The market opportunity for artificial intelligence has been expanding rapidly, with analyst firm IDC predicting that the worldwide content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems software market will grow to US 9.2 billion in 2019. Automating IT and business processes for enterprises is cited by some as having a potential 5 – 7 trillion economic impact by 2025. IPsoft are one of the businesses on the front line of this new disruptive wave of technology and their solutions aim to transform business performance through the employment of'digital labor', most famously its cognitive agent Amelia. Amelia is capable of analyzing natural language, she understands context, applies logic, learns and resolves problems. Her declarative memory consists of both episodic memory and semantic memory, exactly the way human memory is organized.

Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Tech, MIT and University of Toronto published MovieQA, a dataset that contains 7702 reasoning questions and answers from 294 movies. Their innovative dataset and accuracy metrics provide a well-defined challenge for question/answer machine learning algorithms. The questions range from simpler'Who' did'What' to'Whom' that can be solved by computer vision alone, to'Why' and'How' something happened in the movie, questions that can only be solved by exploiting both the visual information and dialogs. MovieQA is unique in that it contains multiple sources of information – full-length movies, plot synopses, subtitles, scripts and DVS (a service that narrates moves scenes to the visually impaired). With the need to scale to large vocabulary data sets, they relied on a TITAN Black GPU for their overwhelming amount of training data.

In a recent announcement, researchers at Google's Britain-based DeepMind unit have revealed that they have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technology which has the capability to mimic the sound of human voice. The new AI technology developed by DeepMind researchers is called WaveNet. It marks the achievement of a new milestone in the company's AI project. According to DeepMind researchers, the breakthrough WaveNet technology can be described as a deep neural network which is capable of generating raw audio wave forms to produce speech. The technology can apparently outperform the currently-in-use Text-to-Speech systems by reducing the gap in human performance -- which could be demonstrated in an actual AI, that is, human conversation -- by up to 50 percent. Moreover, WaveNet - which can presently use only the English and Chinese languages - also boasts the ability to learn different voices and speech patterns to such an extent that it can not only simulate mouth movements and artificial breaths, but also accents, emotions, and language inflections.

Where did the "cyber" in "cyberspace" come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer. It came to him while watching some kids play early video games. Searching for a name for the virtual space in which they seemed immersed, he wrote "cyberspace" in his notepad. "As I stared at it in red Sharpie on a yellow legal pad," he later recalled, "my whole delight was that it meant absolutely nothing."

Two of today's major business and intellectual trends offer complementary insights about the challenge of making forecasts in a complex and rapidly changing world. Forty years of behavioral science research into the psychology of probabilistic reasoning have revealed the surprising extent to which people routinely base judgments and forecasts on systematically biased mental heuristics rather than careful assessments of evidence. These findings have fundamental implications for decision making, ranging from the quotidian (scouting baseball players and underwriting insurance contracts) to the strategic (estimating the time, expense, and likely success of a project or business initiative) to the existential (estimating security and terrorism risks). The bottom line: Unaided judgment is an unreliable guide to action. Consider psychologist Philip Tetlock's celebrated multiyear study concluding that even top journalists, historians, and political experts do little better than random chance at forecasting such political events as revolutions and regime changes.1 The second trend is the increasing ubiquity of data-driven decision making and artificial intelligence applications. Once again, an important lesson comes from behavioral science: A body of research dating back to the 1950s has established that even simple predictive models outperform human experts' ability to make predictions and forecasts. This implies that judiciously constructed predictive models can augment human intelligence by helping humans avoid common cognitive traps.

As a boy growing up in Wales, Dr. Steve Jones was fascinated by solving puzzles and finding solutions to challenging problems. As head of biometrics for the BC Cancer Agency, Dr. Jones arrives at his lab in the morning intent on saving another life. He uses information from the DNA sequencing of tumours followed by computational analysis to find the precise drug to attack and destroy that specific tumour. It's a high-tech approach that helps find solutions in some of the hardest cases. "We've done a number of analyses where the outcome has been able to improve the drug choice and help the patient," says Dr. "If we can introduce machine learning," he says, referring to artificial intelligence, "we can do this even better."

Experts believe that cyborg prostitution will help'clean up the industry' by reducing sexually transmitted diseases and ending sex slavery. The trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation is one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the world. Every year, approximately 21 million adults and children are bought and sold into commercial sexual servitude. As you might imagine, life as a sexual slave is anything but enjoyable or safe for one's health. For this reason, the prospect that robots are likely to take over the prostitution industry by 2025 is, though controversial, heartening news.

Today is C.S. Peirce's birthday. You should read him: he's a treasure chest on essentially any topic, and he anticipated several major ideas in statistics (e.g., randomization, confidence intervals) as well as in logic. Links to Parts 2 and 3 are at the end. It's written for a very general philosophical audience; the statistical parts are pretty informal. Peirce's philosophy of inductive inference in science is based on the idea that what permits us to make progress in science, what allows our knowledge to grow, is the fact that science uses methods that are self-correcting or error-correcting: Induction is the experimental testing of a theory.

Please introduce yourself and your Weps to our readers! We are a team of 20-somethings from Estonia who are behind Weps, the artificial intelligence chatbot website builder that works on any device. Our users can create websites by interacting with Weps in an already familiar messenger-like interface. We were just accepted into Axel Springer Plug and Play accelerator this September and are looking forward to grow together with their help! How did you get the idea to Weps?