A "new" Rembrandt has been unveiled in Amsterdam, but it's not a long lost dusty relic that was found in someone's loft--it was created by data analysts and computers. The portrait of a man in a black hat is the result of 18 months work by art historians, data scientists, developers, 3-D print technicians, and organizations like Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and Amsterdam's Rembrandt House Museum. It consists of more than 148 million pixels, based on 168,263 painting fragments from Rembrandt's output. The initiative is the brainchild of Bas Korsten, executive creative director at ad agency JWT Amsterdam, and was created for Dutch financial services giant ING. Korsten says ING approached the agency with a brief to "find a way to bring their innovative spirit to their sponsorship of Dutch art and culture in a way that would get people thinking."

This afternoon, while I was discussing with Montserrat (aka @mguillen_estany) we were wondering how long it might take to run a regression model. More specifically, how long it might take if we use a Bayesian approach. My guess was that the time should probably be linear in, the number of observations. But I thought I would be good to check. Here the regression is a subset of smaller size.

Ford recently drove an autonomous Fusion through the Arizona night, relying entirely on the car's laser radar system to plot its course. Ford engineers working on the company's autonomous car technology recently succeeded in making a self-driving Ford Fusion lap its Arizona Proving Grounds in complete darkness, using laser radar, or Lidar, as its guide. While Lidar is a standard feature of most self-driving car gadgetry - along with traditional radar and cameras - the test was meant to specifically highlight how an autonomous vehicle might operate in a situation that many humans find nerve-wracking. Most self-driving cars are tested during daylight hours so all of their electronic systems can contribution to the process. As autonomous vehicles creep into our automotive future, the biggest hurdle for automakers won't be scientific but rather psychological.

Members of the writing team - which includes poets, novelists, playwrights and a former television writer - for Microsoft's Cortana artificial intelligence project. Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios. Now, she is applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a different type of character - a virtual assistant, animated by artificial intelligence, that interacts with sick patients. Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain, then sends the data to a real doctor.

What if I told you that there was an Internet search company that's been working on self-driving cars since 2013 and its vehicles have logged countless successful autonomous miles? This company uses luxury vehicles for its autonomous car testing, has teamed up with self-driving tech leaders like NVIDIA, and is working with the government to make self-driving automobiles a reality. You might make an educated guess that I'm talking about Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google. But you'd be wrong (sorry about that). Baidu is working to bring self-driving public transportation to China by 2018 and the company is taking huge strides to make it happen.

In a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern contest of strategy and intuition that has bedeviled AI experts for decades. Machines have topped the best humans at most games held up as measures of human intellect, including chess, Scrabble, Othello, even Jeopardy!. But with Go--a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess--human grandmasters have maintained an edge over even the most agile computing systems. Earlier this month, top AI experts outside of Google questioned whether a breakthrough could occur anytime soon, and as recently as last year, many believed another decade would pass before a machine could beat the top humans. But Google has done just that.

I do machine learning at work. For a long time (the whole time I've had this job, 2 years), I've struggled with a bunch of questions about complicated machine learning models. Are black box models good? Should we be using them? What can I do about it?

Next time you schedule a meeting and an assistant named Amy or Andrew Ingram sets up the logistics, here's a pro tip: You may be chatting with a robot. And if it's one of x.ai's bots, you might never know the difference. That was my experience when I exchanged emails with "Andrew" to set up an interview with x.ai's CEO. After I emailed x.ai's press contact, she referred me to Andrew to hammer out the details. Andrew proposed a time, thanked me when I accepted and sent out a calendar invitation.

Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, founder of investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd (DST Global), has made a new investment in a tech company Horizon Robotics, a China-based startup focused on artificial intelligence (AI). The size of the investment venture was not disclosed. Horizon Robotics will use the latest proceeds on research and development, including team expansion, reported the China Money Network. The startup was established in July 2015 by Dr. Kai YU, the founder and former head of Institute of Deep Learning (IDL) at Baidu. Horizon Robotics previously received seed funding from Hillhouse Capital, Morningside Ventures, GSR Ventures, Sequoia Capital, among others.

Tokyo, April 8, 2016 - Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501) today announced the development of "EMIEW3," a humanoid robot, and its "remote brain"*1 robotics IT platform. EMIEW3, capable of autonomously approaching customers requiring assistance, was developed to provide necessary services and guidance in stores and public facilities. Enhanced by the "remote brain" consisting of a robotics IT platform connected to cloud-based intelligent processing systems and a remote operation system to monitor and control multiple robots at various locations, EMIEW3 is able to provide high quality services. Since the announcement of "EMIEW" in 2005, Hitachi has continued to develop human symbiotic robots that can safely co-exist with humans, providing robot-based services with advanced communication capabilities. Using EMIEW2, first announced in 2007, Hitachi developed functions necessary for customer and guidance services, and demonstrated capabilities which include autonomous mobility at a brisk human walking pace, isolation of human voice from background noise, accessing information from the Web to identify objects and using indoor network cameras as "eyes" to locate objects.