Technology companies are hurriedly snapping up startups in the field of artificial intelligence, and Intel Corp. INTC 0.77 % is the latest to join a buying spree fueled by one of the hottest trends in the tech sector. The chip maker on Tuesday announced plans to pay an undisclosed amount for Nervana Systems, a 48-employee company working on semiconductors, software and services to exploit a popular AI technique called deep learning. Intel's move follows a deal disclosed Friday by Apple Inc. AAPL 0.26 % to purchase Turi Inc., a Seattle-based specialist in the field. The two acquisitions add to a string of 31 purchases since 2011 of AI startups by large companies, according to venture-capital research firm CB Insights. Factoring in smaller acquirers, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP counts 29 related acquisitions so far this year, suggesting the total deal count for 2016 will top the 37 deals announced last year.

BBC Worldwide has teamed up with artificial intelligence start-up Thoughtly to explore how machine learning can help it understand which genres of content are most in demand in which territories. Following an initial trial of Thoughtly's technology, the pair have completed a detailed analysis looking at synopses and descriptions of programming alongside data mining to figure out how best to categorise individual programme titles. Thoughtly's flagship platform, Ellipse, is designed to map themes, generate summaries and identify anomalies in text. It was originally designed to assist researchers in academic institutions to draw insights from very large volumes of text, such as helping medical researchers identify unexpected anomalies in large clinical data sets or help scientific researchers navigate unstructured text for automated screening of'noisy' data sets. BBC Worldwide is using the technology to identify themes that are under or over-represented in its content, to identify recurring and possibly unseen patterns across the various genres in it catalogue, identify which themes have grown and which have declined over the years and generally build a deeper understanding of its content with the objective of matching it with the most relevant audiences both for the BBC itself and for its client broadcasters, according to David Boyle, EVP of insight.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. There's no doubt that pretty much everything humans do can be sliced, diced, and replicated by algorithms so it's not surprising that recent work by Tom S. F. Haines, Oisin Mac Aodha, and Gabriel J. Brostow, researchers at University College London, has resulted in the fall of yet another bastion of being human: Handwriting. Their paper, called "My Text in Your Handwriting," describes software that semi-automatically analyzes a sample of a handwriting, then generates whatever text you want in what looks like the identical style of the original handwriting sample. Authors produce different glyphs to represent the same element of writing – the way one individual writes an "a" will usually be different to the way others write an "a". Although an individual's writing has slight variations, every author has a recognisable style that manifests in their glyphs and their spacing.

Scientists in Japan reportedly saved a woman's life by applying artificial intelligence to help them diagnose a rare form of cancer. Faced with a 60-year-old woman whose cancer diagnosis was unresponsive to treatment, they supplied an AI system with huge amounts of clinical cancer case data, and it diagnosed the rare leukemia that had stumped the clinicians in just ten minutes. The Watson AI system from IBM matched the patient's symptoms against 20m clinical oncology studies uploaded by a team headed by Arinobu Tojo at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science that included symptoms, treatment and response. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has carried out similar work, where teams of clinicians and data analysts trained Watson's machine learning capabilities with oncological data in order to focus its predictive and analytic capabilities on diagnosing cancers. IBM Watson first became famous when it won the US television game show Jeopardy in 2011.

Uber will test its fleet of autonomous cars in Pittsburg. Some guy made a bionic hand out of a coffee machine. This article focuses not what the athletes are putting into their bodies, but what they are putting on their bodies and shows how technology affects gears used by them. An hour long lecture by Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, where he discusses what is happening at the cutting edge of AI research, including the recent historic AlphaGo match, and its future potential impact on fields such as science and healthcare, and how developing AI may help us better understand the human mind. Here, Margaret Boden, a Professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex, examines what it means to be "creative" and whether we can ever translate this into our computers.

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the largest update to the PC software since it launched last year, was hailed as the fir major update. However, many users have discovered their webcams no longer work after the update. As part of a security crackdown, Microsoft limited the type of encoding webcams can use - and it is causing many to crash. As part of a security crackdown, Microsoft limited the type of encoding webcams can use for video streams - and it is causing many to crash. 'If your webcam has stopped functioning since the release of the Anniversary update, you are not alone but the good news is a fix is coming, hopefully in September,' said Brad Sams of Thurrot, which first noticed the issue. Windows no longer allows USB webcams to use MJPEG or H264 encoded streams and is only allowing YUY2 encoding.

Every Monday morning, 75 million Spotify users logon to their devices and play a "Discover Weekly" playlist that's been curated to their musical preferences. Unbeknownst to many, the custom playlist they're enjoying was curated by a machine learning algorithm that has learned their unique musical preferences based on previous interactions with songs, musicians, and playlists. Machine learning, and a more advanced technology called deep learning, are types of artificial intelligence that allow a computer to learn information based on the data it is given. To borrow the words of Drew Breunig, "In a nutshell, deep learning is human recognition at computer scale." Essentially, the more information the computer is given, the better it can learn -- and in the case of platforms like Spotify or Netflix, the more interaction you have with the program, the better it can recommend music, movies, or TV shows that you'll like.

Machine learning tools are commonly used in modern high energy physics (HEP) experiments. Different models, such as boosted decision trees (BDT) and artificial neural networks (ANN), are widely used in analyses and even in the software triggers. In most cases, these are classification models used to select the "signal" events from data. Monte Carlo simulated events typically take part in training of these models. While the results of the simulation are expected to be close to real data, in practical cases there is notable disagreement between simulated and observed data. In order to use available simulation in training, corrections must be introduced to generated data. One common approach is reweighting - assigning weights to the simulated events. We present a novel method of event reweighting based on boosted decision trees. The problem of checking the quality of reweighting step in analyses is also discussed.

The global economic crisis and increased competition have led to a situation where Indian IT companies have been forced to improve productivity and quote lower prices to win deals. This week, Infosys rubbished reports that it was laying-off 3,500 workers, after losing a key project to implement technology solutions for the Royal Bank of Scotland. While the debacle was triggered by Britain's exit from the European Union, it is important for India to prepare for a scenario where the IT and BPO industries will no more be the major job creators that they were in the past. New recruitment in the IT industry has fallen consistently from 2.35 lakh in 2013, and could be significantly less this fiscal compared to the 2 lakh jobs created in 2015-16. When India was at the cusp of the IT boom, the considerable labour arbitrage was an attractive draw for big companies to shift their back-end operations and low-grade coding, maintenance and testing functions to India.

America's return to manned spaceflight moved a step closer today as US astronauts installed a new'parking space' on the International Space Station. The two Americans, Jeffrey Williams and Kate Rubins, hooked up the docking port in just a few hours. SpaceX delivered this new gateway last month, packed in the trunk of a Dragon cargo capsule. NASA describes the gear as'a metaphorical gateway to a future' that will allow a new generation of US spacecraft - the first since the space shuttle program ended in 2011 - to carry astronauts to the space station. US astronaut Kate Rubins works on the docking port of the International Space Station.The adaptors will work with Boeing's CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon, two spaceships under construction that are planned to ferry astronauts to the space station.