Tokyo stocks snapped their four-session losing streak on Tuesday as the yen weakened against the dollar. The Nikkei gained 323.74 points, or 1.94 percent, to close at 17,048.55. On Friday, it gave up 211.57 The market was closed on Monday for a national holiday. The Topix ended up 24.88 points, or 1.85 percent, at 1,369.93, after slumping 13.92 points the previous trading day.

Read more ... » sources and steadily improving softwareHere are the graphics processors cloud giants will use to crunch your voices, videos and data. Read more ... » techniques in a branch of artificialAI is not as remarkable as it sounds. Read more ... » intelligenceAI is not as remarkable as it sounds. Read more ... » called machineHere are the graphics processors cloud giants will use to crunch your voices, videos and data. Read more ... » learningHere are the graphics processors cloud giants will use to crunch your voices, videos and data.

How will Practo cope up with network connectivity when Internet penetration in tier 3 cities is not high? How can telecom operators play a role in aiding remote healthcare? Today, it is true that mobile broadband has not been fully covered in our country, but we believe that India will get there soon. Today, we have around 30 percent of our traffic coming from tier 2 and 3 towns, so we can say that the Internet has reached some parts of these cities. From the B2B side, our product Practo Tab runs our entire Practo Ray software in offline mode; hence doctors and other healthcare providers can use it in this mode and then synchronize it back with the cloud once they get connectivity.

Each are British artificial intelligence and machine learning startups bought by US tech giants--HP, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, respectively. Alongside growing VC funding in AI, US tech firms are snapping up British-founded startups, leading to concerns that the UK is losing the best of its artificial intelligence to Silicon Valley just as it becomes a key technology. Simon Walker, partner in corporate technology at law firm Taylor Wessing, said the sale of AI startups to US firms isn't new and doesn't look like it'll stop soon. "It is obviously disappointing that the AI cannot be retained in the UK," he said. "However, top-of-the-market AI, such as that developed by companies such as SwiftKey and DeepMind, requires huge investment and a significant platform for its use and it is only very large tech companies which have the necessary resources and platforms."

The holder of 18 international Go titles and a ninth-dan player, Mr Lee became a professional player at the age of 12 and had confidently predicted before the match-up that he would win all five games. In a worst-case scenario, he said, he feared losing one game to AlphaGo. Mr Lee said he has been playing Go - or "baduk", as it is known in Korea - for such a long time that he may have become a little jaded. But the defeat has served to rekindle the old enthusiasm, he said. Immediately after Mr Lee's defeat in the final game, the Korea Baduk Association asked Demis Hassabis, the CEO of AlphaGo designer Google DeepMind, for a rematch.

Everything You Know About Artificial Intelligence is Wrong. Will the Singularity Artificial General Intelligence winners be Hedge Fund Managers, the Military and Spy Agencies? When Artificial Intelligence (AI) work began over 50 years ago, the AI field was directly aimed at the construction of "thinking machines"--that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. But this goal proved very difficult to achieve; and so, over the years, AI researchers have come to focus mainly on producing "narrow AI" systems: software displaying intelligence regarding specific tasks in relatively narrow domains. This "narrow AI" work has often been exciting and successful.

The combination of drinking, social media, and sharing has provided Rochester researchers with an innovative test case for analyzing ongoing behavior by Twitter users and then using this analysis to study patterns about drinking in different communities. In a new paper, PhD student Nabil Hossain reports that he and his collaborators have taught computers to analyze tweets about drinking in an effort to predict where Twitter users are when they report drinking. Heatmaps show concentrations of tweets while drinking from Monroe County, NY (left) and New York City. Hossain is a student in the computer science group led by Henry Kautz, the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science. He posted the paper on the arXiv.org

For about a year, Sam Fox-Hartin had worked for an on-demand concierge startup called GoButler as a "Hero," the company's term for employees who field users' requests, via text message, and then complete tasks such as booking tables at restaurants, scheduling appointments, or ordering food for delivery on their behalf. Most of these tasks, like the ones I watched Fox-Hartin maneuver when GoButler invited me to visit its New York headquarters last year, were fairly routine. But he also wrote poems. Convinced couriers to deliver dry ice. And in response to one particularly odd request, drew "some horses hanging around a campfire."

When DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated South Korean master Lee Se-dol, it was a historic stride for AI. The depth of this development, coupled with higher computing power and cheaper data storage, is moving AI into the mainstream. Perhaps the most popular application of AI today comes in the form of virtual assistants and bots, or "agents" as my good friend Shivon defines them. An agent can schedule your meetings, manage your finances, book your travels, order your meals, and more. And even though these agents are typically focused on one specific task, it's remarkable to consider how much progress we have made outsourcing mundane work for a fraction of the cost.

The latest computer games can be fantastically realistic. Surprisingly, these lifelike virtual worlds might have some educational value, too--especially for fledgling AI algorithms. Adrien Gaidon, a computer scientist at Xerox Research Center Europe in Grenoble, France, remembers watching someone play the video game Assassins Creed when he realized that the game's photo-realistic scenery might offer a useful way to teach AI algorithms about the real world. Gaidon is now testing this idea by developing highly realistic 3-D environments for training algorithms how to recognize particular real-world objects or scenarios. The idea is important because cutting-edge AI algorithms need to feed on huge quantities of data in order to learn to perform a task.