If you write marketing or advertising text for a living, you may want to get a second job skill. That's because software that writes text is here, and it is tackling a growing list of assignments. Several companies offer software that regularly churns out thousands of stories and reports based on structured data, like financial results. Ads that literally write themselves emerged last week, as IBM announced a new service based on its Watson supercomputer. A program called Quakebot has generated earthquake stories for the LA Times.

Akihiro Kishimoto is a research staff member at IBM Research – Ireland working on a range of projects in artificial intelligence, parallel and distributed computing and search. His interest in these technical fields grew from his passion for board games. And while a student at the University of Tokyo, he and three of his fellow classmates designed ISshogi, a program to play the incredibly complex (and ancient) Japanese board game, Shogi. ISshogi won the World Computer Shogi Championships four times from 1997-2005. While studying AI at the University of Alberta, Akihiro was a member of the GAMES group (Game-playing, Analytical methods, Minimax search and Empirical Studies) in the Department of Computing Science, and worked with Jonathan Schaeffer and others to solve Checkers.

DVDs were first launched in Japan, Travelocity opened up as the first online booking agent, eBay, Ask Jeeves also opened their online doors and the Spice Girls had their first UK number-one. You get the point (well except the Spice Girls bit) – it was an inflection point with technology, and 20 years later we are that same point again with AI, sometimes referred to as cognitive technologies. At the time I was fortunate to work for a very innovative company who had developed the first generation of SaaS solution for managing supply chains. So as you can imagine I spent a lot of my time sat in meetings trying to convince executives the internet was going to change the world and they needed to innovate. What we forget (which seems silly now) is many of these execs either dismissed the technology, or worse, had convinced themselves they get it and have a solid plan.

London: An intelligent and highly sophisticated robot developed by a research team of University of Birmingham in the UK is joining the world of work as a trainee office manager. The robot, named Betty, will greet guests at reception and carry out tasks at the Transport Systems Catapult, based in Milton Keynes, in the UK, for a two-month trial period. Betty's duties will include patrolling the offices, assessing how many staff members are in the office outside working hours and monitoring the environment by collating data on clutter, office temperature, humidity and noise. She will also check fire doors are closed and desks are clear. A highly sophisticated robot, Betty runs Artificial Intelligence-driven software developed by an international research team led by the University of Birmingham.

Japan's electronics makers are beefing up efforts to recruit hard-to-find artificial intelligence experts -- a critical resource as connected technologies and services loom large on the industry's path forward. Growth in the number of college graduates with AI expertise -- typically math whizzes or engineers with additional knowledge of programming languages and data analysis -- has failed to keep pace with rising demand for such talent. The global supply is only in the tens of thousands, pitting companies expanding AI research operations against each other in the search for top recruits. Sony will next spring begin bulking up its ranks of such new graduates with a specialized recruiting framework for research and development in AI and machine learning. No limit will be set on the number of staff that can be hired, unlike under the company's normal recruiting system.

May 7, 2013: Recent improvements to the Stanford Deterministic Coreference Resolution System (Recasens et al., below) won the best short paper award at NAACL 2013. June 30, 2011: This system was the top ranked system at the CoNLL-2011 shared task. This system implements the multi-pass sieve coreference resolution (or anaphora resolution) system described in Lee et al. (CoNLL Shared Task 2011) and Raghunathan et al. (EMNLP 2010). The score is higher than that in EMNLP 2010 paper because of additional sieves and better rules (see Lee et al. 2011 for details). Mention detection is included in the package.

Romit Shah, of Japanese financial holding company Nomura, has raised his rating on the shares in silicon specialist Nvidia, after spending time with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and hearing about the company's plans for the future. The Wall Street analyst said that Huang "was very enthusiastic about the prospects for the data center business, as hyperscale companies quickly adopt throughput computing in an effort to accelerate workload performance." Shares jumped three percent on the news. Nvidia's year-on-year data center revenues grew by 63 percent last quarter, mostly due to the "broad adoption" of Tesla M40 GPU accelerator. Nomura believes the company has an 80 percent share of the accelerator market, which accounts for less than one percent of overall data center spending.

In my last post about Bot Framework, I wrote an overview about how you can create a weather bot.. in this post, I'm starting a series where I'll go deep into each part of building a bot using the Bot Framework.. In this post, I'll deep-dive into Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS), and how we can use it to understand the user message. LUIS is an API built by Microsoft and introduced as a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services (A set of intelligence services).. it's a Machine Learning API that allows you to create an app with some intents and entities and then train it on some utterances and then start using it in your apps or websites and most importantly… your bots! In this post, I'll guide you to create a LUIS app focusing on the bots scenarios, let's start! Well, this the most important part of building an intelligent service than can help you understanding the language, what's your intents?

Andy Rubin, who co-founded Android and jump-started Google's robotics efforts, imagines a future where artificial intelligence is so powerful that it powers every connected device. Speaking at Bloomberg's Tech Conference in San Francisco today, Rubin said a combination of quantum computing and AI advancements could yield a conscious intelligence that would underpin every piece of technology. "If you have computing that is as powerful as this could be, you might only need one," Rubin says. "It might not be something you carry around; it just has to be conscious." It sounds outlandish and theoretical, and it is.

In fact, unit shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) systems used in infotainment and ADAS systems are expected to rise from just 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), the leading global source of critical information and insight. The attach rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and the vast majority were focused on speech recognition. However, that number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars. "An artificial-intelligence system continuously learns from experience and by its ability to discern and recognize its surroundings," said Luca De Ambroggi, principal analyst-automotive semiconductors, IHS Technology. "It learns, as human beings do, from real sounds, images, and other sensory inputs. The system recognizes the car's environment and evaluates the contextual implications for the moving car." Specifically in ADAS, deep learning -- which mimics human neural networks -- presents several advantages over traditional algorithms; it is also a key milestone on the road to fully autonomous vehicles.