Xiaomi started making smart home gadgets over two years ago. And now for the first time these are heading to markets outside China. Starbucks hired its new chief technology officer, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, just four months ago. While she's new to the coffee chain, she already has … The lifecycle of a new gadget is relatively predictable: When it's brand new, only early adopters are interested. The Alta is Fitbit's best-looking tracker yet, but it doesn't do everything its predecessors can p b The good: /b Attractive; Comfortable to wear; Easy to change straps; Good battery life p b The bad: /b No heart rate monitor; Doesn't measure stair-climbing; Fickle touch screen p b Who should buy: /b Those who want an … IoT described so my grandmother can understand… p If you're reading this, then you probably already know IoT stands for The Internet of Things.

She joined as senior reporter in April 2014 having previously worked as assistant editor at Government Computing. This week saw an artificial intelligence system built by Google-owned AI company DeepMind called'AlphaGo' beat South Korean champion Lee Sedol at the fiendishly complex game'Go'. Sedol won just one game to AlphaGo's four across a five-match series. The success has been touted as a milestone in AI development due to Go's complexity: it managed to win at a game where there are more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe. DeepMind's technique differs from using traditional'brute force' computing power to win. Its deep learning technology allows it to work out general rules from large quantities of data.

Last week, machine learning took a big leap forward when Google's AlphaGo, a machine algorithm, beat the world champion, Lee Sedol, in the game Go. If the lip-reading technology had been used during the 2006 World Cup Final, when Zinedine Zidane was given a red card for headbutting Marco Materazzi, the outcome of the game could have been different. The partnership will provide students within the university's Department of Computing Science the opportunity to gain hands-on experience of IBM's … A new study reveals that voice assistant AIs, like Siri and Cortana, might be clever, but they lack fundamental empathy at their core. Google has entered into the machine learning market with the alpha release of Cloud Machine Learning. "Extraordinary" merger of machine intelligence and cloud economics, is changing business operations and society, says Leading Edge Forum.

It may be time to add'novelist' to the list of professions under threat from super-smart computer software, because a short story authored by artificial intelligence has made it through to the latter stages of a literary competition in Japan. The AI software isn't self-aware enough to think up and submit its own work though (not yet, anyway) – the short-form novel was written with the help of a team of researchers from the Future University Hakodate in Japan. Human beings selected certain words and phrases to be used, and set up an overall framework for the story, before letting the software come up with the text itself. One of two submissions from the university made it through the first round of the Nikkei Shinichi Hoshi Literary Award ceremony – perhaps the entry's title, which translates as The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, should have been enough to tip the judges off – but the competition is unique in that it openly accepts entries from non-human writers (Shinichi Hoshi himself was a science-fiction author). Of 1,450 or so novels accepted this year, 11 were written with the involvement of AI programs, the Japan News reports.

You might want to take the help of artificial intelligence. Developed by scientists in Japan, a super-smart AI robot recently authored a short story, with some assistance from humans. What is more, the work has made it through the initial stages of screening, as part of a literary competition. While the feat is a testament to the fast-improving capabilities of artificial intelligence, the software isn't completely self-aware when it comes to articulating coherent thoughts using words, and creating original pieces of literature. The short novel, titled "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" (meaning'the day a computer writes a novel'), was composed with help from scientists at Japan's Future University Hakodate.

Human beings begin to learn the difference before we learn to speak--and thankfully so. We owe much of our success as a species to our capacity for moral reasoning. It's the glue that holds human social groups together, the key to our fraught but effective ability to cooperate. We are (most believe) the lone moral agents on planet Earth--but this may not last. The day may come soon when we are forced to share this status with a new kind of being, one whose intelligence is of our own design. Robots are coming, that much is sure. They are coming to our streets as self-driving cars, to our military as automated drones, to our homes as elder-care robots--and that's just to name a few on the horizon (Ten million households already enjoy cleaner floors thanks to a relatively dumb little robot called the Roomba). What we don't know is how smart they will eventually become. Some believe human-level artificial intelligence is pure science fiction; others believe they will far surpass us in intelligence--and sooner rather than later.

A new bill in California's legislature that aims to smooth the path for fully driverless vehicles on the state's public roads is being proposed by an assembly member who has received thousands of dollars from Google. It is one of two bills currently under discussion that would relax the rules on testing self-driving cars in the US's largest state and the test bed for automated driving. The bill being promoted by Mike Gatto, who represents several communities in and near Los Angeles, would allow Google and others to test vehicles on public streets without a steering wheel, brake pedal or human safety driver. Gatto has received contributions from Google and Ford, which is also testing driverless car technology in California, according to state campaign finance records. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is considering spinning out its self-driving car project into a separate business.

Tay, a chatbot designed by Microsoft to learn about human conversation from the internet, has learned how make racist and misogynistic comments. Early on, her responses were confrontational and occasionally mean, but rarely delved into outright insults. However, within 24 hours of its launch Tay has denied the Holocaust, endorsed Donald Trump, insulted women and claimed that Hitler was right. A chatbot is a program meant to mimic human responses and interact with people as a human would. Tay, which targets 18- to 24-year-olds, is attached to an artificial intelligence developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research team and the Bing search engine team.

I arrived at time-series analysis models that seemed to be suited to the task, but I'm hitting some issues I would appreciate some help with. I haven't really done any ML on timeseries data or autoregression so this is kind of new to me. First of all, the nature of my data is dense measurements of a particular value over time. The seasonality of the data is probably both weekly and daily. When looking for timeseries models for seasonal data, nearly all the sources suggested a SARIMA model.

That's the question they will be looking to answer--for the first time in history--at next week's PAPIs AI Startup Battle in Valencia, Spain. If artificial intelligence has a continued track record of enhancing and advancing our decision-making skills, it presents itself as an interesting way to better determine which startups are safer to invest in. Telefonica Open Future has partnered with machine-learning platform provider BigML to extract historical data from the application programming interfaces or APIs of websites like Crunchbase and AngelList--it's proprietary so we can't know the exact secrets--and combined it with data like the LinkedIn profile of funders to find a quantifiable correlation among successful startups. The only requirement to be a part of this competition is that artificial intelligence is at the startup's core. But what makes the machine capable of accessing these analytics and what makes it easily available for both techie and layman is the predictive API that connects to that data.