We live in a world besotted with images: selfies, Instagram photos, video clips running on social media platforms that make it easy to instantly post images captured by smartphones and other devices. The explosion of images is making keyword searches less effective, prompting companies that sell photos and music to come up with new approaches to sorting through the haystack for the relevant image. With that in mind, image and music licensor Shutterstock Inc. (NYSE: SSTK) has launched new search features based on machine learning techniques and, specifically, its proprietary "convolutional" neural network technology. Convolutional neural networks are a machine-learning construct usually comprised of multiple layers that is often followed by more fully connected layers as in a standard multilayer neural network. Convolution nets are made up of neurons with "learnable" weights and biases.

Earlier this month, headlines were made around the world when Google's artificial intelligence, dubbed AlphaGo, was able to beat the current world champion in four out of five matches of the ancient board game Go. Now the bot may have to face an opponent of its own type: a group of Chinese computer engineers have announced that they plan to challenge Google, pitting AlphaGo against their own AI program. The scientists are part of the China Computer Go team, and the announcement was made at an event hosted by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. It was said that the challenge will be made before the end of 2016, but exact details of what that will include weren't mentioned, other that the fact that it will involve the game of Go. AlphaGo's win over 33-year-old Lee Sedol came as a bit of a surprise, as the Go champion was seen as a much stronger opponent and expected to win, despite the fact that the program had become the world's first AI to defeat a human in the game last year when it bested a professional player.

PRESS RELEASE–SANDY, Utah–PurePredictive recently announced the release of its advanced predictive modeling platform. This patented technology uses artificial intelligence to automate machine learning, decreasing the inefficiencies that exist within advanced data science. The platform enables data scientists and other experts to accomplish in a few minutes what would otherwise take weeks to do. In addition, the platform features "one click" deployment, putting these "super models" to work right away, rather than waiting the months that would traditionally be required to integrate them into a workflow or software system. Over the last three months, over 450 data scientists and technical experts signed up for PurePredictive's beta release from a selection of companies ranging in size from very small firms to technology giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, HP, eBay, Oracle, Dell and Cisco.

WIRED Health 2016 takes place on 29 April in London. IBM's Watson supercomputer is perhaps best known for winning the gameshow Jeopardy, but its expertise is now being applied to healthcare Kyu Rhee will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016 on 29 April in London. From helping humans live longer to understanding the brain, WIRED Health will hear from the innovators transforming this critical sector. You might know IBM's Watson best for its victory on US game show Jeopardy!, or perhaps for its cookery prowess, or even the campaign to elect it to the US presidency. But IBM hopes that its supercomputer can also change the way doctors diagnose their patients, putting vast quantities of data at a physician's fingertips.

If you've seen the movie Her, or perhaps Iron Man, you'll know what the future of tech looks like. AI is coming and it's coming in a big way. It's here to make our lives easier and simpler, or at least, that's what all the big tech giants would have us believe. AI is nothing new, IBM has been experimenting with Watson for a couple of years. But powerful, enormous tech such as Watson is far removed from the lives of everyday people like you or me.

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that deep-learning artificial intelligence has become a new computing platform, and the company is dealing with hundreds of startups in the space that plan to take advantage of the platform. Speaking at the GPUTech conference in San Jose, California, Huang noted that 5 billion was invested last year in A.I. startups, and there are probably a thousand companies working on the technology for applications ranging from face recognition to self-driving cars. "Deep learning is not an industry," he said. "Deep learning is going to be in every industry. Deep learning is going to be in every application."

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your fluid-filled Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. MIT has developed a 3D printer that can mix solids and liquids. With "printable hydraulics," an inkjet printer deposits individual droplets of material that are each 20 to 30 microns in diameter, or less than half the width of a human hair.

A senior Egyptian al-Qaida figure fighting in Syria was killed in a U.S. drone strike this week, the latest to be killed in such attacks in Syria, a Syrian opposition monitoring group and relatives said Friday. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Rifai Ahmad Taha was killed in a strike Tuesday in the northwestern Idlib province. Before joining al-Qaida, Taha was a top figure in Egypt's notorious militant group Gamaa Islamiya, which massacred 58 foreign tourists in the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor in 1997. He was also allied with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The Observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said several al-Qaida members, including Taha, were killed in Tuesday's strike.

Friday, May 6, 2016 Registration and breakfast begin at 9 a.m. Upon arrival, be prepared to show a picture ID and sign the Building Visitor Log when approaching the Lobby Floor Security Desk. Alert them to the name of the event you are attending and ask them to direct you to the appropriate floor. The talks will be held the First Floor Conference Center, Horace Mann Conference Room. Hospitality Notice for University and Government Employees: Microsoft Research is providing hospitality at this event.

Synopsis: There is more to Text Mining than TDM and TF-IDF. Come explore the world of Sentiment Analysis using Advanced Text Mining techniques with cutting edge tools like Stanford's CoreNLP and analysing it's output using Python. Speaker: Aditya Shankar is a Lecturer in the Intelligent Systems practice at the Institute of Systems Science in the National University of Singapore. He started his career consulting for Microsoft in Redmond, WA, Nike in Portland, OR and T-Mobile in Seattle, WA. He then moved on to work for companies in the Healthcare domain, mostly healthcare providers in Tennessee.