New drone footage has captured the growing pile of lifejackets abandoned by migrants after reaching the Greek island of Lesbos. It is now more than three metres deep in some places, with boats being added to the pile.

And then, at the very top layer you have detectors that can tell you whether you're looking at a person or a dog or a sailplane or whatever it is."

The genetic risk for autism exists in every person, scientists today revealed. As a result, the principal signs of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are seen in each individual - just to varying degrees. Those with the most severe symptoms are the proportion of the population officially diagnosed with ASD, the scientists from the University of Bristol, Harvard and MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital found. They set out to identifying if there is a genetic relationship between ASD and ASD-related traits in people not considered to have ASD. Their findings reveal the risk underlying ASD affects a range of behavioural and developmental traits in all people.

China's leading Internet-search company, Baidu, has developed a voice system that can recognize English and Mandarin speech better than people, in some cases. The new system, called Deep Speech 2, is especially significant in how it relies entirely on machine learning for translation. Whereas older voice-recognition systems include many handcrafted components to aid audio processing and transcription, the Baidu system learned to recognize words from scratch, simply by listening to thousands of hours of transcribed audio. The technology relies on a powerful technique known as deep learning, which involves training a very large multilayered virtual network of neurons to recognize patterns in vast quantities of data. The Baidu app for smartphones lets users search by voice, and also includes a voice-controlled personal assistant called Duer (see "Baidu's Duer Joins the Personal Assistant Party").

Minecraft is to become a testing ground for artificial intelligence experiments. Microsoft, owner of the popular video game, revealed that computer scientists and amateurs will be able to evaluate and develop AI software using its virtual landscapes from July. The company says Minecraft is more "sophisticated" than existing AI research simulations and cheaper to use than building a robot. "This is the state-of-the-art," said Prof Jose Hernandez-Orallo from the Technical University of Valencia, one of a small group of academics given early access to the software. "At this moment there is nothing comparable, and this is just in its beginnings, so I see many possibilities for it."

Join us live at Entrepreneur's Accelerate Your Business event series in Chicago or Denver. If visionaries such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are to be believed, artificial intelligence will create a frightening, dystopian future where mortals are at the mercy of their robot overlords. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who also happens to be Google's director of engineering, is far more optimistic. In a talk with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson held Monday night as part of the 7 Days of Genius Festival, he said that the rise of artificial intelligence won't destroy or enslave us -- instead, it will turbocharge our creative humanity. Computer intelligence is accelerating at an exponential rate: By 2029, computers will reach the level of human intelligence, predicts Kurzweil.

Fighting cyber attacks with artificial intelligence The next frontier of anti-virus software is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to not only predict what threats are out there, but to also actively fight back before they strike. This is according to American-based Cylance's chief marketing officer, Greg Fitzgerald, speaking at the NetEvents Press and Analyst Summit in Rome, Italy.The company says it is "revolutionising cyber security through the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware". Cylance today announced it is expanding into the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) with the establishment of a London-based team led by Evan Davidson, former enterprise sales director at FireEye. It also established a channel partnership with CoreSec Systems, which supplies cyber security and networking solutions in Sweden and Denmark.

The term Artificial Intelligence was originally coined by John McCarthy in 1955, defining it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". Now more than a half a century old, the field of AI and machine learning is finally achieving some of its oldest goals by being used successfully in areas such as data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and search engines. Tech giants have all been investing heavily in AI and Machine Learning. In 2010 Facebook introduced facial recognition technology, and in 2013 Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a lab to AI research. In 2014 Google bought artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for 400 million ( 263 million), making it one of the largest tech acquisitions to date.

Maybe the one single thing more regrettable than drunk texting is drunk tweeting. Publicly broadcasting intoxication is definitely not the best way to bolster one's social media clout, and yet a lot of people can't resist boasting about their alcoholic escapades. Researchers have now trained an algorithm to spot alcohol-related tweets, and even to guess if the tweeter was drinking at the time of posting. Nabil Hossain at the University of Rochester, upstate New York, decided to combine Twitter and machine learning to keep track of alcohol use across a given community. To do that, he and his team collected thousands of geotagged posts tweeted between July 2013 and July 2014 in New York state, and then winnowed them down to tweets containing booze-related keywords (ranging from "beer keg" to "shitfaced").

Originally published at innoarchitech.com here on March 18, 2016. Welcome to the fifth and final chapter in a five-part series about machine learning. In this final chapter, we will revisit unsupervised learning in greater depth, briefly discuss other fields related to machine learning, and finish the series with some examples of real-world machine learning applications. Recall that unsupervised learning involves learning from data, but without the goal of prediction. This is because the data is either not given with a target response variable (label), or one chooses not to designate a response.