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Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a "Like" button. In the pixelated cube world of "Minecraft," players can create almost anything their hearts desire. Now, Microsoft is using the popular world-building game to build and test artificial intelligence in the fictional environment. Microsoft has made a platform for (AI) research using a modified version of "Minecraft" that will become available to the public following a limited release to select researchers.

DARPA are starting a competition to help automate defence and see how artificial intelligence can combat cyber-threats. The latest DARPA Grand Challenge is looking to artificial intelligence to seek out and destroy vulnerabilities in software. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Cyber Grand Challenge will see seven teams battle it out to see if machine learning can do better in finding and fixing exploits better than humans. The agency said on its competition website that identifying threats and remediating them can take over a year from first detection to the deployment of a solution, by which time critical systems may have already been breached. "This slow reaction cycle has created a permanent offensive advantage," reads the blurb.

Machine learning is set to go mainstream in the next two years, according to a new survey by software and application development vendor SoftServe Inc. The new report, based on an April poll of 300 U.S. and U.K.-based medium and large enterprises, shows that 62 percent of firms expect to roll out machine learning-based tolls for business analytics within the next two years. The majority of those companies said the most promising opportunity for machine learning lays in real-time data analysis. According to SoftServe, the survey is evidence that machine learning is moving past the "hype cycle", with enterprises looking to automate analytics processes in areas like business intelligence and cyber security. In the latter area, further evidence of machine learning's progress comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is sponsoring an "all-machine" hackathon at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas next month.

Reuters – A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks. Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic with an expertise in artificial intelligence, speech synthesis and machine learning, started working on the system, called Vault OS, two years ago in a basement in London's Shoreditch district, known for being a tech startup hub. Blockchain technology has captured the imagination of the financial industry, with advocates saying it has the potential to shake up how markets operate. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction ever made. The ledger is tamper-proof and transparent, meaning that transactions can be processed without the need for third-party verification.

Baidu has made its second investment in a U.S. fintech company inside a month after it put an undisclosed sum of money into ZestFinance, a big data firm specializing in credit scoring. Baidu, which operates China's dominant search platform, took part in a 60 million round for payments firm Circle in June. The deal is part of an agreement that will see Baidu use ZestFinance's technology to develop a credit scoring platform that is based on its search data. That's important in a market like China because traditional credit systems are broken there. There's precious little formalized credit history data while many people don't use banks heavily or are unbanked.

Monday 18th July 2016, Whitley: Sir Ben Ainslie has hailed Land Rover's artificial intelligence (AI) as a'game changer' ahead of the British America's Cup team's home event in Portsmouth (22-24 July). Land Rover, Title and Exclusive Innovation Partner to Land Rover BAR, is applying its big data processing power and machine learning expertise to help co-engineer the fastest boat in America's Cup history and bring the world's oldest sporting trophy to the UK for the first time. Land Rover engineers, embedded into the team for over a year, are using artificial intelligence to explore and find patterns in sailing performance data to help'make the boat go faster'. When testing, the sailing team receives over 16 GB of uncompressed data per day from sensors on the boat – the equivalent of filling an iPhone's memory. The ability to process and make sense of this volume of data is unprecedented in sailing.

They were the mischievous creatures blamed for causing mechanical failures and faults on aircraft during World War Two and later the destructive monsters in a hit film franchise. So Gremlins might not seem like the first choice for a fleet of robotic aircraft being developed by the US military. But the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing swarms of re-usable drone aircraft that can work together to perform a mission, which it has called the Gremlins program. Darpa said the program has been deliberately named Gremlins after the imps that British pilots during Wold War Two adopted as their good luck charms. The idea is to replace the expensive and increasingly vulnerable multi-function combat aircraft which currently perform a range of different missions.

Robot" débuted, last year, it felt like a shock to multiple systems, one of them being the network on which it aired. That was USA, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal and Comcast; the home of upbeat, aspirational procedurals, it's known as the "blue skies" network. Robot" was more of a hurricane advisory. Created by a newcomer, Sam Esmail, it was a parable of class rage, with a vigilante anti-hero, welding the paranoid style in American TV drama onto the ideology--and, just as important, the aesthetics--of both the Occupy movement and Anonymous. Esmail's plot was a Philip K. Dick puzzle box, exposing one false reality after another.

"Aapo did it again!" - I exclaimed while reading this paper yesterday on the train back home (or at least I thought I was going home until I realised I was sitting on the wrong train the whole time. This gave me a couple more hours to think while traveling on a variety of long-distance buses...) Aapo Hyvärinen is one of my heroes - he did tons of cool work, probably most famous for pseudo-likelihood, score matching and ICA. Time-contrastive learning (TCL) is a technique for learning to extract nonlinear representations from time series data. First, the time series is sliced up into a number of non-overlapping chunks, indexed by \tau . Then, a multivariate logistic regression classifier is trained in a supervised manner to look at a sample taken from the series at an unknown time and predict \tau, the index of the chunk it came from.