One of the scientists responsible for AlphaGo, the Google DeepMind software that trounced one of the world's best Go players recently, says the same approach can produce a surprisingly competent poker bot. Unlike board games such as Go or chess, poker is a game of "imperfect information," and for this reason it has proved even more resistant to computerization than Go. Gameplay in poker involves devising a strategy based on the cards you have in your hand and a guess as to what's in your opponents' hands. Poker players try to read the behavior of others at the table using a combination of statistics and more subtle behavioral cues. Because of this, building an effective poker bot using machine learning may be significant for real-world applications of AI.

Ben Narasin was an entrepreneur for 25 years, a seed investor for 8 and is now a VC as a General Partner at Canvas Ventures. When I heard Ray Kurzweil present the concept of the singularity to a small group at TED, the idea that computing power advances would ultimately allow thinking machines to advance beyond humans' ability to advance them, and eventually allow us to "upload" our own consciousness into an eternal ether, I was so smitten I committed to living long enough to live forever. I even practiced caloric restriction for several years. Although many things can improve life expectancy, caloric restriction is the only one to have been proven to extend life span -- and every life-extending drug experiment attempts to duplicate its effects. Over time, I came to realize that while the parts of Kurzweil's concept will likely happen for machines, it won't happen for me.

The Pentagon's No. 2 civilian official said Wednesday that the Defense Department is concerned that adversary nations could empower advanced weapons systems to act on their own, noting that while the United States will not give them the authority to kill autonomously, other countries might. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work said the Pentagon hasn't "fully figured out" the issue of autonomous machines, but continues to examine it. The U.S. military has built a force that relies heavily on the decision-making skills of its troops, but "authoritarian regimes" may find weapons that can act independently more attractive because doing so would consolidate the ability to take action among a handful of leaders, he said. "We will not delegate lethal authority to a machine to make a decision," Work said. "The only time we will… delegate a machine authority is in things that go faster than human reaction time, like cyber or electronic warfare."

The Pentagon's No. 2 civilian official said Wednesday that the Defense Department is concerned that adversary nations could empower advanced weapons systems to act on their own, noting that while the United States will not give them the authority to kill autonomously, other countries might. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said the Pentagon hasn't "fully figured out" the issue of autonomous machines, but continues to examine it. The U.S. military has built a force that relies heavily on the decision-making skills of its troops, but "authoritarian regimes" may find weapons that can act independently more attractive because it consolidates the ability to take action among a handful of leaders, he said. "We will not delegate lethal authority to a machine to make a decision," Work said. "The only time we will ... delegate a machine authority is in things that go faster than human reaction time, like cyber or electronic warfare."

Following in the steps of competitors like Slack, Microsoft announced onstage at Build 2016 in San Francisco that it will be generously supporting bots on the Skype platform with a brand new SDK. Onstage at Build, the company showed off two different bots: video bots, which operate within a live video feed, and text bots working in conjunction with Cortana. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! For those familiar with the helpful text AI assistants, a lot of it is the same: bots can help coordinate travel, deliveries and other handy things right within Skype. With Cortana as ringleader, the actions seem very similar to that of Slackbot or Facebook Messenger's capabilities.

We cover many emerging markets in the startup ecosystem. Previously, we published posts that summarized Financial Technology, Internet of Things, Bitcoin, and MarTech in six visuals. This week, we do the same with Artificial Intelligence (AI). At this time, we are tracking 855 AI companies across 13 categories, with a combined funding amount of 8.75 billion. To see the full list of 855 Artificial Intelligence startups, contact us using the form on www.venturescanner.com.

E: I kicked around the idea of Cosmify for about 4 months after I left Yahoo. I lack some of the data analysis background to pull what I wanted to build off, so I asked around and met with a long list of scientists in the Bay Area, Japan, China, and Russia. A friend and famous Python guru (the Python language is one of pillars of exploratory data analysis; R is the other) introduced me to Ana - she has tremendous programming chops and is a well known scientist specialized in reproducible research. She liked the idea of creating an unstructured data analysis system that anybody could use. Turned out too that we have common friends working at Trinity College in Dublin, where she earned her PhD and where I lectured a few times as a guest speaker about advanced large systems programming.

Ilya is a software engineer at Uber Technologies in Louisville. He works on computer vision and machine learning problems to improve map data for Uber services. He graduated from Moscow State University with an MS in Physics in 2005. In 2008 he moved to Colorado to work in Parascript LLC on OCR and medical imaging. In 2011 I joined Google where heworked on automatic map creation using aerial imagery. In 2015 he started to work in Microsoft Bing Maps which was acquired by Uber in August. He's been using several in-house deep learning libraries in Microsoft and Google, in Uber we use open source libraries like Caffe and recently TensorFlow.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, speaks at the keynote ceremony of the Microsoft Build Developers conference. SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come." Onstage demos hammered home those ideas. One involved a smartphone conversation with Cortana about planning a trip to Ireland, which soon found Cortana bringing in a Westin chatbot that booked a room based on the contents of the chat. Another featured a blind Microsoft engineer who helped design technology that allows him to take photos with a pair of smartglasses and have either a menu's contents or people's emotions described to him. Nadella placed such human-AI interactions under an umbrella he called Conversations as a Platform. "It's about taking power of human language and applying it more pervasively to all of our computing," he said. "We will infuse intelligence about us and our context into computers." The integrative AI-focused approach to the way humans interact with their digital lives comes not a moment too soon given the pressure Microsoft faces in this "Conversation as a Service sector from Amazon with Alexa and Google with Google Now," says Holger Mueller, analyst with Constellation Research. "All these new conversation canvasses need cloud as the delivery platform and Microsoft needs utilization to achieve economies of scale in the Azure build out." Microsoft had a less than successful rollout of a entertainment-focused chatbot just last week. Nadella drew a collective laugh from the 5,000 attendees when he mentioned Tay, which was taken offline after just one day of existence after hackers made it spew offensive comments. "We are back to the drawing board," he said. "Technology has to have the best of humanity, not the worst." That led to comments from the CEO about the need for a "principled approach" to this emerging technology, an oblique reference to the big drama that recently unfolded between Apple and the FBI." "We need to make choices about how we build technology," Nadella said.

Morgan Freeman is already known the world over as the preeminent voice of pop culture, and the movie embodiment of God, but in the new National Geographic Series The Story of God, Freeman travels the world on a journey of biblical proportions. But rather than proselytizing, The Story of God is true to the National Geographic brand as a travelogue where Freeman pursues the roots of religious beliefs and explores how they are being interepreted in modern times. Along with visiting sites of holy significance to major world religions, such as the Ganges River or the Vatican, Freeman also interacts with the scientific community to get its take on the big questions. For example, in the first episode, "Beyond Death," Freeman asks if humans could achieve immortality by storing our memories and personality in a machine. He proceeds to interview "Bina," an A.I. that identifies herself as "a human who happens to be a robot."