A new artificial intelligence program the company built with Carnegie Mellon University called Pluribus recently beat five poker professionals in a six-player Texas Hold'em tournament. After 10,000 hands, the system averaged profits of about $1,000 per hour using $1 chips, a "decisive margin of victory," according to a Facebook blog post. AI has been besting humans at poker for a couple of years, but previous programs could compete with just a single player at a time. Given the complexities that come with poker, including techniques like bluffing, beating five humans in a single game is a significant milestone, Facebook said. "No other game embodies the challenge of hidden information quite like poker, where each player has information (his or her cards) that the others lack," Facebook wrote in a blog post.

Gamers in Europe are being invited to take on a bot developed by some of the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers. But there's a twist: players will not be told when they have been pitted against it. The tests are being carried out by DeepMind, the London-based AI company that previously created a program that defeated the world's top Go players. In this case, the challenge involves the sci-fi video game Starcraft II. It is seen as being a more complex task, since players can only get a partial overview of what their opponent is doing, unlike the Chinese board game Go where all the pieces are on show.

In May 2019, Amalgam Insights attended Knowledge 2019, ServiceNow's annual end-user conference. Since ServiceNow's founding in 2004, the company has evolved from its roots as an IT asset and service management company to a company that supports digital workflow across IT, HR, service, and finance with the goal of making work better for every employee. In attending this show, Amalgam Insights was especially interested in seeing how ServiceNow was evolving its message to reflect what Amalgam Insights refers to as "Market Evolvers," companies that have gained market dominance in their original market and taken advantage of modern mobile, cloud, and AI technology to expand into other markets. As jaded IT industry analysts, we attend 25-30 tradeshows and end-user shows each year, including the likes of Oracle Open World, Dreamforce, SAP SAPPHIRE, IBM Think, RSA Conference, Microstrategy World, KubeCon and CloudNative Conference, Tableau Conference, VMWorld, Red Hat Summit, and many, many others. It is part and parcel of being an industry analyst, but it also means that even the most inspiring and amazing speakers start blending together after a while.

Recently I visited with the cybersecurity teams at NTT Communications, British Telecom (BT), and DBS Bank. Each has mature, useful and metrics-driven security solutions. Some of the subtleties of its threat management program are pretty amazing; it feels it can identify characteristics of not only groups of attackers, but actual individuals. BT has an incident response capability that is second to none, driven partly by its interest in combining red team and blue team tactics. These two security teams carefully hone their incident response steps and techniques. All of these companies have taken a unique approach, in that they are upskilling all dedicated security workers to consider not just the defender's dilemma, but also the hacker's dilemma.

Businesses are increasing the pace of investment in AI systems to defend against the next generation of cyberattacks, a new study from the Capgemini Research Institute has found. Two thirds (69%) of organizations acknowledge that they will not be able to respond to critical threats without AI. With the number of end-user devices, networks, and user interfaces growing as a result of advances in the cloud, IoT, 5G and conversational interface technologies, organizations face an urgent need to continually ramp up and improve their cybersecurity. AI-enabled cybersecurity is now an imperative: Over half (56%) of executives say their cybersecurity analysts are overwhelmed by the vast array of data points they need to monitor to detect and prevent intrusion. Accordingly, almost half (48%) said that budgets for AI in cybersecurity will increase in FY2020 by nearly a third (29%).

Artificial intelligence can help transform health care by improving diagnosis, treatment, the delivery of patient care, and the efficiency of healthcare systems. But AI is only as good as the data it's built on. AI developers in the health sector are facing multiple challenges including limited access to health data, poor data quality, and concerns over the ethical use of data for AI. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is now exploring the potential for a departmentwide AI strategy to facilitate the development of AI for health. As one important first step, the HHS Office of the CTO and the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) co-hosted a roundtable in April to gather input from stakeholders outside of HHS.

Over the past decade or so, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven to be very effective in tackling a variety of tasks, including natural language processing (NLP) tasks. NLP entails the use of computational techniques to analyze or synthesize language, both in written and spoken form. Researchers have successfully applied CNNs to several NLP tasks, including semantic parsing, search query retrieval and text classification. Typically, CNNs trained for text classification tasks process sentences on the word level, representing individual words as vectors. Although this approach might appear consistent with how humans process language, recent studies have shown that CNNs that process sentences on the character level can also achieve remarkable results.

Embark co-founders Alex Rodrigues, left, and Brendon Moak with their fleet of autonomous semi-trucks at the startup's operations center in Ontario, California. Embark Trucks, a robotic tech upstart led by two young Canadian computer scientists, hired a key member of Tesla's Autopilot team to help its self-driving trucks better see and understand their surroundings and highway conditions. Zeljko Popovic, an engineer with a background in robotics who joined Tesla over six years ago and created and ran the Perception Team for Autopilot, is now Perception Lead for San Francisco-based Embark, the company said. He'll report to Embark CTO Brandon Moak and focus on boosting the accuracy and distance at which the cameras, radar and laser lidar sensors on its semi-trucks detect other vehicles, as well as leading mapping, localization and machine learning efforts. "Self-driving perception systems need huge amounts of data to train their machine learning algorithms, which means gathering high-quality data is key for Embark's perception team," said CEO Alex Rodrigues.

Only 25% of organisations using artificial intelligence (AI) have adopted an enterprise-wide AI strategy, according to a recent report by intelligence and advisory services platform International Data Corporation (IDC). The Chinese-owned, USA-based advisory firm also said that the findings of its report titled'Artificial Intelligence Global Adoption Trends & Strategies' suggested that half of the organisations surveyed see AI as a priority and two-thirds of them emphasise a culture which gives AI primacy. The survey found that the primary drivers behind the AI initiatives were to improve productivity, business agility and customer satisfaction by leveraging the automation capabilities. Faster time to market new products and services was a leading reason for the implementation of AI by these firms. As per the report, the factors delaying fuller implementation of AI technology in the surveyed organisations were found to be the cost of AI solutions, lack of skilled personnel and biases creeping into the data.

As Mr. Elias realized, Pluribus knew when to bluff, when to call someone else's bluff and when to vary its behavior so that other players couldn't pinpoint its strategy. "It does all the things the best players in the world do," said Mr. Elias, 32, who has won a record four titles on the World Poker Tour. "And it does a few things humans have a hard time doing." Experts believe the techniques that drive this and similar systems could be used in Wall Street trading, auctions, political negotiations and cybersecurity, activities that, like poker, involve hidden information. "You don't always know the state of the real world," said Noam Brown, the Facebook researcher who oversaw the Pluribus project.