With hype around artificial intelligence (AI) at an all-time high, Gartner says many CIOs are understandably cautious about promoting its potential value to their business. But a new report from Gartner calls on CIOs to start investing now on AI. Digital business pressure combined with the rapid pace of innovation make it a great time for CIOs to aggressively learn how AI might influence the business strategy over the next two to four years, according to the authors of the report, Gartner analysts Janelle B. Hill, Bern Elliot and Jamie Popkin. They say CIOs can get involved at the front end of business strategy development, and educating their CEO and the board about recent developments in AI. In these discussions, CIOs can promote AI's massive potential to disrupt markets and remake existing business models, not just as an output that further automates existing capabilities.

How would you like your pizza to be delivered to you in a self-driving car? In the next few weeks the idea is going to be tested on some of Domino's customers in the US city of Ann Arbor in Michigan. The aim is not to test if self-driving cars work, but to see if customers are happy to go out of their homes to collect the pizza from an empty car. The research is being carried out with Ford, which plans to start making self-driving vehicles in 2021. Russell Weiner, the president of Domino's USA, which is based just outside Ann Arbor, said the firm wanted to ensure the delivery of its pizzas this way would be "clear and simple" for customers.

There didn't seem to be anything strange about the new teaching assistant, Jill Watson, who messaged students about assignments and due dates in professor Ashok Goel's artificial intelligence class at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her responses were brief but informative, and it wasn't until the semester ended that the students learned Jill wasn't actually a "she" at all, let alone a human being. Jill was a chatbot, built by Goel to help lighten the load on his eight other human TAs. "We thought that if an AI TA would automatically answer routine questions that typically have crisp answers, then the (human) teaching staff could engage the students on the more open-ended questions," Goel told Digital Trends. "It is only later that we became motivated by the goal of building human-like AI TAs so that the students cannot easily tell the difference between human and AI TAs. Now we are interested in building AI TAs that enhance student engagement, retention, performance, and learning."

As published by Insights Success Magazine "Tea. You do not want to get out of bed. But the alarm on your mobile phone is ringing, and you've got things to do. So with those four iconic words, spoken into your WhatsApp, with your eyes still scrunched closed, Unified Inbox's (UIB) UnificationEngine (UE) Intelligent IoT Messaging platform hasn't just unified communications, it's turned on the smart water kettle in your kitchen. Seamlessly bringing together Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and unified messaging, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), those four words are boiling the water for your morning cup of tea. UIB makes it as easy for you to chat, via voice and text message, with your "things" as it is with your friends. Unified Communications company UIB's patented UE is the world's first true intelligent IoT messaging platform. UE's device- and platform-agnostic middleware enables machines and equipment to communicate with both people and things. Users can remotely control connected devices using simple natural language messages (e.g., "Tea, Earl Grey Hot" or simply, "Boil water") and receive alerts and notifications (e.g., ""Your water will be ready in two minutes" and "You have three days of milk left, shall I re-order?") on the communications channels you already use.

Military drones that can fly for more than 40 hours and stream footage of US cities will replace police helicopters by 2025, experts claim. Multiple defence companies are now racing to build unmanned aircraft that will be allowed to fly in US airspace - which is incredibly tightly controlled. Leading the race is a long-winged craft called MQ-9B, created by Californian-based company General Atomics. This could allow law enforcement to stream video of cities from 2,000 feet (50 metres) high using cameras that are powerful enough to pick out individual faces from a crowd. Californian-based company General Atomics is investing heaving in a long-winged craft called MQ-9B and are aiming to receive FAA certification to fly in 2025.

Drones are harnessing artificial intelligence to detect sharks approaching Australian beaches. Starting next month, Little Ripper drones will be able to monitor sharks in real-time with approximately 90 percent accuracy. By contrast, humans are only about 20 to 30 percent accurate when spotting sharks. "It's not about replacing human beings all together, it's about assisting human beings to get the work done in a better way with more accuracy," Dr. Nabin Sharma, a research associate at the University of Technology Sydney's School of Software said in an interview with Reuters. "That's what the application is meant for."

It will not be the first experiment with advanced pizza delivery technology. Australia-based Domino's Pizza Enterprises, the Ann Arbor-based company's largest independent franchisee, has tested delivery to customers in New Zealand via drone and self-driving robot.

Ford Motor Co and Domino's Pizza Inc in September will begin testing Michigan consumers' reactions to having their pies delivered by self-driving vehicles, the companies said on Tuesday. It will not be the first experiment with advanced pizza delivery technology. Australia-based Domino's Pizza Enterprises, the Ann Arbor-based company's largest independent franchisee, has tested delivery to customers in New Zealand via drone and self-driving robot. In a blog post last week, Sherif Marakby, head of Ford's autonomous and electric vehicles, signaled the automaker's broader ambitions, saying Ford planned to cooperate "with multiple partners" in deploying self-driving vehicles "designed to improve the movement of people and goods." Previously, Ford executives had said the company expected to launch a self-driving shuttle for commercial ride-sharing fleets in 2021.

IBM Watson Internet of Things 1,760 views IBM Watson presents Soul Machines, LENDIT Conference 2017 (Professional Camera) - Duration: 5:12.

This paper presents a constructive algorithm that achieves successful one-shot learning of hidden spike-patterns in a competitive detection task. It has previously been shown (Masquelier et al., 2008) that spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) and lateral inhibition can result in neurons competitively tuned to repeating spike-patterns concealed in high rates of overall presynaptic activity. One-shot construction of neurons with synapse weights calculated as estimates of converged STDP outcomes results in immediate selective detection of hidden spike-patterns. The capability of continual learning is demonstrated through the successful one-shot detection of new sets of spike-patterns introduced after long intervals in the simulation time. Simulation expansion (Lightheart et al., 2013) has been proposed as an approach to the development of constructive algorithms that are compatible with simulations of biological neural networks. A simulation of a biological neural network may have orders of magnitude fewer neurons and connections than the related biological neural systems; therefore, simulated neural networks can be assumed to be a subset of a larger neural system. The constructive algorithm is developed using simulation expansion concepts to perform an operation equivalent to the exchange of neurons between the simulation and the larger hypothetical neural system. The dynamic selection of neurons to simulate within a larger neural system (hypothetical or stored in memory) may be a starting point for a wide range of developments and applications in machine learning and the simulation of biology.