Renren.com, once a leading Chinese online social network, is now dubbed as a "cyber Chernobyl". A recent report shows that there are almost no active users left on Renren, as advertising accounts keep pushing uninteresting contents and the system keeps recommending other people's posts that were so "yesterday". Some have jokingly said this must be what will happen to our world after it is taken by AI. Although it is still hard to say whether AI will ultimately do us good or pose threats, robots are indeed gradually entering our lives.

HYDERABAD: At a time when most of the startups are focusing on solving fairly shallow problems, Avishkar, the start-up accelerator programme of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) on Friday took three companies under its wings to encourage entrepreneurs who are into solving deep-tech problems. Screened from about 140 applications across the world, the top three companies are all set to form the first batch of the six-month long programme. The selected startups will now work closely with the Avishkar team and the faculty members of IIIT-H labs and other partners over the next six months to get to a level of investment-readiness that will launch them to the next stage of their journey. "We are a four-month-old company trying to build a virtual personal stylist for women. Through our app, we want to offer all the services that a stylist offers to women. In other words, we want to create artificial intelligence (AI) of a personal stylist. The best part about Avishkar is that unlike many accelerators, the programmes here are personalised for each and every startup and would be helpful for us to grow faster," Komal Prajapati, founder, Fabulyst, said.

Real estate experts like to say that the three most important features of a property are: location, location, location! Likewise, weather events are highly location-dependent. We will see below how a similar perspective is also applicable to machine learning algorithms. In real estate, the buyer is first and foremost concerned about location for at least 3 reasons: (a) the desirability of the surrounding neighborhood; (b) the proximity to schools, businesses, services, etc.; and (c) the value of properties in that area. Similarly, meteorologists tell us that all weather is local.

This post contains my answers from a Quora session I did on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Each section contains a link to the original Quora question, the overall session can be found here. Think carefully about what you actually want to achieve with it. Most fall into the latter camp, but it seems everyone fancies themselves as containing a bit of the former (particularly if they think they're going to solve AI). To do the former well, in the international community, requires really good foundations (particularly in mathematics) followed by a PhD with a supervisor who has experience of how that community works. Doing the second well is much easier from the perspective of learning machine learning. A data generator would often be a scientist or company that is working in a particular application and wants answers. They need access to machine learning researchers or statisticians to give advice on how to answer those questions. They should try and collaborate with experts in data analytics and data science, but they should be careful, there is a lot of hype around the term'big data' at the moment. It's a difficult area to navigate. Data generators typically need an interface to consume machine learning (or statistics) effectively, if this interface is poorly chosen a lot of wasted resource can result (things get very expensive very quickly for a lot of data generators!). A data consumer is where the largest demand is right at the moment, and should probably be the starting point for someone who wants to move in the right direction. An MSc in Data Science would be a good starting point. You can also use this experience to see if you want to transit into a machine learning generator (that's basically what happened to me). What are you passionate about? That is the route in to any subject. Is it a particular approach to learning or a particular application?

"There are ugly things that have to happen in order to make the enterprise work and play with the cloud," says David Linthicum, SVP of Cloud Technology Partners, a cloud consulting firm based in Boston, in a recent podcast. To help enterprises address these challenges, public cloud vendors need to place more of an emphasis on hybrid cloud. In this podcast, Linthicum and Sandeepan Banerjee, SVP of engineering and operations for container management company ClusterHQ and former Data Head at Google, discuss this topic, as well as new cloud technologies, such as containers and machine learning. Will public cloud vendors fill in container ecosystem gaps? Containers are one of several new cloud technologies making their way into the enterprise.

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to disrupt so many different dimensions of our society that the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy recently announced a series of four public workshops to look at some of the possible impacts of AI. The first of these workshops happened at the University of Washington on Tuesday, May 24th, and I was there to cover how some of these discussions may impact the virtual reality community. The first AI public workshop was focused on law and policy, and I had a chance to talk to three different people about their perspectives on AI. I interviewed the White House Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Edward Felten about how these workshops came about, and the government's plan for addressing the issue.

We've seen a big rise in apps and bots, and a lot of them have something in common besides being based on artificial intelligence and machine learning: many of them are written first (or only) for English-speaking users. Now one of the more interesting personal assistant apps created first for Spanish speakers is announcing funding: Sherpa, a personal assistant app based out of Spain, has raised 6.5 million in a Series A round. Xabi Uribe- Etxebarria, the founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that the funding will be used to continue building out more functionality in the app, as well as on more hires and to expand the reach of the app as it gears up for a much bigger Series B and eventual expansion to other languages like English and Portuguese. Sherpa is filling an interesting niche in the market that most English speakers might not even realise exists: many of the interesting evolutions in AI and natural language processing have been focused on English applications, leaving large swathes of the non-English speaking world without the same kinds of services. Uribe- Etxebarria notes that while some apps do have Spanish versions they are basic.

A savage Terminator-like computer network could declare war on humanity, Britain's top robotics experts have admitted. The alarming claim emerged today as MPs held an otherwise run-of-the-mill hearing about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Parliament summoned two AI professors and two research directors to discuss how smart robots will change the economy. Labour MP Graham Stringer then stung them with the million-dollar question - whether The Terminator could come true. The 1984 classic and its sequels feature a computer system called Skynet that becomes "self-aware", takes control of America's nuclear weapons and rains a firestorm down upon the earth. Read more: Killer computers to create'artificial hell' for humanity by torturing unlucky victims FOREVER That may sound a bit extreme, but none of the four experts ruled it out.

One day in January, Eric Wilson dashed off a message to the teaching assistants for an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "I really feel like I missed the mark in giving the correct amount of feedback," he wrote, pleading to revise an assignment. Thirteen minutes later, the TA responded. "Unfortunately, there is not a way to edit submitted feedback," wrote Jill Watson, one of nine assistants for the 300-plus students. Last week, Mr. Wilson found out he had been seeking guidance from a computer.

Noida, India and London, United Kingdom, May 27th 2016 – HCL Technologies, a leading global IT services company, has been named the winner of the Best Innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) award at the AIconics Awards. The AIconics are the world's only independently judged awards celebrating the drive, innovation and hard work in the international Artificial Intelligence Community organised by AIBusiness and was hosted during The AI Summit on the 5th May. HCL was also named as a finalist in the Best Intelligent Assistant category, which showcases companies making ground-breaking advancements in virtual assistants and advanced voice/text recognition capabilities. This year's awards featured 5 categories, recognising industry leaders across a broad spectrum of AI technologies. In winning the Best Innovation in NLP award, the AIconics Awards judges recognised that HCL is ahead of the curve when it comes to NLP, at a time when many businesses are looking towards productivity and automation of roles and tasks.