Qualcomm was ordered to pay BlackBerry $815 million in an arbitration settlement last April. BlackBerry announced today that the two companies have reached a final agreement amount of $940 miillion, which includes the original arbitration amount along with interst and attorneys' fees. The release says that Qualcomm will pay the full amount before the end of May. It brought in $286 million in revenue last quarter, making this $940 million settlement a much needed infusion of cash to can help the beleaguered company pivot towards self-driving cars.

WASHINGTON – Launched today, the American College of Radiology (ACR) Data Science Institute (DSI) will work with government, industry and others to guide and facilitate the appropriate development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help radiologists improve medical imaging care. "Patients will benefit most from artificial intelligence if radiologists serve a leading role in guiding the technologies that best enhance medical imaging diagnosis and treatment," said James A. Brink, MD, FACR, chair of the ACR Board of Chancellors. "The ACR Data Science Institute will create, gather, manage and integrate AI knowledge as these tools emerge to improve patient care." The ACR DSI will benefit from decades of ACR experience in modality accreditation, appropriateness criteria, practice standards and radiology workflow standardization. "ACR's pioneering role in creating DICOM standards promoted the adoption of digital modalities, filmless radiology, advanced visualization, PACs and now AI," Brink said in launching the College's DSI today at the ACR 2017: The Crossroads of Radiology annual meeting in Washington, DC.

For those of us who zone out during university lectures, the temptation multiplies when you taking classes from home. Next fall, a business school in France will try to stop online students from getting distracted with an AI app called Nestor. To judge your level of attention, it can track your face and eyes and even detect when you pull out a phone. If you start to slack off, it can warn you via pop-up messages or emails, and tell you roughly when you may drift away again. The bot will be used for two classes at the ESG Business school, including a 30 hour "street marketing" course, as part of a distance learning program.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will become the primary way banks interact with their customers within the next three years, according to three quarters of bankers surveyed by consultancy Accenture ACN.N in a new report. Four in five bankers believe AI will "revolutionize" the way in which banks gather information as well as how they interact with their clients, said the Accenture Banking Technology Vision 2017 report, which surveyed more than 600 top bankers and also consulted tech industry experts and academics. Artificial intelligence -- the technology behind driverless cars, drones and voice-recognition software -- is seen by the financial world as a key technology which, along with other "fintech" innovations such as blockchain, will change the face of banking in the coming years. More than three quarters of respondents to the survey believed that AI would enable more simple user interfaces, which would help banks create a more human-like customer experience. "The big paradox here is that people think technology will lead to banking becoming more and more automated and less and less personalized, but what we've seen coming through here is the view that technology will actually help banking become a lot more personalized," said Alan McIntyre, head of the Accenture's banking practice and co-author of the report.

While Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX may have ambitions to set up a colony on Mars, Jeff Bezos, CEO of rival, Amazon, is setting his sights slightly closer to home. In a talk this week, Bezos has revealed that wants to colonise the moon. And his plans don't just involve sending a handful of people to live on the lunar surface, as he has said that he'want(s) to see millions of people living and working in space.' In March, Bezos announced plans to ship packages to the moon by 2020 to help set up a human settlement. He has already reserved a parking spot near the Shackleton Crater on the south pole.

However, AI represents an opportunity to introduce intelligent, scalable engagement and more personalised experiences to help customers accomplish tasks or solve problems while also improving overall satisfaction. Whether they're based in messaging platforms or hardware devices, virtual concierges are bots designed to provide personalised services. We're already seeing the following list of AI applications implemented today: Today's customers live in a multi-screen, omnichannel world. Whether it's integrating back-end CRM, enhancing commerce, personalising experiences, introducing new touch points, predicting behaviors, trends and expectations, successful AI implementations require a new blueprint.

In this video, students learn how we make robot joints move to the angles or positions that are required to achieve the desired end-effector motion. This is the job of the robot's joint controller. In the lecture, we will take discuss the realms of control theory.

Since its launch in 1987, the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) has brought together researchers working on neural networks and related fields, but it later diversified to become one of the largest conferences in machine learning. In recent years, the trend towards deep learning has brought the conference closer to its roots. The 2016 program spanned six days (Dec 5 to 10) and included tutorials, oral and poster presentations, workshops, and invited talks on a broad range of research topics. Following their previous Insights post on ICML 2016, Two Sigma researchers Vinod Valsalam and Firdaus Janoos discuss below the notable advances in deep learning, optimization algorithms, Bayesian techniques, and time-series analysis presented at NIPS 2016. With 550 accepted papers and 50 workshops, the number of attendees more than doubled in the past two years (from more than 2500 in 2014 to over 5000 in 2016), demonstrating rapidly growing interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence. That included strong industry participation (Two Sigma was among the more than 60 sponsors), both for recruiting talent as well as for presenting advances in the field. Several interesting invited talks were given by researchers who are established in both academia and industry.

According to the 2016 Global CEO Outlook from Forbes Insights, "the force and speed with which technological innovation are moving through the economy is creating an inflection point for the business sector." And with only 5% of organizations mastering their digital strategies to the point of differentiation from their competitors, there is much work to be done. At the heart of this shift resides embedded technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, Big Data analytics, the Internet of Things, and blockchain. In their MIT Sloan Management Review article, "Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem," Peter Weill and Stephanie L. Woerner shared that businesses with 50% or more of their revenues from digital ecosystems achieve 32% higher revenue growth and 27% higher profit margins. For example, Trenitalia announced last year that they improved their customer experience by proactively and detecting machine failures with predictive maintenance.

Its name may not be familiar to ordinary consumers, but U.S. chipmaker Nvidia is cementing its position as a major player in artificial intelligence applications with its graphics processing units. Highlighting its potential, a 10 trillion yen ($89.9 billion) investment fund which Japan's SoftBank Group recently set up jointly with the Saudi Arabian government and other entities has decided to buy an equity stake worth about 400 billion yen in Nvidia. An autonomous-driving Lincoln MKZ equipped with Nvidia technology gives a demonstration ride during the 2017 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 5. Reuters An autonomous-driving Lincoln MKZ equipped with Nvidia technology gives a demonstration ride during the 2017 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Jan. 5. Reuters Nvidia has a large presence in self-driving technology, where it has gained a dominant position. It is regarded as a likely favorite to grow into a chip industry behemoth in the medium-to-long term. The fund's acquisition plan reflects Softbank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son's aim to invest in companies that support growth industries at the fundamental level in a long-term perspective.