What if a simple algorithm were all it took to program tomorrow's artificial intelligence to think like humans? According to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, it may be that easy -- or difficult. Are you a glass-half-full or half-empty kind of person? TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what's in store for 2017.

A Northwestern University team developed a new computational model that performs at human levels on a standard intelligence test. This work is an important step toward making artificial intelligence systems that see and understand the world as humans do. "The model performs in the 75th percentile for American adults, making it better than average," said Northwestern Engineering's Ken Forbus. "The problems that are hard for people are also hard for the model, providing additional evidence that its operation is capturing some important properties of human cognition." The new computational model is built on CogSketch, an artificial intelligence platform previously developed in Forbus' laboratory.

In early August, IBM announced that it will acquire Merge Healthcare Inc., a company that sells systems that help medical professionals access and store medical images. This move is a critical step in IBM's plan to put AI to work medically by training its Watson software to identify maladies like heart disease and cancer. Merge is valuable to IBM because it owns 30 billion images, including computerized tomography, X-rays, and magnetic-resonance-imaging scans. The company can use these images in its deep learning training program. IBM is hoping that the same kind of software that lets Flickr recognize your face or a dog in your photos can help Watson identify symptoms of diseases.

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze large patient data sets promises to change the face of population health management in a way that will be far reaching across the industry and a game changer to the way physicians monitor and care for their patients. AI's ability to raise the level of evidence-based medicine can help primary care physicians make better decisions in several areas. These include the ability to determine appropriate treatments for their patients and to how best to monitor their care during and after hospitalization, to improving efficiency and productivity in care team workflows and finding better ways to reduce overall costs associated with patient care. Supercomputers that compare and analyze large groups of patients' clinical data, diagnostic images and claims data, are capable of identifying subtle patterns and changes in health and wellness that can foreshadow the start of an illness, monitor the effectiveness of drug treatments and identify patients' health risks. For example, when researchers at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, wanted to find out which patients with pulmonary hypertension had the greatest risk of heart failure, they used AI software to analyze images of patients' hearts and constructed a smart 3D heart that predicts patient survival rates.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures--short films, music videos, commercials--that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other people's bodies, Teddy bears dance to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot clothes from rifles onto fleeing nudists. Last year, their first feature-length project, "Swiss Army Man"--starring Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent talking corpse that befriends a castaway--premièred at Sundance, and left some viewers wondering if it was the strangest thing ever to be screened at the festival. The Times, deciding that the film was impossible to categorize, called it "weird and wonderful, disgusting and demented." Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Daniels were notified by their production company, several years ago, that an Israeli indie pop star living in New York wanted to hire them to experiment with technology that could alter fundamental assumptions of moviemaking, they took the call. The musician was Yoni Bloch, arguably the first Internet sensation on Israel's music scene--a wispy, bespectacled songwriter from the Negev whose wry, angst-laden music went viral in the early aughts, leading to sold-out venues and a record deal. After breaking up with his girlfriend, in 2007, Bloch had hoped to win her back by thinking big. He made a melancholy concept album about their relationship, along with a companion film in the mode of "The Wall"--only to fall in love with the actress who played his ex. He had also thought up a more ambitious idea: an interactive song that listeners could shape as it played. But by the time he got around to writing it his hurt feelings had given way to more indeterminate sentiments, and the idea grew to become an interactive music video. The result, "I Can't Be Sad Anymore," which he and his band released online in 2010, opens with Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apartment. Standing on a balcony, he puts on headphones, then wanders among his friends, singing about his readiness to escape melancholy. He passes the headphones to others; whoever wears them sings, too. Viewers decide, by clicking on onscreen prompts, how the headphones are passed--altering, in real time, the song's vocals, orchestration, and emotional tone, while also following different micro-dramas. If you choose the drunk, the camera follows her as she races into the bathroom, to Bloch's words "I want to drink less / but be more drunk." Choose her friend instead, and the video leads to sports fans downing shots, with the lyrics "I want to work less / but for a greater cause."

Simons Institute 92 views Computational Learning Theory by Tom Mitchell - Duration: 1:10:37. Machine Learning TV 4 views How Hard Is Inference for Structured Prediction? - Duration: 47:36. Simons Institute 196 views Learning Representations II, Deep Beliefe Networks by Tom Mitchell - Duration: 1:22:44.

The Arterys Cardio DLTM application is vendor agnostic and was developed using data from several thousand cardiac cases. The software produces editable automated contours, providing precise and consistent ventricular function in seconds. The trained deep learning algorithm was validated as producing results within an expected error range comparable to that of an experienced clinical annotator. This clearance enables Arterys to make use of its unique clinical annotation platform, which collects ground-truth data every time a user views a study on Arterys.com. In the future, the deep learning model can be optimized as new data is collected from all global users.

Artificial intelligence (AI) on its own isn't enough to compete – companies need industry-specific solutions to business problems. So said Martin Schroeter, IBM's senior vice-president and chief financial officer, on the company's quarterly earnings call. Cognitive computing technology (IBM's term for AI) is just "table stakes," said Schroeter, claiming that his company is going the extra mile. IBM is building datasets for Watson to serve specific industries, including healthcare and finance. "You need more than public data or algorithms to solve real-world problems," Schroeter said.

Clear link found between AI adoption and business growth. Infosys has released its multinational research findings on the business impact of Artificial Intelligence, market maturity and expectations. A clear link has been shown to exist between a company's revenue growth and its AI maturity, with those reporting faster revenue growths more likely to be ahead in AI adoption. The report also found that AI is perceived as a long-term strategic priority in innovation. The majority of respondents, totalling to 85 percent, aim to train employees on the benefits and use of AI.

Scientists have created what they say is a vaccine against the kind of fake and hyper-partisan news that is spreading quickly across Facebook. The researchers claim that by showing people lies, they can teach them to better see the truth. The solution works in a similar way to a real vaccine – exposing people to a small amount of the problem to help them better respond to larger amounts of it. The solution could help social networks and news organisations battle against fake news, which has been credited with helping the vote for both Brexit and for Donald Trump. The study claims that if people are shown well-established facts about climate change and then lies about it, the latter will cancel out the former.