new features and tools. "The site is still a work in progress for us as we get to wrap our heads and hands around the artificial intelligence that it provides but we felt that we wanted to test first- hand how this new technology works " said founder D. Zant of Investor Ideas. This is not another do-it-yourself website builder.

A future chart-topping song may soon come from an algorithm. Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) in Paris is developing a system of algorithms which can create songs that cater to the user's taste, based on styles adapted from existing music. The starting point of the song creation is a database of sheet music of more than 13,000 existing songs, from which the user can choose any number of titles with a sound or feel they would like the new song to incorporate. The algorithm analyses the songs' characteristics, and statistical properties related to rhythm, pitch and harmony. It will learn, for instance, which notes "go well" with a given chord, what chord is probable after a given chord, or which notes usually follow after a given note.

Google's new Pixel phone launched to positive reviews, largely because of the phone's new digital helper called Google Assistant. As I wrote in my review of the new Google Pixel, it's relatively easy to make a high-end smartphone these days. The real challenge is lighting it up with unique software that helps you do more. And the new Google Assistant accomplishes just that. Right out of the gate, Assistant is noticeably smarter and more capable than Siri, a stark embarrassment for Apple, which had a five-year head start on Google.

New research provides a Rosetta Stone that translates the language of reinforcement learning to the quantum realm. It tackles sticky questions like what it means for a quantum agent to learn and how the history of a quantum agent's interaction with its environment can be captured in a meaningful way. It also shows how a standard algorithm in the quantum toolkit can help agents learn faster in settings where an early stroke of luck can make a big difference--like when learning how to navigate a maze. Future research could investigate whether a quantum computer, with the added help of a quantum agent, could learn about its own noisy environment fast enough to change the way it reacts to errors. The work may also shed light on one of the deepest questions in physics: How does the everyday world arise from interactions that are, at the microscopic level, described by quantum mechanics?