From Amazon and Facebook to Google and Microsoft, leaders of the world's most influential technology firms are highlighting their enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there is growing interest in AI, the field is understood mainly by specialists. Our goal for this primer is to make this important field accessible to a broader audience. We'll begin by explaining the meaning of'AI' and key terms including'machine learning'. We'll illustrate how one of the most productive areas of AI, called'deep learning', works.

Scientists have developed a mind-controlled robotic hand that allows people with certain types of spinal injuries to perform everyday tasks such as using a fork or drinking from a cup. The low-cost device was tested in Spain on six people with quadriplegia affecting their ability to grasp or manipulate objects. By wearing a cap that measures electric brain activity and eye movement the users were able to send signals to a tablet computer that controlled the glove-like device attached to their hand. Participants in the small-scale study were able to perform daily activities better with the robotic hand than without, according to results published Tuesday in the journal Science Robotics. The principle of using brain-controlled robotic aids to assist people with quadriplegia isn't new.

One day we will "think about machine learning the way we think about electricity: It's hard to imagine the world without it," said SAP Chief Innovation Officer Juergen Mueller at the recent SAP TechEd Barcelona. Under Mueller, SAP has embarked on a journey to bring machine learning to business around the world, essentially "electrifying" all applications with this technology. For the uninitiated, machine learning takes Big Data, runs it against sophisticated algorithms and helps applications to learn from this information. Massively improved computing power makes this possible in real time. Most importantly, it allows applications to "think" and independently resolve problems – going beyond what they were explicitly programmed to do, and often what humans can do.

DEDHAM, MA--(Marketwired - Dec 7, 2016) - RAGE Frameworks, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) for the Enterprise, today announced that a leading diversified investment and financial services company has deployed RAGE LiveSpread to automate the extraction, interpretation and processing of financial statements and other documents needed for credit analysis. RAGE LiveSpread is a contextual, traceable machine learning solution built on the RAGE-AI platform. Dealing with variations in form (electronic files, pdfs, and paper statements), format, language, accounting standards across countries, and data delivery methods makes financial statement automation a major challenge. Currently, this is a manual, error-prone, and non-scalable process at every major bank around the world. At this leading investment and financial services company, RAGE's solution completely automates the ingestion, extraction, interpretation of investment reports, bank statements and Income Tax returns.

"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances." "When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better." One famous example of Occam's Razor in action is found in conspiracy theories surrounding the NASA moon landings. Many conspiracy theorists believe that the first Moon Landing was staged and filmed in a studio, part of an elaborate hoax. Their justification relies upon many twisted and convoluted theories, whereas the NASA argument is fairly straightforward.

Obi is looking fly in his custom eyewear. The orange safety goggles, adorned with tiny reflectors, fit securely over his little feathered head. But Obi the parrotlet isn't wearing these goggles to make a fashion statement. He's part of an experiment where he flies through a sheet of lasers so that researchers can see how the air around him behaves as he moves. In a paper published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, researchers tried to observe the wake of a bird in flight.

A/B Testing - In marketing, A/B testing is a simple randomized experiment with two variants, A and B, which are the control and treatment in the controlled experiment. It is a form of statistical hypothesis testing. Other names include randomized controlled experiments, online controlled experiments, and split testing. In online settings, such as web design (especially user experience design), the goal is to identify changes to web pages that increase or maximize an outcome of interest (e.g., click-through rate for a banner advertisement). Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) - AdaBoost, short for "Adaptive Boosting", is a machine learning meta-algorithm formulated by Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire who won the prestigious "Gödel Prize" in 2003 for their work.

Testosterone gets a pretty bad reputation. It's been long known as the hormone of aggression. In his 1998 book, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes, "What evidence links testosterone with aggression? Some pretty obvious stuff": Males tend to have more testosterone than women, and tend to be more aggressive. "Times of life when males are swimming in testosterone (for example, after reaching puberty) correspond to when aggression peaks."

Etiya's'Serdoo' uses AI to automate customer service management SINGAPORE, 6th December 2016 -- Etiya, the leading independent software vendor providing telco CRM, catalog-driven BSS/OSS, social CRM and big data analytics, announced the launch of a customer service management and application called Serdoo that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate, understand and analyse information from any interaction - such as via text and social media - with a telco's customers. Serdoo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application that is powered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies. The application can be integrated with any digital channel and interprets and deciphers mail, webchats, SMS, and social media postings. The system is making its debut at TM Forum Live! Asia in Singapore and is the product of 12 months' R&D at Etiya's Silicon Valley location. A number of communication service providers have already trialed Serdoo, with some initial reports showing a reduction in response times by as much as 50%.

David Reilly, CTO at Bank of America, believes that automation will "change how we insure property, loan money, invest money, deliver technology, write research reports, and what professionals in financial services do every day." For example, an insurance company can incorporate far more data -- from credit scores to behavior -- when it decides how risky a customer is. He added: "Every week in the news we read about a new application for artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, or robots -- whether it is self-driving cars, AI assistants, predictive models, robots building (or printing) hardware, or how to invest our money ... Put these all in the category of automation -- and that is what will impact finance the most in the next decade." Diwakar Choubey, CEO of online lender MoneyLion, predicts that "what was once a sit-down conversation between a client and their personal private banker might now be accessible through a mobile app to broad audiences, 24/7." Jenny Fielding, managing director at Techstars Accelerator, said that technology "enables basic automation so that making payments, checking balances and customer service can happen in real time via messaging platforms. However, as the underlying technologies mature, deep learning algorithms will minimize the need for human interaction."