KnittBar is the world's most amazing versatile smart power bar. It will give you a new way to look at electricity and how to use your appliances and electronics in a better way; a smart way. Like building blocks, KnittBar's modular design enables you to build the perfect KnittBar that is just right for you. The locking mechanism makes sure that the modules are tightly connected. Don't forget to put on the End Cap:) More modules will be developed, the possibilities are endless!

As Apple plays catch up in many ways, the Mountain View company is doubling down on machine learning efforts that will play an important role in future products. Earlier this week, Google launched a dedicated Machine Learning research group in Europe. Google Research, Europe is based out of the company's Zurich office -- which is already home to the company's largest engineering presence outside of the US. Googlers there were responsible for developing the engine that drives Knowledge Graph and are currently working on the conversation engine that powers the upcoming Google Assistant in Allo. Engineers will specifically focus on natural language processing & understanding, machine intelligence, and machine perception.

If you follow me on Snapchat (msuster) you might already know that I've been looking at and investing in a number of companies in the computer vision space. My thesis is that it will become a major I/O computing metaphor or as this field is sometimes referred to HCI (human-computer interaction). Today I am so excited to announce our latest investment in the category -- Nanit -- which is a smart baby monitor. The objective behind Nanit is to help parent "sleep more and monitor less." By using computer vision Nanit is able to better help parents understand how well a child is sleeping and if they're having difficulties what the causes may be (sound, ambient light, temperature or even, gasp, too much parental interference).

Machine learning represents a paradigm shift in programming, there's no doubt. The concept has begun to weave its promising tendrils through everything from Facebook's image software to Gmail's spam filter, but a crafty engineer thought up a better use: a real-life sorting hat inspired by the character in J.K. Rowlings's beloved Harry Potter series. The impetus for project lead Ryan Anderson, a tech hobbyist by night and a solutions architect for IBM by day, was a creation that would entertainingly instill in a young audience the importance of math, technology, and science. "I was thinking of fun projects and, coincidentally, I have a couple of daughters, and they are mad keen on'Harry Potter,'" he told Tech Insider. "They've read the books, like, five times."

After more than a century of building some of the most exclusive cars ever driven by chauffeurs, Rolls-Royce has found a new valet. Though the artificial intelligence system known as "Eleanor" is still just a concept, she offers a peek into how the world's most refined name in automobiles sees the ultra-wealthy getting around in the future. The technology is featured in the brand's 103EX Vision 100 concept car, an autonomous vehicle, which was unveiled in London on Thursday. "She [Eleanor] will look after you," said Ian Robertson, a BMW board member who once ran the Rolls-Royce division, and who remains close to the brand. "She will determine what your mood is like today, and then change the way the car drives, change the ambiance inside of it, maybe change the music."

Google announced today that it is expanding its largest non-U.S. The new Machine Learning Research Group will be based in Zurich, Switzerland, which is already home to Google's largest research center outside the U.S. The company did not say specifically how many positions will be added. But in a blog post, Google executives said machine learning has become critical to the company's development efforts across a wide range of services. "Google's ongoing research in Machine Intelligence is what powers many of the products being used by hundreds of millions of people a day -- from Translate to Photo Search to SmartReply for Inbox," wrote Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research in Europe. Indeed, the Zurich research center has already had a sizable impact on Google.

Join our next free training with Kenji Lefèvre, Product Manager at Dataiku, to understand how Dataiku streamlines the deployment and production of predictive applications with Dataiku 3.0. If the timing is not convenient, register to receive the recording of the session afterwards. Kenji Lefevre is Dataiku's Product Manager, a collaborative platform to design, build, and run predictive applications from start to finish. Before joining Dataiku, Kenji worked as a freelance data scientist. He holds a PhD in mathematics on homotopical algebra and is particularly interested in the popularizing of science.

"Wand Labs' technology and talent will strengthen our position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence, where we bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence -- connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways," David Ku, corporate vice president of the Information Platform Group at Microsoft, said in statement. "It builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere." "The acquisition of Wand Labs will support Microsoft's chatbots strategy, which the company refers to as "conversations as a platform," Raul Castanon-Martinez, senior Analyst, enterprise mobility, 451 Research told us today. "This is CEO Satya Nadella's first big initiative." Castanon-Martinez said although there are redundancies in the technology developed by Wand Labs and Microsoft's own assets, the acquisition will also provide Microsoft with a talented group of individuals with expertise in conversational interfaces. This will help Microsoft significantly expand the team of experts that are currently working on its conversation-as-a-platform strategy, he said. "This will be critical moving forward; Microsoft has ambitious goals to become the leader in this space [and] the industry is moving at a fast pace.

Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a new artificial intelligence software that can turn any smartphone into an eye-tracking device. Eye-tracking technology - which can determine where in a visual scene people are directing their gaze - has been widely used in psychological experiments and marketing research, but the required pricey hardware has kept it from finding consumer applications. In addition to making existing applications of eye-tracking technology more accessible, the system developed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Georgia may enable new computer interfaces or help detect signs of incipient neurological disease or mental illness. "Since few people have the external devices, there is no big incentive to develop applications for them," said Aditya Khosla, an MIT graduate student. "Since there are no applications, there's no incentive for people to buy the devices. We thought we should break this circle and try to make an eye tracker that works on a single mobile device, using just your front-facing camera," he said.

Enfield Council in north London is trialling a virtual assistant called Amelia to improve the online digital service experience for users and also to reduce the workload of staff within the organisation. The council's head of digital delivery, Tim Kidd, believes this kind of AI-led approach will, in time, be rolled out for services in local government across the country. Speaking with Computerworld UK, Kidd says he "absolutely" expects AI to take off in the public sector and local government. "How quickly is a separate matter, but absolutely in the long run these sorts of technologies will become mainstream in our services," he asserts. The council worked closely with Amelia's engineers at IPSoft so that the organisation can feed information about its processes directly into the AI.