The BBC is preparing to launch a rival to Amazon's Alexa called Beeb, with a pledge that it will understand British accents. The voice assistant, which has been created by an in-house BBC team, will be launched next year, with a focus on enabling people to find their favourite programmes and interact with online services. While some US-developed products have struggled to understand strong regional accents, the BBC will this week ask staff in offices around the UK to record their voices and make sure the software understands them. The BBC currently has no plans to launch a standalone physical product such as Amazon's Echo speaker or a Google Home device. Instead, the Beeb software will be built into the BBC's website, its iPlayer app on smart TVs, and made available to manufacturers who want to incorporate the public broadcaster's software.

More than ever before, the most consequential question an IT organization must answer about every new data center workload is where to run it. The newest enterprise computing workloads today are variants of machine learning, or AI, be it deep learning-model training or inference (putting the trained model to use), and there are already so many options for AI infrastructure that finding the best one is hardly straight-forward for an enterprise. There's a variety of AI hardware options on the market, a wide and quickly growing range of AI cloud services, and various data center options for hosting AI hardware. One company that's in the thick of it across this entire machine learning infrastructure ecosystem is Nvidia, which not only makes and sells most processors for the world's AI workloads (the Nvidia GPUs), it also builds a lot of the software that runs on those chips, sells its own AI supercomputers, and, more recently, prescreens data center providers to help customers find ones that are able to host their AI machines. Related: Is Your Data Center Ready for Machine Learning Hardware? We recently sat down with Charlie Boyle, senior director of marketing for Nvidia's DGX AI supercomputer product line, to talk about the latest trends in AI hardware and the broader world of AI infrastructure.

Picture this: A gamer in Los Angeles dons a haptic–response bodysuit and activates a device on his forehead that transports him into a fully realized virtual world. He can interact with every object in this digital space and get real-time sensory feedback--sights, smells, sounds, feeling on his skin. He links up with other players from across the globe, while dynamic artificial intelligence crafts a unique gaming experience. The game is specifically tailored to their personalities, skill levels, interests, fears--it's unlike anything they've seen before. As they compete, thousands of fans in packed stadiums cheer them on.

A sign marks a landmine field, left from a past conflict, near Israel's Golan Heights village of Merom Golan August 20, 2006. Syria, a key Hizbollah ally, wants the Lebanon war to lead to a comprehensive peace settlement that addresses what Damascus regards as the root of instability -- Israeli occu. Despite record global investment in land mine clearance in 2017 that exceeded $770 million worldwide, nearly 2,800 people were killed and thousands more injured by mines and other explosive remnants of war (ERW). Civilians, half of them children, accounted for 87% of all casualties. Over half of 62 countries known to have mine contamination are committed to the Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Treaty, but only four are on track to meet their clearance deadlines.

The exciting world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the subject of the Gaming Standards Association's (GSA) latest Technology Summit (GSATS), "Focus on Artificial Intelligence." This crucial technology event for the gaming industry takes place November 6 and 7 at the Hyatt Regency in San Diego, Calif. The in-depth summit is a follow up to last year's overwhelmingly successful summit, "Focus on Blockchain." AI is defined as "the ability for computer-based programs to parse large volumes of data, identify patterns, learn those patterns, discern probable outcomes and make recommended actions based on that learning." As defined, AI has great applicability in the global gaming industry with use cases ranging from responsible gaming, such as, the early identification of potential problem gamers based on analysis of actions and the evaluation of pertinent big data, to tracking patrons feelings and analyzing their needs and interests allowing for the creation of better gaming experiences, anti-money laundering, identifying most valuable players, identifying efficiencies for revenue maximization, and a host of others.

The roles of artificial intelligence (AI) and data mining in libraries are expanding globally and transforming knowledge management in access, discovery, and research. The session was sponsored by the Knowledge Management and Information Technology sections with the Big Data special interest group. Frank Cervone, director of information technology for the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Public Health, kicked off the program by asking, "Is AI real?" AI has been actively embedded in public and personal spaces, but Cervone cautioned that the visions and realities of AI are inconsistent and problematic, particularly on ethics and regulations. He covered important concepts and processes of data and text mining, machine learning, and how they have affected research and access in many fields. Cervone concluded by exclaiming what AI is not doing and argued that we need to be moving with it.

In the near future, doctors may be able to apply artificial intelligence to electrocardiogram data in order to measure overall health status, according to new research published in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, a journal of the American Heart Association. An electrocardiogram, also known as an EKG or ECG, is a test used to measure the electrical activity of the heart. While it's known that a patient's sex and age could affect an EKG, researchers hypothesized that artificial intelligence could determine a patient's gender and estimate their'physiologic age'--a measure of overall body function and health status distinct from chronological age. Using EKG data of almost 500,000 patients, a type of artificial intelligence known as a convolutional neural network was trained to find similarities among the input and output data. Once trained, the neural network was tested for accuracy on the data of an additional 275,000 patients by predicting the output when only given input data.

Hope is at hand for millions of frustrated smart assistant users across the UK as the BBC announces plans for'Beeb', an AI that will recognise all British regional accents. Videos of Glaswegians, Liverpudlians, Mancunians and others have spread online in recent years, showing their struggles with products like Amazon's Alexa. Many have been forced to adopt a'received pronunciation' way of speaking to be understood. Ironically, this formal accent was once seen as a bastion of style within the BBC's own cadre of presenters. Developers claim the smart assistant will be available next year on the BBC's website, iPlayer and as a software plugin for hardware like Amazon's Echo speaker range.

Trying to comprehend the nature of an AI superintelligence is akin to trying to comprehend the mind of God. There's an element of the mystical in attempting to define the intentions of a being infinitely more intelligent and therefore infinitely more powerful than you--a being that may or may not even exist. There's even an actual religion, founded by a former Uber and Waymo self-driving engineer, dedicated to the worship of God based on artificial intelligence. But the existential fear of superintelligence isn't just spiritual vaporware, and we have a sense, at least, of how it might come to be. Researchers like Eliezer Yudkowsky suggest that the development of superintelligence could start with the creation of a "seed AI"--an artificial intelligence program that is able to achieve recursive self-improvement. We've already done that with narrow AI-- AlphaGo Zero started out knowing nothing about the game Go, but quickly managed to improve to a human level and then far beyond.

We get the idea behind using mines during times of war. They can be hidden which means that they can be used to protect an area. The explosions also can act as an alarm of sorts, notifying soldiers than an enemy is close by. However, once the war is over, what happens to these mines? They are usually left there which in turn creates problems for people who are repopulating an area after war, where innocent civilians might accidentally step on them. However, the process of clearing mines is dangerous and slow, but a company by the name of 4M Analytics believes it can improve on that process using AI.