In 1996, Bill Gates said, "Content is king." Ten years later, Cisco's CEO, John Chambers talked about video as king. Last year, a New York Times headline read, "Where clicks reign, audience is king." I thought I'd coin a new phrase for IBM Watson, "Conversation is king". However, a Google search revealed that sci-fi novelist, Cory Doctorow, published, "Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."

SF Bay ACM Members: We NEED you to attend! Chapter Elections will be briefly held at the beginning of this meeting. In this talk, Arno Candel presents a brief history of AI and how Deep Learning and Machine Learning techniques are transforming our everyday lives. Arno will introduce H2O, a scalable open-source machine learning platform, and show live demos on how to train sophisticated machine learning models on large distributed datasets. He will show how data scientists and application developers can use the Flow GUI, R, Python, Java, Scala, JavaScript and JSON to build smarter applications, and how to take them to production.

Elon Musk claims that humans are at risk of becoming the dumb "house pets" of artificial intelligence, unless we implant technology into our brains to help us compete with machine learning of the future. In a public talk and on Twitter last week, Musk announced that a'neural lace' - which is basically a brain implant that can augment natural intelligence by hooking us up to computers - will be the key to maintaining our authority as a species. "I don't love the idea of being a house cat, but what's the solution?" said Musk during a live interview at Recode's Code Conference in California on Wednesday. "I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer. Just as your cortex works symbiotically with your limbic system, your third digital layer could work symbiotically with you."

The zany AI angle, pushed heavily by Tronc's new billionaire biotech benefactor Patrick Soon-Shiong, is just one recent twist in the saga at the once-storied newspaper chain. Since USA Today owner and rival Gannett made a hostile bid for Tribune/Tronc last month, Chairman Michael Ferro has done everything to keep the company from changing hands. On CNBC today, Ferro outlined some of his plans to revitalize the company, whose share price has dropped by nearly half over the last couple years. It involves using vaguely described machine learning technology to produce lots of video. "There's all these really new, fun features we're going to be able to do with artificial intelligence and content to make videos faster," Ferro told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin.

I think there's a special stigma when people say they're supporting Trump, because of some of the brash things that he's said,

By now, you probably know the broad strokes about Tango: It's a suite of technologies that combines computer vision, motion tracking and depth perception to help a device figure out exactly where it is and how it's moving through space. So far, the Tango foundation has been used, among other things, to give us turn-by-turn directions inside a museum and let us play with virtual puppies. The Pro features a 6.4-inch Quad HD IPS screen that will stretch pockets and hands alike. In fact, the phone is so big that the thought of using it as my daily driver is just absurd. We've seen huge phones before -- here's looking at you, Xperia Z Ultra -- but the Phab2 Pro is less of a big handset than it is a small tablet. That shouldn't come as a surprise, either.

A new surveillance technology will allow for the immediate, automatic detection of suspicious behaviour in live video feeds. The research project, led by the IARPA unit at the U.S. Office of National Intelligence, proposes a recognition system dubbed Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA), which is able to scour through multiple live video streams and pick out potential criminal and terror activities. Describing the project, IARPA officials noted: 'The DIVA program will produce a common framework and software prototype for activity detection, person/object detection and recognition across a multi-camera network. The impact will be the development of tools for forensic analysis, as well as real-time alerting for user-defined threat scenarios.' The technology is designed to pore through video surveillance and other incoming camera footage to search for new threats, as well as to identify individuals and objects already flagged by the authorities as posing a danger.

Lately there's been a rumble pretty much everywhere about artificial intelligence, digital personal assistants, the Internet of Things, wearables and apps for everything. I've even written myself about what the rise of digital assistants mean to search. There are some who claim that these new technologies will render search obsolete, passed over for the convenience and joy of an always-available digital world. I think they are wrong. Instead of looking at a search engine as an advertising platform, we need to remember what it actually does for people.

America has a prison problem. Although the United States accounts for just 4.4 percent of the world's population, we account for 22 percent of the world's overall prisoner population. All this attempted correction comes at both social and financial expense. America spent around 80 billion on prisons, jails, probation, and parole in 2010, according to a report by The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair, and too costly – in every sense of the word – and we need to start to change it," heralded the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann on Tuesday in Washington, DC.

In today's digitally driven world, enterprises need to find ways to extract valuable insights from huge amounts of data. That data is both generated within the organization and captured from external sources, from every application and social media to the networks of sensors that constitute the Internet of Things (IoT). To make sense of these data assets, enterprises need automated tools that continually analyze data and generate information and insights that business leaders can use to keep the organization competitive. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that involves building systems that learn iteratively from data, identify patterns, and predict future results--all with minimal human intervention. Machine learning is often used in data science, alongside tools such as statistical modeling, data mining, information retrieval, and natural language processing.