USA Today's Ed Baig tries out Samsung's new smartphone before it hits store shelves. NEW YORK-- Will the Note 7 battery fiasco choke sales of Samsung's latest smartphone? On redemption Friday, the day when consumers could start getting the company's first major phones since the twice recalled and ultimately discontinued Note 7 phablet, analysts expected heavy demand for the new Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S devices. Newly released research from SurveyMonkey and Creative Strategies found the Note 7 recalls had no impact on the interest in the Galaxy S8 and S for 53.7% of those surveyed. Among current Samsung smartphone users, 65.2% were unbothered by the Note 7 recall.

Data scientists are a happy bunch overall, but they do worry about ethical issues such as human bias and prejudice being programmed into machine learning (ML) and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in warfare and intelligence gathering. That's a finding in the new "2017 Data Scientist Report" just published by AI specialist CrowdFlower Inc. "Read any article on AI (and there is no shortage) and shortly behind, you'll likely find mention of ethical issues," the report said. "From the White House to the Wall Street Journal to the World Economic Forum, the question of how we program the future is one of the most critical issues facing not just data scientists but society as a whole. In perhaps the most important question in this year's survey, we asked, 'Which of the following do you personally think might be issues regarding ethics and AI?' " The top concern raised in answering that question was "human bias/prejudice programmed into machine learning" (listed by 63 percent of respondents), followed by "use of AI and automation in warfare/intelligence" (49 percent). "Unease on the displacement of human workforces and the impossibility of programming a commonly agreed upon moral code also ranked high on the radar of ethical issues for data scientists tallying in at 41 percent and 42 percent respectively," CrowdFlower said.

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 17, 2017) - NVIDIA ( NASDAQ: NVDA) today announced that its deep learning platform is now available as part of Baidu Cloud's deep learning service, giving enterprise customers instant access to the world's most adopted AI tools. The new Baidu Cloud offers the latest GPU computing technology, including Pascal architecture-based NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs and NVIDIA deep learning software. It provides both training and inference acceleration for open-source deep learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow and PaddlePaddle. "Baidu and NVIDIA are long-time partners in advancing the state of the art in AI," said Ian Buck, general manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. "Baidu understands that enterprises need GPU computing to process the massive volumes of data needed for deep learning. Through Baidu Cloud, companies can quickly convert data into insights that lead to breakthrough products and services."

Insurance executives believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will significantly transform their industry in the next three years, with insurers investing in AI to empower agents, brokers and employees to enhance the customer experience with automated personalized services, faster claims handling and individual risk-based underwriting processes, according to Accenture's Technology Vision for Insurance 2017. At the same time, however, the report found that insurers face challenges integrating AI into their existing technology, citing issues such as data quality, privacy and infrastructure compatibility. Titled "Technology for People," the report is based on the insights of a technology advisory board, interviews with industry technologists and a survey of more than 550 insurance executives across 31 countries. According to the report, three-quarters (75 percent) of insurance executives believe that AI will either significantly alter or completely transform the overall insurance industry in the next three years. One-third (32 percent) believe that their own company will be "completely transformed" by AI within that timeframe, and an additional 39 percent believe that AI will "significantly change" their company.

Teenage hackers are motivated by idealism and impressing their mates rather than money, according to a study by the National Crime Agency. The law enforcement organisation interviewed teenagers and children as young as 12 who had been arrested or cautioned for computer-based crimes. It found that those interviewed, who had an average age of 17, were unlikely to be involved in theft, fraud or harassment. Instead they saw hacking as a "moral crusade", said Paul Hoare, senior manager at the NCA's cybercrime unit, who led the research. Others were motivated by a desire to tackle technical problems and prove themselves to friends, the report found.

By the way, you can listen to a neuron fire here (what you're actually hearing is the electro-chemical firing of a neuron, converted to audio). Some electrodes want to take the relationship to the next level and will go for a technique called the patch clamp, whereby it'll get rid of its electrode tip, leaving just a tiny little tube called a glass pipette,21 and it'll actually directly assault a neuron by sucking a "patch" of its membrane into the tube, allowing for even finer measurements:39 A patch clamp also has the benefit that, unlike all the other methods we've discussed, because it's physically touching the neuron, it can not only record but stimulate the neuron,22 injecting current or holding voltage at a set level to do specific tests (other methods can stimulate neurons, but only entire groups together). Finally, electrodes can fully defile the neuron and actually penetrate through the membrane, which is called sharp electrode recording. If the tip is sharp enough, this won't destroy the cell--the membrane will actually seal around the electrode, making it very easy to stimulate the neuron or record the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron. But this is a short-term technique--a punctured neuron won't survive long.

This file photo taken on May 1, 2015 shows Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveiling large utility scale home batteries at the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, California. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink Corp is working to link the human brain with a machine interface by creating micron-sized devices. Neuralink is aiming to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke, cancer lesion etc, in about four years, Musk said in an interview with website Wait But Why. "If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy," Musk said in the interview published on Thursday. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Musk said in a tech conference last year. "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing," Musk said in the latest interview.

Tesla founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink is working to link the human brain with a machine interface by creating micron-sized devices. Neuralink is aiming to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke, cancer lesion etc, in about four years, Musk said in an interview with website Wait But Why. "If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy," Musk said in the interview published on Thursday. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Musk said in a tech conference last year. "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing," Musk said in the latest interview. "If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person."

Today, Milton Keynes based Artificial Intelligence software company, Celaton has been named a winner of the Queen's Award for Enterprise in Innovation 2017. The Queen's Awards for Enterprise are the UK's most prestigious business awards to celebrate and encourage business excellence. Established in 2004, Celaton Limited has designed and implemented a machine learning software platform which, enables better customer service, faster. An Innovation Award has been given for the development of inSTREAM . Businesses receive a plethora of content on a daily basis from customers, suppliers and staff, which is highly labour intensive to process, make actionable and gain insights from.

This is a guest post by Lauren Delapenha. She is an editor at DiscoverDataScience.com, a one-stop resource for learning about the rapidly-evolving field of data science through comprehensive education and career guides. According to IBM, the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. A decent chunk of those quintillion bytes is made up of people asking the experts how to break into and excel in the dynamic, lucrative field of data science. An even larger chunk of those bytes consists of convoluted, contradicting answers to that question.