From within the dark confines of the skull, the brain builds its own version of reality. By weaving together expectations and information gleaned from the senses, the brain creates a story about the outside world. For most of us, the brain is a skilled storyteller, but to spin a sensible yarn, it has to fill in some details itself. "The brain is a guessing machine, trying at each moment of time to guess what is out there," says computational neuroscientist Peggy Seriès. Guesses just slightly off -- like mistaking a smile for a smirk -- rarely cause harm.

WIRE)--Ipswitch, the leader in easy to try, buy and use IT management software, today announced the findings of an independent global study, carried out by analyst firm Freeform Dynamics. The survey examines the attitudes and readiness of IT decision makers with regard to intelligent machines and business systems (machines with decision making and learning capabilities). Exploring the fast-paced adoption of these systems, the report looks at the positive impacts already being observed in the commercial world and the potential barriers to even further mainstream adoption over the next decade. According to the research, investment in intelligent business systems and automation is well underway across the globe. Top current application deployment areas cited by respondents include digital customer engagement systems (55 percent), process automation and workflow systems (52 percent) and automated risk monitoring and management solutions (50 percent).

SITTING IN AN office in San Francisco, Igor Barani calls up some medical scans on his screen. He is the chief executive of Enlitic, one of a host of startups applying deep learning to medicine, starting with the analysis of images such as X-rays and CT scans. It is an obvious use of the technology. Deep learning is renowned for its superhuman prowess at certain forms of image recognition; there are large sets of labelled training data to crunch; and there is tremendous potential to make health care more accurate and efficient. Dr Barani (who used to be an oncologist) points to some CT scans of a patient's lungs, taken from three different angles.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted in 1990 that a computer would beat a human world champion chess player by 1998. In 1997, that actually happened with IBM's Deep Blue. Since then, artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to advance rapidly, making now a good time to brush up on what is considered the next wave of highly disruptive technology. AI consists of many sub disciplines such as natural language processing, computer vision, knowledge representation and reasoning. The technology is making its way into a broad range of industries from marketing with behavioural targeting, to healthcare with accurate and early detection of complex diseases, to infrastructure with smarter urban planning.

SYDNEY: Marketers are looking toward artificial intelligence (AI) to boost capability in measurement and targeting, according to an expert in the field. Karen Nelson-Field, Associate Professor at the University of South Australia and the author of Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing, addressed this topic at the AdNews Media Summit in Sydney. And she outlined potentially significant opportunities for advertisers in the areas of viewability, ad avoidance, audience measurement and contextual programmatic targeting in real-time. While biometrics and similar technology have been used before to track people's responses to ads in a laboratory setting, Nelson-Field argued this is too removed from how people interact with advertising in real life. She suggested that the next step for marketers is in biometrics with vision AI behind it, a phase that will harness subconscious recollection and provide a more accurate picture of how consumers interact with advertising in real life.

Back in May, I mentioned that ROSS Intelligence, based on IBM's Watson platform, had announced that Baker & Hostetler had agreed to license ROSS Intelligence's artificial intelligence legal research product, ROSS. The firm will use ROSS in its Bankruptcy, Restructuring and Creditors' Rights team. Latham will be using ROSS to streamline their research. As is customary, ROSS is not described as a "robot attorney" but as a complement to the firm attorneys which empowers them. I suspect that is currently quite true, but doubt that it will remain that way.

Complex interdependencies between applications and computing environments can make whitelist-based security nearly impossible to enforce in practice, a Cisco executive has argued as the company debuts a data-centre analytics platform that utilises machine-learning techniques to model and predict the security impact of configuration and application changes. Those changes can wreak havoc with conventional security models built around blacklists that are difficult to keep up to date as the environment changes, vice president of product marketing Rajeev Bhardwaj told CSO Australia as the company debuted a Tetration Analytics platform that surveils the data centre to monitor data flows and application interactions. While many data-centre operators preferred to operate on a zero-trust, whitelist-based security model, that had been difficult to accomplish because of changing interdependencies within the "black box" of the data centre, Bhardwaj said. "The data centre of today has multiple layers of complexity from compute, network, and storage infrastructure as well as virtualisation, firewalls, load balancers and customer applications," he explained. "If something goes wrong it's extremely hard to find out what happened: you look at the black box and don't know which application is talking with which applications, which ports are open, which applications are protected with a firewall."

CANNES - Many a CMO is excited about the prospect of having machine-learning algorithms or artificial intelligence (AI) do the heavy lifting when it comes to harvesting actionable insights from the data onslaught. But Kevin Akeroyd, GM and SVP of Oracle Marketing Cloud, does his best to let them down easy, pointing out that there's still plenty to be done today. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he told Campaign Asia-Pacific on the sidelines of the Cannes Lions Festival in France. You know what, let's get you really, really good at listening and responding to data before you get yourself all hot and bothered about machine learning. In his view, many brands are not even listening to all the available data, tying it together and making an activation decision up into a consistent channel experience.

Hollywood fantasy: The reality of AI development is a little more nuanced and a lot less advanced than movies might have us believe. It's the theme of so many dystopian sci-fi books and movies: a super intelligent machine in charge of lethal military hardware becomes self-aware and decides to wreak havoc. But could it actually happen? At the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Texas last month, a workshop was held on the ethics of AI development and a panel discussed whether or not so-called'lethal autonomous weapons' should be banned. "There are many arguments, legal, ethical, political and technical for a ban," Toby Walsh, head of the Optimisation Research Group at Australia's research body NICTA and chair of the proceedings, told Fairfax Media.

With laptops and hand-held devices slowly replacing pencils and paper, some educators question the importance of teaching handwriting in the classroom. Although some say it is a nonessential motor skill, researchers have found evidence that in fact it helps children pay attention to and understand the written language. Brain scans in children who did not yet know how to print revealed they are unable to distinguish letters and respond to them'the same as to a triangle'. Although some say it is a nonessential motor skill, researchers have found evidence this skill helps children pay attention to and understand the written language. Brain scans in children who did not yet know how to print yet revealed they are unable to distinguish letters and respond to them'the same as to a triangle' You have to see letters in'the mind's eye' in order to create them on a piece of paper she explained.