One of the largest law firms in the US, Baker & Hostetler has hired Ross, according to a report at Futurism. Ross is a natural language legal assistant for lawyers, that is based on IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence. Ross can sift through mountains of legal data, to give succinct and direct answer to questions. It works like a search engine, but instead of giving a list of answers that again puts the onus of shifting through the data on the user, Ross just gives one most appropriate answer. Ross is different from other digital assistants that do this, because instead of basing the results on keyword indexing, Ross actually has cognitive capabilities.

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what's happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1--Part 2 is here. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing--but then you have to remember something about what it's like to stand on a time graph: you can't see what's to your right. So here's how it actually feels to stand there: Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750--a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It's impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone's face and chat with them even though they're on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery.

In this presentation we will look at implant technology, both in terms of new forms of identification and also in bringing humans and technology together, particularly with regard to the security issues that this presents. We will also see how good the latest artificial intelligence is at posing as a human. The audience will be given the opportunity to try for themselves and see if they can tell the difference between human and machine. Kevin Warwick is Emeritus Professor at Reading and Coventry Universities. His research areas are artificial intelligence, biomedical systems and...

Google has revealed the most powerful computer for understanding the English language in the world – and called it Parsey McParseFace. The technology, which is built on the more sensibly named TensorFlow and SyntaxNet frameworks, is a powerful tool that uses new artificial intelligence technology to be able to analyse the linguistic structure of language, and understand what each part of a sentence does to its meaning. Google is making the tool open source, so that anybody can use it for free. But it will probably go down in history because of its silly name. Google said that the name – a reference to the controversial Boaty McBoatface – was a suggestion that came while it was trying to name the new technology, and that it didn't have any better alternatives.

The project is using repurposed Ultra Pods, which are already in operation at London's Heathrow Airport. There, the electric four-wheelers run on tracks, shuttling passengers in relative safety. To help make them road-ready, TRL has teamed up with Westfield Sportscars, a classic car builder based in the West Midlands, and Oxbotica, a research-based offshoot from Oxford University's Mobile Robotics Group. The group's mission is to see how the public reacts to driverless vehicles, especially in urban environments where there are plenty of motorists and pedestrians. Successful applicants will be asked to give some feedback about their driverless adventure.

From Lego bricks to batteries, young children, and even the occasional adult, can swallow a bizarre array of objects. But a new foldable robot could now help doctors remove these without the need for surgery. The origami robot can be swallowed, steered through the stomach using a magnetic field and then attach itself to the foreign objects to help them pass through the digestion system. Engineers have created a foldable robot (pictured) out of dried pig intestine and a material that shrinks when heated. When folded it can be encased in a capsule of ice so it can be swallowed.

The amount of data produced every day grows tremendously in most real-life domains, including medical imaging, genomics, text categorisation, computational biology, and many others. Although it appears beneficial at the first glance (more data could mean more possibilities of extracting and revealing useful underlying knowledge), handling massively large datasets became a challenging issue and attracts research attention, especially in the era of big data. This big data revolution affected many research fields, including statistics, machine learning, parallel computing, and computer systems in general [1]. Storing and analysing the acquired historical information should allow predicting the label of an incoming (unseen) feature vector, containing some quantified features of a given data example. If the labels are categorical, then we are to tackle the classification task (it's regression otherwise).

Now that high school seniors have made the fateful choice of a college to attend in the fall, their parents are free to pull out tufts of hair as they figure out how to pay for it. Scholarships are life-saving options, but they can be hard to ferret out, says San Francisco-based startup Schoold, which offers a free college-planning mobile app. The company, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to personalize help for individual students, today announced a new "Scholarship" function on its app. It will automatically surface details on study grants and awards that could work for each particular user. The app takes into account the student's intended college, major, interests, and other elements of the profile they create on the app.

One of the hottest topics the last few years or so have been around AI in all it's forms, everything from being simple female-named chatting tools, to domesday predictions AI that will kill us all, or just make us fat and obsolete in the workplace. So far what we've seen and be able to play with has mostly been in the form of chat bots, helping us navigate through over complicated websites or get some very limited customer service help. November 6, 2001 "Treehouse of Horror XII" was aired, with Pierce Brosnan starring as Ultrahouse 3000. An smart building AI that becomes attracted to Marge and decides to get rid of Homer, attempting to kill him by dumping him into the dining room table's garbage disposal. Alas containing many of the common fears of what an AI eventually will do to us.

Virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a number of new technologies are providing new opportunities for media agencies as well as e-commerce companies to grow new business and shift business models. JD.com unveiled its latest smart refrigerator model at the CES Asia yesterday, aiming at providing an industry chain solution for smart devices manufacturers. JD.com chief technology officer Zhang Chen told a keynote speech that it has also setablished a strategic partnership with Microsoft to drive artificial intelligence research and to enhance human-computer interaction experience. It would seek partnership that could complement each party's resources in terms of retail channel and technology. Last year, sales volume of smart devices at JD.com nearly tripled and the types of devices available also added 1.6 times from a year ago.