Earlier today, in San Francisco, we provided an update on how Microsoft is helping to democratize Artificial Intelligence (AI) by making it accessible to everyone and every organization. Today's focus was on conversational computing, which combines the power of natural language with advanced machine intelligence to help people engage with technology in more natural and personal ways. As we talk to businesses and governments who are looking to take advantage of these new capabilities, we see significant value being created when leading organizations start using intelligent bots to transform business processes such as customer services, helpdesks, and even factory floor operations. One example is at Rockwell Automation, which provides industrial automation and information solutions to customers in more than 80 countries. Their customers wanted access to information in their production lines in faster and more innovative ways, and so, with that objective in mind, Rockwell Automation used the Bot Framework and Cognitive Services in Cortana Intelligence to build Shelby, a bot that monitors production more efficiently and lets managers know the status of their operations through more natural forms of interaction.

Conversational artificial intelligence company Conversica has raised $34 million in an oversubscribed Series B round led by Providence Strategic Growth Capital Partners. Toba Capital, Wellington Financial LP, and Recruit Strategic Partners contributed to the round, as did Series A investor Kennet Partners and Conversica founder Ben Brigham. The funding will be used to boost the company's sales and marketing activities and for expansion into international markets. It will also support ongoing product development efforts including the launch of new AI assistants and multilingual support. Our planes are now'big flying mobile devices' and top hacking targets Consumers check smartphones more than 9 billion times a day and enable new businesses PwC sends'cease and desist' letters to researchers who found critical flaw China targets aviation industry to spy and steal secrets Our planes are now'big flying mobile devices' and top hacking targets PwC sends'cease and desist' letters to researchers who found critical flaw Conversica's flagship product, the AI Sales Assistant, automatically engages with prospective customers using natural, two-way email conversations until the lead converts into an opportunity or chooses to opt out.

Machine learning is advancing ad tech by leaps and bounds. At events in Melbourne and Sydney, Tris Southey, product manager for DoubleClick Search, explained how Google's Smart Bidding can help brands run more effective Search campaigns. Great chefs will tell you that cooking is an art--but it's also a learning experience. When you're a beginner, you gather ingredients and follow the recipe, step by step. After you become an expert chef, you adjust elements of the dish as you go, substituting or adding ingredients until it tastes to your liking.

The year Jojo and I started eighth grade, the power plant officially cut electricity to two hours a day. We'd already been through years of brownouts, of flickering lights, blinking monitors, older ag drones without artificial neural networks rebooting in their stations and randomly launching to spray the fields again or overfeed the chickens. So when Public Works & Electric issued a message to all our devices telling us about its irregular hours of operation, no one was surprised. The message was full of obfuscating language, but anyone with a tide chart could spot the correlation. Anyone driving down the causeway to the airport, past the power plant, could see through its chain-link fence the turbines standing silent, tense as raised shoulders; the grounds swamped in seawater, the ebbing tide dragging out an iridescent Rorschach of petroleum.

Future grid scenario analysis requires a major departure from conventional power system planning, where only a handful of most critical conditions is typically analyzed. To capture the inter-seasonal variations in renewable generation of a future grid scenario necessitates the use of computationally intensive time-series analysis. In this paper, we propose a planning framework for fast stability scanning of future grid scenarios using a novel feature selection algorithm and a novel self-adaptive PSO-k-means clustering algorithm. To achieve the computational speed-up, the stability analysis is performed only on small number of representative cluster centroids instead of on the full set of operating conditions. As a case study, we perform small-signal stability and steady-state voltage stability scanning of a simplified model of the Australian National Electricity Market with significant penetration of renewable generation. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared to an exhaustive time series scanning, the proposed framework reduced the computational burden up to ten times, with an acceptable level of accuracy.

A company's logo is an important part of its identity, but the processes behind defining, registering, and protecting these trademarks is a convoluted and rather archaic one. A startup called TrademarkVision aims to simplify it by replacing that laborious and arcane process with what amounts to a machine-learning-powered reverse image search. This isn't in some lab, either: the EU just switched their whole image trademark system over to it. Most people probably haven't had to do many trademark and logo searches. Well, why don't you take the USPTO's version for a spin so you know what it's like? Try to find the Nike "Swoosh" or something.

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has launched its new Centre for Quantum Software and Information (CQSI). Speaking at the launch on Monday, UTS Deputy vice chancellor of Research Glenn Wightwick said the new centre will be solely dedicated to the development of the software and information processing infrastructure required to run applications at quantum scale. "It's clear that we're on the cusp of a new era of computing," Wightwick said. "We're incredibly excited about the potential of quantum computing to solve problems that the fastest classical computers will never be able to solve. "It's these forces that are driving this period of sustained innovation in the field of quantum computing.

You must understand algorithms to get good at machine learning. The problem is that they are only ever explained using Math. In this mega Ebook written in the friendly Machine Learning Mastery style that you're used to, finally cut through the math and learn exactly how machine learning algorithms work. Using clear explanations, simple pure Python code (no libraries!) and step-by-step tutorials you will discover how to load and prepare data, evaluate model skill, and implement a suite of linear, nonlinear and ensemble machine learning algorithms from scratch. I live in Australia with my wife and son and love to write and code.

Brain tests at the age of three appear to predict a child's future chance of success in life, say researchers. Low cognitive test scores for skills like language indicate less developed brains, possibly caused by too little stimulation in early life, they say. These youngsters are more likely to become criminals, dependent on welfare or chronically ill unless they are given support later on, they add. Their study in New Zealand appears in the journal, Nature Human Behaviour. The US researchers from Duke University say the findings highlight the importance of early life experiences and interventions to support vulnerable youngsters.

With the Radeon Instinct line, AMD joins Nvidia and Intel in the race to put its chips into AI applications--specifically, machine learning for everything from self-driving cars to art. The company plans to launch three products under the new brand in 2017, which include chips from all three of its GPU families. The passively cooled Radeon Instinct MI6 will be based on the company's Polaris architecture. It will offer 5.7 teraflops of performance and 224GBps of memory bandwidth, and will consume up to 150 watts of power. The small-form-factor, Fiji-based Radeon Instinct MI8 will provide 8.2 teraflops of performance and 512GBps of memory bandwidth, and will consume up to 175 watts of power.