Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba introduced its first automobile last week, the RX5 sport utility vehicle, set to be delivered to customers in August. The company called the vehicle, made with Chinese carmaker SAIC, the first "Internet car" in a news release. It will run software developed by Alibaba's YunOS division to connect with other smart devices, the company said. It will retail for 148,800 yuan, or 22,300. Alibaba in its announcement said the car will use the company's own e-commerce platform to deliver such services as finding parking spaces, locating gas stations or making restaurant reservations.

Southfield, MI, June 2016 – Stefanini, a 1B global IT provider, announced today that the company is launching Sophie, its artificial intelligence platform with the ability to turn data into valuable solutions. Aware of the latest trends, Stefanini has invested and developed this platform over the last 3 years as a Research & Development and pilot project for clients in Brazil, and now, the company is launching the platform in the United States. "We are very proud to introduce Sophie for our clients in North America, reinforcing Stefanini's commitment to connect people and technology innovations with a goal to create business value," said Antonio Moreira, Stefanini CEO, North America and Asia Pacific. "Our artificial intelligence platform can improve the end-user experience and deliver smarter and more efficient services," affirmed Mr. Moreira. Technology research firm Gartner forecasts that by 2017, autonomics-based managed services and cognitive platforms will fuel a significant reduction in the cost of IT services by automating repetitive tasks currently tackled by humans.

Rave reviews of games on YouTube might not be all that they seem, according to a new ruling, after developers have been told off for not disclosing that it had paid vloggers to rave about its games. The US Federal Trade Commission announced that it has reached a settlement with Warner Brothers Entertainment after allegations arose that the publisher had failed to adequately disclose that it had paid high profile gaming YouTube personalities to give positive coverage of its title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. The FTC had complained that Warner Bros had hired a third-party marketing company which paid YouTube gaming "influencers" sums ranging from "hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars" to cover the game. The conditions of the payment were that the coverage had to be positive, should not report any bugs or glitches that might have been uncovered, and that at least one Facebook post or Tweet had to be posted to promote the video. The sponsored videos generated over 5.5 million views and according to a press release from the FTC regarding the settlement one of the most high earning YouTube personalities in the world, PewDiePie's sponsored video made up 3.7 million of these views.

A recent release out of Insilico Medicine reports, "At Mensa Annual Gathering 2016, the annual event of the largest and oldest high IQ society transpiring in San Diego from June 29th to July 3rd, Dr. Michael West, CEO of BioTime, Inc announced the launch of a beta version of Embryonic.AI, an artificially intelligent system for analyzing the embryonic state of human cell samples using gene expression data. The first implementation of Embryonic.AI was launched by LifeMap Discovery, Inc, a subsidiary of BioTime, Inc and is freely available for beta testing. Scientists and companies from all over the world are welcome to test their stem cell and adult cell samples using Embryonic.AI and discuss collaboration alternatives.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at left, with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. (Photo: Brian Smale) Microsoft and GE are joining forces to use cloud technologies in industrial production. GE will bring its Predix industrial data-gathering operating system to Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, the two companies announced Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. The deal is the first in a planned strategic partnership between GE and Microsoft. "Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement announcing the partnership. "Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business -- from the factory floor to smart buildings."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at left, with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. (Photo: Brian Smale) Microsoft and GE are joining forces for new cloud technologies that will bring improved use of big data to production. GE will bring its Predix industrial data-gathering operating system to Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, the two companies announced Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto. The deal is the first in a planned strategic partnership between GE and Microsoft. "Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement announcing the partnership. "Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business -- from the factory floor to smart buildings."

WIRE)--International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a 2016 IDC Innovators report recognizing pioneering players in the machine learning-based text analytics market. IDC Innovators are companies with under 50M in revenue that offer an inventive technology and/or groundbreaking new business model. Kira Systems, Loop AI Labs, NetBase, and Taste Analytics were all named as IDC Innovators in the machine learning-based text analytics market for 2016. "Organizations are continually looking to improve their handling of data, especially unstructured data, given the explosion of information that is available via the Internet today," said David Schubmehl, Research Director, IDC's Content Analytics, Discovery and Cognitive Systems research. "Understanding and utilizing this human-generated data is a significant challenge for most organizations and the use of machine learning based text analytics is rapidly becoming the best approach to dealing with this type of data."

During his company's first-quarter earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said delivering artificial intelligence and machine learning as cloud services to enterprise customers "is going be a huge source of differentiation for us." "We are at an exceptionally interesting tipping point where these technologies are really taking off," Pichai told financially grounded Wall Street investors. Google, Mountain View, Calif., is engineering solutions that can enable services partners to help customers use machine learning to understand their data, he said. A couple of weeks later, at Google's I/O developers' conference, Pichai revealed a new custom chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, that will power machine-learning workloads. One notable customer, Snapchat, already is using Google's platform to learn more about its users by studying the content of the photos they post on the social media site. And in March, Google enjoyed its own board game coup.

According to TechSci Research report, "United States Artificial Intelligence Market, By Application, By Region, By End User Competition Forecast & Opportunities, 2011-2021", the artificial intelligence market in the US is projected to grow at a CAGR of 75% during 2016 - 2021 on account of growing artificial intelligence technology adoption in consumer electronic devices, research and developmental activities in healthcare industry, unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous cars, etc. Moreover, venture capital investments in this sector, are in full swing, especially in the US. The country is witnessing numerous start-ups sprouting every year, backed by various angel investors and venture capitalists. Major venture capitalist active in the United States artificial intelligence market include Accel, General Catalyst Partners, GV, Work-Bench, Promus Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Samsung Electronics, Wipro Technologies, Samsung Global Innovation Centre, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Formation 8, among others. In 2015, western region of the United States dominated the artificial intelligence market of the country, on account of presence of major end users such as cyber security solution providers, healthcare institutes, government headquarters, etc., in the region.

For more information about embedded vision, please visit: http://www.embedded-vision.com Bill Jenkins, Senior Product Specialist for High Level Design Tools at Intel, presents the "Accelerating Deep Learning Using Altera FPGAs" tutorial at the May 2016 Embedded Vision Summit. While large strides have recently been made in the development of high-performance systems for neural networks based on multi-core technology, significant challenges in power, cost and, performance scaling remain. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are a natural choice for implementing neural networks because they can combine computing, logic, and memory resources in a single device. Intel's Programmable Solutions Group has developed a scalable convolutional neural network reference design for deep learning systems using the OpenCL programming language built with our SDK for OpenCL.