Amazon may have pioneered the smart-speaker movement, but Google isn't far behind. A year after Amazon debuted the first Echo, Google followed in its footsteps with the Home. The company copied Amazon yet again with the Home Mini, which is its version of the Echo Dot. Last year, Amazon revealed the Echo Show -- an smart speaker with a display. And, sure enough, earlier this year, Google announced that it, too, was getting into the smart-display category.

As financial institutions race to implement artificial intelligence solutions, there is the potential to miss less robust applications that the consumer expects today, while also slowing the development of more sophisticated AI solutions for the future. Subscribe to The Financial Brand via email for FREE!When The Jetsons premiered in 1962, the notion of a robot maid was considered an imaginative dream about a futuristic life as opposed to something that might actually happen within the viewer's lifetime. That same year, the U.S. was heavily focused on the space race to the moon, still more than six years away from the historic Apollo 11 landing. More than 50 years ago, the world began to dream in terms previously unimaginable. As a result, some of the Jetson generation traded their Saturday morning bowls of sugary cereal for mechanical and software engineering degrees -- and in just 56 years, have created a world their parents might have argued was impossible. While the common U.S. household may not have a Rosie yet, consumer robots and artificial intelligence (AI) have never been more commonplace than they are today.

Although much of the world focused on the the first Earth-Moon conversation at 4:18 p.m. EDT July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle with just 30 seconds of fuel remaining, the entire mission was actually recorded. After painstakingly digitising the original tapes, the audio has now been put online. 'The Eagle has landed': NASA releases Apollo 11 mission audio Melania Trump visits a children's hospital in Nashville Matt Lauer says'I think they see me as an easy mark' Hundreds of audio conversations between the flight controllers and other teams supporting the mission were going on every minute of the mission over an intricate intercom system. 'The untold story of that momentous 8-day, 3-hour, mission by Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins was the round-the-clock support provided by Mission Control and many communications and support locations around the globe,' said NASA. The trio of space explorers lifted off 9:32 a.m.

Researchers hoping to deploy a 600-meter plastic-sweeper to the Pacific Ocean to clean up the notorious floating Great Garbage Patch have revealed the final design for their contraption. The gigantic'pac man' system consists of a 600-meter-long floating tube that sits at the surface of the water, with a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below to catch plastic waste. It harnesses the power of wind and surface waves to autonomously sweep through the area, gathering up plastic waste as it goes. The gigantic'pac man' system consists of a 600-meter-long floater that sits at the surface of the water, with a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below to catch plastic waste. In the water, the'pac man' will catch plastic in a skirt, which will be emptired by a boat every few weeks Ocean Cleanup Project was forced to radically redesign the system after tests of their original system found it moved too much due to waves.

I was NASA's chief orbital technician, as the agency was changing its name to NAIA, the National Artificial Intelligence Administration, responsible for de-orbiting the International Space Station. The ISS name itself was a misnomer, coined when the space program was sliding from dream toward delusion. By definition, space stations are orbital facilities where astronauts transfer from Earth-launch vehicles to interplanetary ships intended for, say, the first human expedition to Mars, which indeed never took place. Having accomplished little worthwhile scientific research since its 1998 launch, the ISS was primarily a propaganda tool, pretending the technologically advanced nations of the world had become partners and that humanity had a glorious future in outer space. After decades of indecision, the alternatives now were to find a new purpose for the ISS and boost it to a higher orbit or crash it back to Earth at a safe location in the vast Pacific Ocean.

The Chinese military is developing a fleet of new submarines that will navigate the ocean without a human crew, according to scientists involved in the project. The submarines will be powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), allowing them to navigate independently and work alongside existing fleets. The crew-less submersibles will be relatively large and low-cost compared to other military watercrafts, according to scientists working on the project. The AI submarines are rumoured to be fitted with diesel-electric engines to enable them to stay at sea for several months without returning to dock. China will use these unmanned subs for intelligence gathering missions, planting sea mines, and'kamikaze'-style attacks on high-value targets, the scientists said.

China is developing large, smart and relatively low-cost unmanned submarines that can roam the world's oceans to perform a wide range of missions, from reconnaissance to mine placement to even suicide attacks against enemy vessels, according to scientists involved in these artificial intelligence (AI) projects. The autonomous robotic submarines are expected to be deployed in the early 2020s. While not intended to entirely replace human-operated submarines, they will challenge the advantageous position established by Western naval powers after the second world war. The robotic subs are aimed particularly at the United States forces in strategic waters like the South China Sea and western Pacific Ocean, the researchers said. The project is part of the government's ambitious plan to boost the country's naval power with AI technology.

The South China Post reported Sunday that Beijing expects to deploy artificially intelligent unmanned submarines in the early 2020s. The seacraft could be used to survey waters, place munitions or even be used in suicide attacks against enemies, scientists involved in the program told the outlet. Lin Yang, marine technology equipment director at the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, confirmed the program, and said it was a response to work in the US to develop similar watercraft. These subs, dubbed extra-large unmanned underwater vehicles, or XLUUVs, are much bigger than the current crop of underwater vehicles -- large enough to dock as conventional submarines and to carry significant weaponry and other equipment. Their artificial intelligence will help them operate undersea, not only to avoid natural phenomena, but to detect and identify friendly or hostile ships and make navigational decisions to avoid them.

Taxi destination prediction is a very important task for optimizing the efficiency of electronic dispatching systems, thus allowing relevant advantages for both taxi companies and customers. In fact, during periods of high demand, there should be a taxi whose current ride will end near a requested pick up location from a new customer. If an electronic dispatcher is able to know in advance where all taxi drivers will end their current ride, it will also be able to better allocate its resources, identifying which taxi to assign to each call. Moreover, automatic systems for the taxi mobility monitoring collect data that, integrated with other information sources, can help in understanding daytime human mobility routines. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for addressing the taxi destination prediction problem, based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) applied to a regression setting. RNNs are trained based on the individual drivers' history and on geographical information (i.e., points of interest), using only the starting point of each ride (with no knowledge about the whole trajectory). The proposed approach was tested on the dataset of the ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge 2015 - based on the city of Porto - obtaining better results with respect to the competition winner, whilst using less information, and on Manhattan and San Francisco datasets.

For the third time Netflix organized its Personalization, Recommendation and Search Workshop. It was awesome to get invited for this event during my tech holiday in the San Francisco Bay Area. The experienced data scientists from all over Silicon Valley and beyond made it a knowledge-rich day. Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and University of Minnesota shared how to understand and serve your users better. There was one subject that all speakers agreed on: classic matrix factorization (collaborative filtering) reached its expiration date. This includes challenges of multi-armed bandits, an implicit feedback approach, top-N ranking techniques, tyranny of the majority and algorithmic bias. At Netflix almost your whole homepage is personalized: the banner, carousels, order, artwork, text and search. That is why they state that a good recommender system considers: what, how, when and where a title is recommended.