Teams representing the University of California, Berkeley and Arizona State compete in the Grand Final of last year's Heroes of the Dorm tournament at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles. By the end of this week, four teams will advance to determine a champion after an intense multi-week competition. Their names will look familiar -- UConn, Miami and Oregon -- and monetary stakes are high, to the tune of 500,000. They're battling with video game controllers in the growing arena of competitive video gaming, whose increasing popularity has attracted the attention of big names in tech and media, from Electronic Arts to ESPN to Yahoo, as they see a growing audience eager to learn about the competitive scene and engage more in games at the center of its rise. 'We have the early markers of what will ultimately make eSports mainstream," says Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research, which gathers data on the global games market. But it could require a generational shift before competitive video gaming -- known to many as "eSports" -- formally becomes mainstream entertainment. On April 3, the "Heroic Four" will be determined in Heroes of the Dorm, a competitive video game tournament hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, based on its action game Heroes of the Storm. For the second year, teams representing colleges from across the U.S., including the University of Connecticut and Arizona State University, are playing for glory and more than 500,000 in scholarships and prizes, including a free ride through school for the winning team. Fans watch the action online on ESPN, Twitch and YouTube, and they can even join tournament pools, where the winner with the most accurate bracket snags 10,000. It's the latest example of competitive video gaming's increased following, as younger fans gravitate towardeSports. The market is valued at 747 million, according to SuperData, and is expected to more than double to 1.9 billion in three years. The rising audience -- SuperData estimates it at 134 million as of last year -- is pushing video game publishers and cable networks to create competitive video game experiences and explore broadcasting options. The eSports market is young. Whalen Rozelle, Director of eSports at Riot Games -- makers of the hit competitive game League of Legends -- says it's still in "our pre-teen phase," with plenty of room to grow. "The industry still hasn't really figured out'is every game an eSport?

The nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used in signal and image processing, including bio-informatics, blind source separation and hyperspectral image analysis in remote sensing. A great challenge arises when dealing with a nonlinear formulation of the NMF. Within the framework of kernel machines, the models suggested in the literature do not allow the representation of the factorization matrices, which is a fallout of the curse of the pre-image. In this paper, we propose a novel kernel-based model for the NMF that does not suffer from the pre-image problem, by investigating the estimation of the factorization matrices directly in the input space. For different kernel functions, we describe two schemes for iterative algorithms: an additive update rule based on a gradient descent scheme and a multiplicative update rule in the same spirit as in the Lee and Seung algorithm. Within the proposed framework, we develop several extensions to incorporate constraints, including sparseness, smoothness, and spatial regularization with a total-variation-like penalty. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with the problem of unmixing hyperspectral images, using well-known real images and results with state-of-the-art techniques.

Nearly everything at Google has an acronym. Machine learning, the artificial intelligence method for processing reams of data, currently all the rage across Google, is just "ML" inside the company. On Wednesday, Google presented its newly assertive push for the enterprise, hosting its inaugural cloud developer conference in San Francisco. In fact, Google unveiled a handful of new offerings that, in essence, pour ML all over the cloud. "I've become convinced that there's a new architecture emerging," an exuberant Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent Alphabet, said from the stage.

Yahoo! Inc., is getting into the artificial intelligence (AI) game with the release of new internally-built software under an open-source license. Called CaffeOnSpark, the software is able to perform'deep learning' on the vast ocean of data kept in Yahoo's Hadoop file system. Now, the company has made it available on GitHub for everyone to use. Deep learning is a machine learning method that's particularly useful in helping computers come to sort through and recognize user-generated data, and one of its most exciting use cases is where images are concerned. As such, Yahoo built CaffeOnSpark to help identify the billions of images posted onto its Flickr photo sharing website.

Can artificially intelligent robots be our friends? Roboticists and AI researchers are trying to make it so – and the first fruits of their labors are about to come onto the market. But there are already hints that the efforts will touch some of humanity's hot buttons. Take Hanson Robotics, for example: Its latest creation, Sophia, combines an AI chatbot with an expressive humanlike face. She can talk enthusiastically about helping humans in health care, education and customer service.

Many AIs are developed to sift through and make sense of Big Data. But behind-the-scenes, others are acquiring softer human skills and deploying their algorithms to make art. On Monday, Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor of computer science from the Future University in Hakodate in northern Japan, announced that his research team's short-form novel--co-created with an AI--had passed the initial screening of a domestic literary competition. Though their creation didn't nab the grand prix, the human-machine collaboration showed the early promises of what could be, if the team's AI is refined in the future. "So far, AI programs have often been used to solve problems that have answers, such as Go and shogi," said Matsubara, in a report by the Yomiuri Shimbun.

In the face of the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, a start-up that develops AI is to puts its technology to use as a psychological aid for refugees by having supportive conversations with them via SMS messages. In the midst of a civil war and a near-total collapse of society, millions of Syrian refugees have been fleeing their country in search of anywhere where they can live safe in the knowledge their life is not under threat, but not without great psychological stress on those involved. However, due to the sheer number of people fleeing, and the difficulty they experience in simply trying to find shelter, they are unlikely to receive any form of support for the sake of their mental health. According to The Guardian, however, a start-up that develops AI, X2AI, is to use its systems to create a chatbot called Karim, which will allow anyone with a mobile phone to have conversations with it about their experiences in Arabic. Once the conversation becomes more developed, Karim will use its natural language processors to analyse the likely emotional state of the human on the other end and react with an appropriate response or questions for the refugee.

If you're one of the thousands of New Yorkers who has, on occasion, sent out a tweet after a couple of cocktails, this algorithm may be able to pick up on your antics. Researchers from the University of Rochester recently developed a computer program that can single out tweets sent while the user is tipsy. Some of the strongest words include "shot," "here," "haha," a URL, and -- worrisomely -- "drive." To develop the algorithm, researchers first collected millions of geo-tagged tweets and then filtered them for references to drinking and alcohol. Then they had to sort out whether the tweet was sent actually sent about the user's own alcohol use (and not, say, a friend's) and whether it was sent while the tweeter was under the influence.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. Artificial Intelligence is tricky stuff. When it works right, it does amazing things like thrash the World Champion Go player by winning four games to one in a 1 million tournament. When it goes wrong, well, that's a whole different story, and Microsoft's recent experiment with an AI chatbot named Tay that interacted (note the past tense) with users on Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, is a great example. Going offline for a while to absorb it all.

It's been another busy week across the tech world, bringing some news that had been long-anticipated, and some surprises that were far from expected. With the weekend upon us again, 7 Days is here once more to bring you up to speed on what you may have missed, so get comfy, and let's crack on… We begin this week with bad news for owners of most BlackBerry devices. Facebook has revealed that it will end access to certain APIs on BB OS 7.1 and BlackBerry 10, which means that the next Facebook update for BlackBerry will lose several major features. On Wednesday, Google announced its plans to launch Android Pay in the UK "in the coming months", but while numerous major financial institutions and retailers are onboard, two of the country's'Big Four' banking groups – Barclays and RBS, which includes NatWest – haven't signed up. We've known for a while that the next version of Android would include split-screen multitasking support.