The tech icon was helping launch the Advance Queensland Innovation and Investment Summit on Thursday, where the government hoped to foster the seeds of the next Apple, Google or major AI player. "A machine doesn't yet say'what's an obstacle of the world, what's a problem of the world that needs solving and what is an approach I could take to solve it?' " he told the audience. "We're just at the verge of where the machines may take off and go much further than even we humans could make them go. "It is a new revolution in my mind, the revolution of artificial intelligence, machines that will learn, that will be able to do things much better than we know how to tell them."

How does the image-recognition technology in a self-driving car respond to a blurred shape suddenly appearing on the road? Researchers from KU Leuven, Belgium, have shown that machines can learn to respond to unfamiliar objects like human beings would. Imagine heading home in your self-driving car. The rain is falling in torrents and visibility is poor. All of a sudden, a blurred shape appears on the road.

CHENNAI: Infosys has launched a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that the IT major claims will revolutionize the way companies manage complex information technology systems. 'Mana', the AI tool, can optimize mundane maintenance of IT systems, saving substantial operating expenditure for firms and freeing up human resources to innovate. CEO Vishal Sikka, who has been at the announced the system at the firm's Confluence conference in San Francisco. "If we can bring automation to do better things we can already do, then we can focus on innovation," he said, adding that Infosys has been doing that by using Mana in maintenance and operation of the complex systems, thereby freeing up resources to "reinventing the landscape" in which they operate. Systems like these, said Sikka in the buildup to the announcement, will maintain and operate a complex landscape, codify and capture knowledge that sits in business processes, helping turn focus on improving processes and implementing "Zero Distance" between end user and the firm.

WASHINGTON – A man who threatened to blow up a local Baltimore TV station Thursday dressed head-to-toe in an animal costume was carrying chocolate bars made to resemble an explosive device, police said. The 25-year-old was in "serious but stable condition" at a local hospital after police shot him several times when he emerged from the building and walked toward them, Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith told reporters during a news conference. Police used a robot to disarm the man as he lay injured on the ground after being shot, which is when they discovered that his bombs were fake. "Those devices were actually candy bars wrapped in aluminum foil with wiring connecting each of them," Smith said. The authorities were alerted at 1:20 p.m. (1720 GMT) after the man set what was believed to be his own car on fire just outside the FOX45 station before entering the building.

Elon Musk's OpenAI has created a'gym' to let developers train their AI systems on Atari games. The open source code, which is still in development, includes'environments' to create situations in which AI can learn. The environments include playing classic board games, controlling a robot in simulation and playing 59 Atari games like Asteroids, Air Raid, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Pitfall. The hope is that the tasks will give OpenAI and others a way to rank and improve various AI approaches, and unveil new ways to teach machines to learn. OpenAI will also feature a leaderboard of the most successful systems.

Japan is experiencing a surge in the number of repeat offenders, particularly among older people, and the Ministry of Justice is working with a rehabilitation facility in Tokyo on the project, which may be rolled out elsewhere if it proves successful. More than 47 per cent of the people arrested in 2014 had previously been convicted of a crime, the highest figure since 1989. Many of those arrested committed petty offences, such as shoplifting, as a way to return to prison, because they are estranged from their families and feel isolated.

Alicia Vikander is following in Angelina Jolie's butt-kicking footsteps. The Swedish actress has signed on to play the role of Lara Croft in a new "Tomb Raider" movie from Norwegian director Roar Uthaug. MGM, Warner Bros. and GK Films announced the news Thursday. Jolie was the first actress to bring the popular video game character to life on the big screen. Both Jolie films were poorly received by critics, but the first was a big box office success.

Tesla Motors cofounder and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently collaborated with Y Combinator's Sam Altman and former Googler Ilya Sutskever to launch a non-profit platform for artificial intelligence research called OpenAI. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a part of fictional films today. As a matter of fact, AI has become ubiquitous in almost all fields of sciences, offering its remarkable benefits that can revolutionize the world. Despite its protracted history, artificial Intelligence is a field that is still constantly and actively evolving. It is defined as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines through incorporating clever computer programs.

Like so many organizations today, Infosys, the Indian consulting giant, is a company in transition. For years it has made a good living helping customers manage legacy tools, but CEO Vishal Sikka, who took over 21 months ago saw a shifting landscape and he began implementing new systems immediately. One of those changes involved developing a new artificial intelligence system they have called Mana, which is designed to help customers automate repetitive system maintenance tasks and build knowledge about the underlying systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Sikka announced the system this morning at the Infosys Confluence conference in San Francisco. Mana involves three main tools: Infosys Information Platform for analytics, Infosys Automation Platform for automating and continuously building knowledge about system maintenance and workflow tasks and Infosys Knowledge Platform, a formal platform for capturing and storing knowledge.

We introduce a new learned descriptor for audio signals which is efficient for event representation. The entries of the descriptor are produced by evaluating a set of regressors on the input signal. The regressors are class-specific and trained using the random regression forests framework. Given an input signal, each regressor estimates the onset and offset positions of the target event. The estimation confidence scores output by a regressor are then used to quantify how the target event aligns with the temporal structure of the corresponding category. Our proposed descriptor has two advantages. First, it is compact, i.e. the dimensionality of the descriptor is equal to the number of event classes. Second, we show that even simple linear classification models, trained on our descriptor, yield better accuracies on audio event classification task than not only the nonlinear baselines but also the state-of-the-art results.