Newswire) Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Global Artificial Intelligence Market (2016 - 2022)" report to their offering. The global artificial intelligence market is estimated to reach USD 16,274.0 The report aims at estimating the size and future growth potential of the market across different segments such as technology, application, and region. With the rise in adoption of AI in the media & advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare sectors, the machine learning and natural language processing technologies are expected to play a key role in propelling the growth of the AI market in the next five years. Artificial intelligence (AI) could double annual economic growth rates within two decades by changing the nature of work and spawning a new relationship between man and machine.

At places like schools, hotels and tourist attractions, Microsoft Translator can help up to 100 people hold a live conversation in nine different languages. Imagine you're on a guided tour in Chartres cathedral in France along with tourists from Brazil, China, Russia and Germany -- but none of you speaks French. For the last few decades, you'd each need your own tour guide. A new app from Microsoft aims to flatten this multilanguage barrier, though. The Microsoft Translator app, running on your phone but relying on a network to Microsoft's servers, can translate your tour guide's words into eight other languages.

On the heels of a mostly positive jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (4.6% unemployment is the lowest it's been in nine years), the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) released a more sobering snapshot of the world of work. A briefing by MGI director James Manyika, compiled from the company's extensive research, took a deeper dive into employment numbers. In the United States and the 15 core European Union countries (E.U.-15), there are 285 million adults who are not in the labor force--and at least 100 million of them would like to work more. Some 30% to 45% of the working-age population around the world is underutilized--that is, unemployed, inactive, or underemployed. Manyika says that unemployment figures typically get the most attention at the expense of those who are underemployed.

Britain is "languishing in the digital slow lane" with 4G connectivity lagging behind the networks of countries like Romania, Albania, Panama and Peru, according to the Government's official infrastructure advisers. Market provision of mobile services has left too many "digital deserts" and "not spots" where users cannot get 4G signals, even within major city centres, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) found. It called on the Government to step in to ensure that basic talk, text and data services are available to all Britons, wherever they live, work and travel, and to make the country ready for next-generation 5G communications. The NIC was asked in March to advise ministers on how the UK can become a "world leader" in the deployment of 5G, which potentially offers ultra-fast, ultra-reliable, ultra-high capacity seamless connectivity to support future technologies like augmented reality, connected vehicles and the "Internet of things". London has UK's best 4G coverage, but slowest speeds But the Commission found that there was still much work to be done to haul the UK out of its 54th position in global rankings for 4G, with typical users able to access the service only 53% of the time.

For the past 30 days in the frigid port city of Duluth, Minnesota, a colony of houseflies has been kept alive by a piece of software. The computer takes care of their needs, giving the insects water and nutrients in the form of powdered milk and sugar. The flies, of course, are unaware that their ultimate fate depends on whether or not a machine correctly identifies blobs of pixels flitting across a camera--if it fails, they die. It's one hell of a metaphor in a time where futurists are considering a world where daily needs are met by computers that track and analyze us. "We should be smart about how we plan for artificial intelligence, because one way or another it's coming," said David Bowen, the 41-year-old artist and professor behind the installation, which he calls FlyAI.

Amazon's Echo has made tangible the promise of an artificially intelligent personal assistant in every home. Those who own the voice-activated gadget (known colloquially as Alexa, after its female interlocutor) are prone to proselytizing "her" charms, applauding Alexa's ability to call an Uber, order pizza or check a 10th-grader's math homework. The company says more than 5,000 people a day profess their love for Alexa. On the other hand, Alexa devotees also know that unless you speak to her very clearly . . . I hate her, I love her," one customer wrote on Amazon's website, while still awarding Alexa five stars. "You will very quickly learn how to talk to her in a way that she will understand and it's not unlike speaking to a small frustrating toddler." Voice recognition has come a long way in the past few years. But it's still not good enough to popularize the technology for everyday use and usher in a new era of human-machine interaction, allowing us to talk with all our ...

An artificial intelligence program has written a Christmas carol. Researchers at the University of Toronto used their "" program to write a Christmas carol based off of a "Christmassy photograph," The Guardian reports. The scientists simply uploaded the photograph into a computer hosting the program and then "let it do its thing." The artificial intelligence program then wrote several lines of lyrics and sang them to music it Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Computer Software Artificial intelligence Google's DeepMind'Lab' opens up source code, joins race to develop artificial general intelligence Following right on its heels came Google's that, its machine learning platform, has created a "lab." The DeepMind Lab offers a 3D training environment, and its entire code library is now available on the open source hosting service GitHub. With Universe, OpenAI aimed to address a primary challenge for AI research, which is a lack of "a large variety of realistic environments [for AI agents to] learn progressively more Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Artificial general intelligence Places: Americas North America United States Microsoft's digital assistant, Cortana, could be getting an upgrade--and Intel may be helping.

In multiagent systems, social choice functions can help aggregate the distinct preferences that agents have over alternatives, enabling them to settle on a single choice. Despite the basic manipulability of all reasonable voting systems, it would still be desirable to find ways to reach plausible outcomes, which are stable states, i.e., a situation where no agent would wish to change its vote. One possibility is an iterative process in which, after everyone initially votes, participants may change their votes, one voter at a time. This technique, explored in previous work, converges to a Nash equilibrium when Plurality voting is used, along with a tie-breaking rule that chooses a winner according to a linear order of preferences over candidates. In this paper, we both consider limitations of the iterative voting method, as well as expanding upon it. We demonstrate the significance of tie-breaking rules, showing that no iterative scoring rule converges for all tie-breaking. However, using a restricted tie-breaking rule (such as the linear order rule used in previous work) does not by itself ensure convergence. We prove that in addition to plurality, the veto voting rule converges as well using a linear order tie-breaking rule. However, we show that these two voting rules are the only scoring rules that converge, regardless of tie-breaking mechanism.

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A Chilean startup that has built artificial intelligence software to help recreate animal-based foods using plants is looking toward U.S. multinationals after signing deals at home to sell its products, the company's founders said. NotCo, founded around a year ago by three Chileans, has already persuaded Cencosud's Jumbo supermarkets to stock its'Not Mayo' across Chile, and has signed a deal to supply a national food manufacturer with one of its products, said Chief Executive Matias Muchnick. The company has also spoken to international companies including Hershey, Coca-Cola and Mars about creating new versions of chocolate and soda. "We want to promote these products as mainstream. It will only have an impact if meat-eaters who don't care about sustainability buy them," said Muchnick, adding that they can be retailed at the same price as the non-vegan version.

Alberto Arvelo is used to hiring composers to set music to his films. The Venezuelan director's most recent feature, "Libertador," employed none other than Gustavo Dudamel -- in his debut film score -- for that task. The roles were reversed, however, on Arvelo's new assignment: setting film to Dudamel-led concerts of Joseph Haydn's epic oratorio, "The Creation." "It's exactly what should happen with a good music in film," Arvelo said. "Good music is something that you can feel, that can create something that's not there. Basically, if music is there, it's because we have to add something to that moment, to provoke this combustion in some way. This is more or less the same concept, but exactly in a reverse way."