Overview

Amazon has revealed a whole host of new Echo devices, as well as products that you can control by talking to the Alexa assistant that lives inside them. In all, it announced more than 70 updates – which touched on almost every part of its Alexa line-up. The very short version is this: Amazon updated just about every Echo to give it a better-looking grey mesh on the outside and to make it louder and better sounding on the inside. If you want the slightly less short version of each of the updates, then read on. Here's what happened to each of those products in slightly more detail.

Packt, the leading UK provider of technology/coding books and courses, conducted a survey in August 2018 to know what AI actually means to people in software. What are they doing with it and how it will impact them in the present and future? The findings here are based on responses from 2,800 technology professionals from around the world and details developer attitudes and perspectives on artificial intelligence in 2018. It's hard to discern a clear trend – there's an even spread of concern

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Companies and cities all over world are experimenting with using artificial intelligence to reduce and prevent crime, and to more quickly respond to crimes in progress. The ideas behind many of these projects is that crimes are relatively predictable; it just requires being able to sort through a massive volume of data to find patterns that are useful to law enforcement. This kind of data analysis was technologically impossible a few decades ago, but the hope is that recent developments in machine learning are up to the task. There is good reason why companies and government are both interested in trying to use AI in this manner. As of 2010, the United States spent over $80 billion a year on incarations at the state, local, and federal levels. Estimates put the United States' total spending on law enforcement at over $100 billion a year.

Electric drones booked through smartphones pick people up from office rooftops, shortening travel time by hours, reducing the need for parking and clearing smog from the air. This vision of the future is driving the government's "flying car" project. Major carrier All Nippon Airways, electronics company NEC Corp. and more than a dozen other companies and academic experts hope to have a road map for the plan ready by the year's end. "This is such a totally new sector Japan has a good chance for not falling behind," said Fumiaki Ebihara, the government official in charge of the project. For now, nobody believes people are going to be zipping around in flying cars any time soon.

Chinese companies are "aggressively investing" in artificial intelligence (AI) applications and show more thirst for talent, a joint study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows, at a time when the race for AI superiority is in the spotlight around the world. The conclusion – based on a survey of over 3,000 participants in 126 countries and 300 executives from China – shines a light on China's ambitions in AI, which is seen as a major driver of the new economy, and the perceived competitive threat the country poses to other big economies. "China's rapid rise in AI has been a wake-up call for nations, industries and corporate executives globally," says the report, which was released on Tuesday and titled Artificial Intelligence in Business Gets Real. "Indeed, many recent national programmes to advance the development of AI refer to China as a competitive threat." Betting big on the core technology behind an array of cutting-edge applications from autonomous driving to facial recognition, China's State Council last July laid out a three-step road map to AI supremacy.

Over the last 10 years, we have come to see robots perform and execute jobs that were once exclusive to humans – be it, manufacturing cars or filling warehouse orders. As of today, we are no strangers to the fact that there are multiple industries that AI/ML have significantly impacted over the last couple years. However, the integration of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare with a chatbot as your doctor is set to witness a significant paradigm shift. We are already seeing image recognition algorithms assist in detecting diseases at an astounding rate and are only beginning to scratch the surface. Chatbots are slowly being adopted within healthcare, albeit being in their nascent stage.

The joint availability of computational power and huge datasets has considerably changed the landscape of Artificial Intelligence. In many fields, applications (self-driving cars, cybersecurity, e-health…) that seemed out of reach in the past are now closer to becoming a reality. Recent advances in Machine Learning, the key component of AI, show the growing maturity of algorithms that are now able to handle an increasing number of new tasks. However, simple adversarial attacks can still easily defeat a learning algorithm and the potentially massive deployment of AI tools in various environments raises many new concerns. Additionally to scalability and versatility of algorithms, awareness of drifting or fake data, privacy, interpretability, accountability are now all features that a learning and decision system should take into account.

As you can see, there is massive overlap between these generative sequence models and AEs we discussed previously. A very popular example of sequence modelling is their application to NLP or text modelling.

AI Magazine is an official publication of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). It is published four times each year in fall, winter, spring, and summer issues, and is sent to all members of the Association and subscribed to by most research libraries. Back issues are available on-line (issues less than 18 months old are only available to AAAI members). The purpose of AI Magazine is to disseminate timely and informative expository articles that represent the current state of the art in AI and to keep its readers posted on AAAI-related matters. The articles are selected for appeal to readers engaged in research and applications across the broad spectrum of AI.