Founded in 1990, the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King by increasing the presence of, and recognizing the contributions of, underrepresented minority scholars at MIT. MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars enhance their scholarship through intellectual engagement with the MIT community and enrich the cultural, academic, and professional experience of students. Six scholars are visiting MIT this academic year as part of the program. Kasso Okoudjou is returning for a second year as an MLK Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Originally from Benin, he moved to the United States in 1998 and earned a PhD in mathematics from Georgia Tech. Okoudjou joins MIT from the University of Maryland College Park, where he is a professor.

San Jose, California, Oct. 08, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Sonasoft Corp. (OTCQB: SSFT), a leader in innovative artificial intelligence (AI) and data management solutions, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of OPtimAIze, Inc., an Artificial Intelligence software company that focuses on AI solutions for software product engineering teams. Sonasoft now has the solution to establish itself as a leading provider of AI for software product development. According to the analysts at Statista the enterprise software market alone had a global market size of over $457 billion in 2019. IDC also forecasted that worldwide spending on artificial intelligence (AI) will reach $776 billion by 2022. Sonasoft is well-positioned to gain significant market share in a large existing market that is poised to accelerate with an anticipated adoption of AI.

Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order for the "American AI Initiative," to guide AI developments and investments in the following areas: research and development, ethical standards, automation, and international outreach. This initiative is indicative of the changing times, and how, as a country, the U.S. is learning to navigate the implications of AI. Leaders in the business world, specifically, are faced with the responsibility of equipping our employees with the skills necessary for paving long-lasting career paths, and the workforce must discover what will be expected as technology continues to disrupt the norm, and work as we know it. As a global business leader, an AI optimist, and a father, I find myself asking: What will make a career sustainable in 2020 and beyond? Will the future of education rise to meet the demands of the future of work?

SingularityNET, a startup that bills itself as a "decentralized artificial intelligence" company, said today it's working with networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. on an ambitious project to create more advanced AI technologies that will soon be able to surpass humans in their ability to learn and perform new tasks. The partnership is a strong validation of SingularityNET's technologies, which include a blockchain-based, decentralized marketplace for AI algorithms, and various deep neural net models for computer vision and language understanding. Its biggest project, however, is a customized version of the OpenCog Advanced General Intelligence engine, an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to "human-equivalent AGI." AGI is an emerging new field within AI, or some might even say a more superior form of it. Traditional AI generally refers to the ability of a machine to imitate human cognition, such as learning and problem-solving. But most AI models remain quite primitive, specialized on training machines at a single task, whether that's image recognition, playing chess or studying medical data.

The traditional retail industry is facing challenges as the rapid development and continuous improvement of AI tools and techniques ushers in the era of New Retail. Many once-successful brick and mortar shops are at risk of disappearing altogether if they fail to adapt to the changing marketplace. As the concept of "New Retail" spreads globally, many Fortune Global 500 retail companies are implementing AI technologies such as computer vision and NLP in unmanned stores and warehouses or virtual stores, and are accelerating supply chain upgrades to better position themselves for the future of shopping. Global Retail Industry Market Size The steady growth of the global economy and per capita disposable income have triggered a surge in the retail industry over the past few years. The global retail industry market was valued at nearly US $23.5 trillion in 2017, a 5.3 percent year-on increase.

The traditional retail industry is facing challenges as the rapid development and continuous improvement of AI tools and techniques ushers in the era of New Retail. Many once-successful brick and mortar shops are at risk of disappearing altogether if they fail to adapt to the changing marketplace. As the concept of "New Retail" spreads globally, many Fortune Global 500 retail companies are implementing AI technologies such as computer vision and NLP in unmanned stores and warehouses or virtual stores, and are accelerating supply chain upgrades to better position themselves for the future of shopping. Global Retail Industry Market Size The steady growth of the global economy and per capita disposable income have triggered a surge in the retail industry over the past few years. The global retail industry market was valued at nearly US $23.5 trillion in 2017, a 5.3 percent year-on increase.

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly taking hold across global business, according to a new McKinsey Global Survey on the topic. 1 1. The online survey was in the field from February 6 to February 16, 2018, and garnered responses from 2,135 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent's nation to global GDP. AI, typically defined as the ability of a machine to perform cognitive functions associated with human minds (such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, and problem solving), includes a range of capabilities that enable AI to solve business problems. The survey asked about nine in particular, 2 2. The nine capabilities are natural-language text understanding, natural-language speech understanding, natural-language generation, virtual agents or conversational interfaces, computer vision, machine learning, physical robotics, autonomous vehicles, and robotic process automation (RPA).

On screen, the grey skinned velociraptor twitches and spasms, trying to hurl itself to its feet under the command to rise. A thousand parallel iterations live in their simple digital worlds, trying to find a path to standing up. One manages, briefly, then collapses again. Hundreds of the iterations are abandoned, and the ones that were closest spawned again into a thousand dreams of a standing robotic dinosaur. Eventually, one succeeds in lunging to its feet and staying erect. The neural net that learned to stand survives. The rest disappear into the ether. This article continues the exploration that David Clement and I are making into machine learning via Plastic Dinosaur, a robotic velociraptor guided by neural nets. It's a fictional exercise to introduce and play with concepts of robotics and machine learning, and to explore aspects of where machine learning is today.

On screen, the grey skinned velociraptor twitches and spasms, trying to hurl itself to its feet under the command to rise. A thousand parallel iterations live in their simple digital worlds, trying to find a path to standing up. One manages, briefly, then collapses again. Hundreds of the iterations are abandoned, and the ones that were closest spawned again into a thousand dreams of a standing robotic dinosaur. Eventually, one succeeds in lunging to its feet and staying erect. The neural net that learned to stand survives. The rest disappear into the ether. This article continues the exploration that David Clement and I are making into machine learning via Plastic Dinosaur, a robotic velociraptor guided by neural nets. It's a fictional exercise to introduce and play with concepts of robotics and machine learning, and to explore aspects of where machine learning is today.

Blizzard Entertainment, the game developer behind hugely popular titles such as World of Warcraft and Overwatch, has banned a professional esports player from competing and taken away his prize money after he expressed support for Hong Kong's protest movement. Ng Wai Chung, who lives in Hong Kong and plays under the name Blitzchung, is one of the top players in the Asia-Pacific region for the online card deck game Hearthstone. Blitzchung made the comment on an official Hearthstone broadcast on Twitch, the video streaming platform, after his last game in the 2019 Hearthstone Asia-Pacific Grandmasters Tournament. Blitzchung wore a gas mask and dark goggles during that interview last Sunday, evoking the gear activists have worn during months of street protests. Toward the end of the segment, he shouted the popular protest chant, "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times!"