Andrej Karpathy is holding a classroom full of Stanford grad students and undergrads rapt with his description of the pros and cons of different kinds of algorithms used in training a neural network to recognize objects in an image. Suddenly, from the middle of the room, the distinctive artificial voice of Apple's Siri pipes up: "I'm not sure what you said." Siri, probably activated accidentally, draws big laughs. In this room, where students are deep into the intricacies of learning how to make software that better understands humans and our data, the error message is a reminder of the technology's exploding real-world applications. As a consequence, the students in Karpathy's class are likely to graduate into a favorable job market.

Are we headed for a future of robot lawyers, online judges, mechanical mediators, cyborg litigators and android attorneys? Reading some recent media headlines, you would think so. Last year in Dublin, a conference warned that lawyers must'cut fees or face a future led by robots'. In fact, headlines have been predicting this onslaught of the machines ever since IBM's Watson (a question-answering supercomputer) beat two human Jeopardy! But it's not just the press – many practitioners see the same future.

An Iranian-born video-game designer wants players to relive history with a new game that gives users a first-person perspective on the 1979 Iranian revolution. "1979 Revolution: Black Friday" lets gamers experience the tumultuous events through the eyes of a photojournalist who is watching his country unravel. Released Tuesday by indie game designer iNK Stories, the game has garned acclaim for its accurate depiction of the revolution. The lead on the project, Navid Khonsari -- a former Rockstar Games designer who helped developed the popular "Grand Theft Auto" series – says he wanted to create a game that is not only historically accurate but could also lead to a new genre of video games. The game offers multiple scenarios based on the revolution, but does not include the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Baltimore, MD - Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine will present a range of deep learned biomarkers of ageing and deep learned predictors of biological age at the RE-WORK Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit in London, 7-8th of April. The first such predictor is already available online at http://www.Aging.AI trained on hundreds of thousands of human biochemistry and cell count samples linked to chronological age, gender and health status. Transcriptomic and signalomic ageing markers and predictors of chronological and biological age and cross-species comparison will be discussed. "RE-WORK summits are clearly outperforming most industry conferences in agility, openness, diversity and focus on applications of deep learning in multiple areas and we are happy to be invited to present at their Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit in London. Artificial intelligence will transform biomarker development and drug discovery much sooner than most pharmaceutical companies and regulators expect and we are happy to be at the forefront of this emerging trend", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO or Insilico Medicine, Inc.

Sincerely, I'm not too mutch fot the app-within-an-app model, successfull now in WeChat and Kik and just recently in japanese LINE (… and please note, many years ago japanese Docomo i-mode m-sites have been precursors of just that) So, I feel that HTML5 embedded bot apps running inside a chat platform are a compromise of the moment, now in 2016, that we "come from" the visual web paradigma ( click&point #GUI), possibly evolving in a final "pure" conversational dialog flow man-machine "intimate" experience (#CUX). Of course SMS-based chatbots are just a proof-of-concept without a possible future, almost in Europe/Italy, where SMS are billed something like 0.25 EUR each:-( I more agree on the above statement: this is the future in my previson: conversational applications able to sustain complex conversations with users, having an "AI-personality", along with a deep/intimate knowledge of human user, and above all able to do inferences. I call this bots: "Third generation" and now we are moving from generation I (command-based) to generation II (dialog based, but without inference skills). BTW, I'm convinced that chatbots on instant messaging platform (text based using hands to write on a keyboard) represent an intermediate phase, bringing us to voice-enabled interfaces (e.g.

We've covered robot writers before, but to date it has never been much of a concern for actual writers. Robots just aren't that good at doing what we do; although Microsoft's'Tay' did prove to be pretty great at going from zero to off-the-rails after dealing with some nasty Twitter comments -- something any writer can relate to. Until now, "robot writers" -- artificial intelligence programs taught to write -- were mainly only good at penning quick stories based on data-heavy reports. Box scores, stock reports, and the like were basically all the programs were capable of doing well. This year's edition of TNW Conference in Amsterdam includes some of the biggest names in tech.

One of the world's biggest banks has revealed it is leading the fight against criminals using state of the art AI technology. The Bank of Russia has teamed up with Yandex Data Factory to use the latter's machine learning services to identify unlicensed money lenders, and the websites hosting them. So far, Yandex Data Factory's custom search algorithm has helped to reveal 2,500 suspicious organisations, and played a significant role in spotting any inaccuracies, meaning that potentially fraudulent organisations will not be missed in the future. The system works by analysing key words across an existing Yandex database, which identified seven million web pages related to finance topics. The algorithm is then able to assign a web page to its correct category, before identifying if an organisation is licenced, which Yandex says occurred correctly in 98 percent of cases.

"YOU are a developer and you've just spent two weeks writing this amazing app. Your dream is to get it in front of every iPhone user." That was how Steve Jobs, then Apple's boss, introduced an online shop for smartphone apps eight years ago. At first few paid it much heed, but it launched one of the fastest growing software markets ever. Since then, over 100 billion apps have been downloaded, generating 40 billion in revenues for developers and billions more in subscriptions and other fees.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

On this blog, we have been often preaching how Machine Learning has been expanding out of its historic habitat of academics and R&D labs into all kinds of industries by powering smart applications. One of the reflections of this trend can be seen in the number of conferences and events that are bringing together real life practitioners and business leaders that are looking for ways to incorporate Machine Learning in their core activities. This year we are witnessing the addition of Machine Learning Prague to that growing event list as possibly the first conference of its kind in Eastern Europe. We are also proud to announce BigML's active participation at the event that will take place on April 23–24, 2016. In the organizers' words "This is not another academic conference. Our goal is to foster discussion between machine learning practitioners and all people who are interested in applications of modern trends in artificial intelligence. You can look forward to inspiring people, algorithms, data, applications, workshops and a lot of fun during both days as well as at the afterparty."