Imagine strapping an enormous VR headset to a car. Now, place that car inside a facility the size of a football field that simulates a full range of motion. Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt provided a peek inside that incredible facility during a keynote speech to a crowd of more than 3,000 at our GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley Thursday. Pratt also announced that Toyota will be opening a new autonomous driving research facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that will be staffed by about 50 researchers to complement Toyota's ongoing efforts in Japan, Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Mass., near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pratt is a legendary figure in the robotics community.

Deal activity in artificial intelligence has now hit record highs for two quarters straight. Deal count had already leapt to 24 in Q4'15, ten more deals than the previous quarter. The trend continued in Q1'16, with deals reaching a 5-year quarterly high, and passing the 25-deal threshold. However, total funding dropped 18% to 83M from 101M in Q4'15, when over 20 companies raised funds. Our artificial intelligence category covers startups primarily focused on developing AI technologies, across areas including image processing, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and predictive APIs, among other core applications.

Or did he deliberately damage his car? It's a question insurance companies face every day. Deliberate deception is a contributing factor in one out of ten insurance claims. A joint project by IBM and SAP is intended to make estimating easier for claims adjusters in the future. The two tech giants are developing a program that searches through large numbers of damage reports to uncover irregularities.

Fear of our jobs being replaced by machines dates all the way back to the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and maybe even earlier. But as new machines, computers, and robots are developed and jobs are lost, we have learned new jobs are created: programmers, code-writers, and so on, and society adapts. However, as technology continues to advance, the artificial intelligence capabilities of some of these new "machines" make them seem more human than ever. As a lawyer, it makes you wonder: Can these new iPeople be held liable? Think about the bank teller and the fear he must have experienced when the invention of the ATM was announced, or the cashier when self-checkout was introduced.

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 30, 2016) - EverString, the fastest-growing predictive marketing SaaS company, today announced that its artificial intelligence-powered platform is now integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The new integration empowers users to optimize the prospect-to-customer journey by enabling sales and marketing teams to prioritize existing prospects and also identify net new, high-quality leads using the power of predictive marketing. "Predictive Marketing is quickly becoming an integral piece of an intelligent customer engagement solution and we are excited to offer this powerful technology through our partnership with EverString," said Jujhar Singh, general manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "With EverString's predictive marketing technology, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers can improve sales outcomes not only by prioritizing prospect conversations but also by filling their pipeline with high-value accounts." Delivered as a SaaS platform, the EverString integration provides marketers with the ability to analyze and validate their entire addressable market of prospects, then proactively select and target the optimal audience based on data from their Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and more than 20,000 external signals. EverString's predictive marketing technology leverages applied data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence to find and analyze patterns in the pipeline of all prospects and customers existing in a user's instance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 7, 2016) - Databricks, the company behind Apache Spark, today announced that DNV GL, a provider of classification and technical assurance along with software and independent expert advisory services to the maritime, oil & gas and energy industries, has selected Databricks for large-scale energy data analytics. With Databricks, DNV GL utilizes innovative machine learning techniques to quantify the relationship between smart meter and weather pattern data. Through predictive models, it is able to accurately predict energy demand based on massive amounts of historical weather data, a process sometimes referred to simply as "weather normalization." This new analytics capability enables millions of households to quantify their energy savings. DNV GL delivers testing and expertise to companies throughout the energy value chain.

Spring is the time when many sports fans are glued to their brackets in hopes of asserting their ability to correctly select amongst the 150 quintillion permutations of Teams who will win the NCAA Basketball Championship (see our blog post on this subject). My personal highlight of the spring sports calendar is the Masters Golf Tournament, which is held every year at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. The professional golf schedule contains four major tournaments each year: The Masters, The US Open, The Open Championship, and The PGA Championship. Of these tournaments, only the Masters is played on the same course every year and its champion is awarded the iconic Masters Champion green jacket. Having participated in a number of fantasy sports leagues and being a Data Scientist at MapR gives me a unique perspective on my approach to choosing who I think will most likely "win" the tournament.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Nvidia for much of its two-plus decades of life made most of its money by manufacturing and selling GPUs for gaming systems. While the bulk of the company's revenues still come from its mainstream graphics technologies, Nvidia over the past several years has been aggressively pushing into new growth areas, particularly virtual reality (VR), connected cars, and deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI). That pivot into these emerging markets has been on full display here this week at the company's GPU Technology Conference (GTC), an event whose growth has mirrored the rise in importance of GPUs in such areas as accelerated computing and high-performance computing (HPC). In 2012, 2,350 people attended GTC; this year, more than 5,000 are here. In his keynote address April 5, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made announcements in all the new target areas, from technologies designed to make VR worlds more real to products aimed at accelerating innovation in deep learning.

It could mean the end of trips to Ikea, and allow you to transform your living room at the touch of a button. Dubbed the'digitally transformable sofa,' Lift-Bit is a series of hexagonal stools that fit together honeycomb-style. Powered through a tablet app and simple hand gestures, the stools shift their height around in a matter of seconds to transform into whatever piece of furniture you need. Dubbed the'digitally transformable sofa,' Lift-bit is a series of hexagonal stools that fit together honeycomb-style and allows you to create a number of combinations. Dubbed the'digitally transformable sofa,' Lift-Bit is a series of hexagonal stools that fit together honeycomb-style and allows you to create a number of combinations.

Some foundations of statistical science have been questioned recently, especially the use and abuse of p-values. See also this article published in FiveThirtyEight.com. Statistical tests of hypotheses rely on p-values and other mysterious parameters and concepts that only the initiated can understand: power, type I error, type II error, or UMP tests, just to name a few. Pretty much all of us have had to learn this old stuff (pre-dating the existence of computers) in some college classes. Sometimes results from a statistical test will be published in a mainstream journal - for instance about whether or not global warming is accelerating - using the same jargon that few understand, and accompanied by misinterpretations and flaws in the use of the test itself.