Ever think your smartphone is vibrating or ringing when it isn't? It's such a common phenomenon that researchers gave the problem, which plagues between 70% and 90% of smartphone users, a name: phantom vibration syndrome. Some people find themselves so unhealthily attached to or distracted by their digital devices that they go on technology fasts to help them detach. Entrepreneur Rand Hindi says the problem isn't technology but the way we interact with it. Hindi, who was born in Lebanon and grew up in France, started coding at age 10, launched a web development agency at age 15, and earned his PhD in bioinformatics while working as a consultant on algorithmic trading.

Implementing Enterprise AI is a unique and limited edition course that is focussed on AI Engineering / AI for the Enterprise. The course is launched for the first time and has limited spaces. Created in partnership with H2O.ai, the course uses Open Source technology to work with AI use cases. Successful participants will receive a certificate of completion and also validation of their project from H2O.ai. To sign up or learn more, email info@futuretext.com The course targets developers and Architects who want to transition their career to Enterprise AI.

If you're keeping up with the rapid changes in the technology industry, you're seeing a bunch of terms thrown around as if they're interchangeable--but really, there are some pretty important distinctions. In this post, we're going to demystify the differences, and clarify the relationships, among these terms, especially artificial intelligence, machine learning, and self-driving cars. Let's begin with a simple model for how we'll approach this topic: Artificial intelligence is the broad field that covers all sorts of different initiatives and efforts to create machines that behave intelligently. What exactly it means to'behave intelligently' is a question best left for the philosophers and cognitive scientists, but for us, it refers to creating machines that do the highly complex things that only humans have previously been able to do. That means that AI is about creating machines that do more than just follow the commands that we give them. They can process input, make decisions, and take action.

A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occurs involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.[1] The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, as well as a subject of philosophical and religious interest, throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.[2] Dreams mainly occur in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep--when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake. REM sleep is revealed by continuous movements of the eyes during sleep. At times, dreams may occur during other stages of sleep. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable.[3] The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes.[3] People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase. The average person has three to five dreams per night, and some may have up to seven;[4] however, most dreams are immediately or quickly forgotten.[5] Dreams tend to last longer as the night progresses. During a full eight-hour night sleep, most dreams occur in the typical two hours of REM.[6] In modern times, dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious mind. They range from normal and ordinary to overly surreal and bizarre. Dreams can have varying natures, such as being frightening, exciting, magical, melancholic, adventurous, or sexual. The events in dreams are generally outside the control of the dreamer, with the exception of lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is self-aware.[7]

CAMBRIDGE, MA - 10 Nov 2016: IBM Watson Health (NYSE: IBM) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today announced a research initiative aimed at discovering the basis of cancer drug resistance. The five year, $50 million project will study thousands of drug resistant tumors and draw on Watson's computational and machine learning methods to help researchers understand how cancers become resistant to therapies. The anonymized data will be made available to the scientific community to catalyze research worldwide. To help understand how cancers become resistant to specific therapies, Broad Institute will generate tumor genome sequence data from patients who initially respond to treatment but who then become drug-resistant. Broad will use new genome-editing methods to conduct large-scale cancer drug resistance studies in the laboratory, to help identify tumors' specific vulnerabilities.

Artificial intelligence is already everywhere. Robots are performing surgeries, courts use AI to help determine sentencing and bots trade on the stock market all day. Last week, 150 academics and industry experts published the U.S. Roadmap for Robotics -- just ahead of the presidential election -- to help guide Congress as it moves to figure out how to allocate federal funds to encourage innovation, keep humans safe and, importantly, make sure America remains a global leader. The first Roadmap for Robotics report, published in 2009, inspired the Obama administration to launch the National Robotics Initiative in 2011, a program that allocated $70 million to advancing robotics research in the United States. The 2016 report is a 100-page tome packed with specific, technical recommendations that the contributors believe will be important for Congress to fund and support as robotics starts to take center stage across U.S. industries.

The most entertaining video we posted on Video Friday a couple weeks ago was almost certainly Robot Drone Man, a parody of this PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen) video, which for some reason has 150 million views on YouTube. Parody or not, Robot Drone Man actually exists, and it's a project of Ilhan Bae, a researcher and futurist at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), who wrote in to tell us about it. Robot Drone Man is an avatar drone, in the same category as other telepresence robots like Double and Beam. It allows a remote human to have an embodied physical presence through a mobile robot, although in this case, the robot can fly, since most of it is a DJI S1000 octocopter. With a height of 1.4 meters (landed), it's designed to match the eye level of people interacting with it, and the remote operator can "gesticulate with two hands and head as if a distant operator exists in person," says Bae, adding that this is "the first trial to couple a telepresence robot in an upright position and drone platform into one body."

Global awareness of data privacy and its implications is improving, not least due to a spate of high profile image hacks. But this has been slow to translate directly into changed behaviour, as in many instances there has been no alternative to storing and archiving images other than on global online services, where data can be mined, hacked and shared. Pimloc, which intends to provide that alternative, was founded in March this year by serial entrepreneur Simon Randall. The founding team includes some of the world's foremost thinkers in deep learning visual technology and computer vision application development across a range of fields. The firm has already completed an oversubscribed seed funding round lead by staff and UK business angels.

SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today introduced three initiatives to make its business applications more intelligent and empower its ecosystem to build machine learning (ML) applications for customers. Spanning its own solutions, partner programs and educational offerings, these programs will help accelerate ML adoption across SAP's global customer base. This announcement was made at the SAP TechEd conference, being held November 8-10, 2016, in Barcelona. First, SAP has unveiled new intelligent business applications. A new solution, "brand intelligence," is supposed to analyze brand exposure in video and images by leveraging deep learning.

"That would bother me a lot and it would bother others. "So yes, it can be used for bad outcomes. It's incumbent on us to make sure it's not concentrated in the hands of people who can implement this without checks and balances." Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize winner and world-renowned physicist, also drew attention to the dark side of AI last month. For the moment artificial intelligence poses no immediate or obvious threat, but experts say it is a matter of time and work needs to be done now.