HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global IT services provider, won the Award for Best AI Innovator at the 2016 AIconics Awards, which celebrate drive, innovation, and hard work in the international Artificial Intelligence Community. HCL won for Satori, a DRYiCE(TM) module that is an AI-enabled web application combining the functions necessary for traditional and 21st-century enterprises, such as content and document management, personal profiling, enterprise social networking, enterprise search, business intelligence, workflow management, and an enterprise application store. The category for Best AI Innovator celebrates the company that is at the front-end of AI innovation, investing significantly in R&D, and committed to advancing the industry. HCL's high placement in these awards underscores the company's commitment to bringing innovative automation and AI solutions to the enterprise. In May, the company won for Best Innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the London AIconics Awards.

The LaGuardia Plaza Hotel is a four-minute drive from LaGuardia Airport, in Queens, and on a recent August afternoon nearly every car parked in the hotel's lot was black. One after the other, men in shirtsleeves pulled up in Chevy Suburbans and GMC Yukon XLs and gleaming Lexus RS 300s with leather-trimmed seats, got out, then made their way across the marble lobby and up a flight of stairs. A brightly smiling woman approached them as they congregated around a registration desk. She jotted the letters onto a yellow sticky note and worked her way down the line. "Do you have an appointment? The men were black-car drivers, currently working for the ride-summoning companies Uber or Lyft, or both, and they were there, in all likelihood, because another driver had told them that they could get more money, and better treatment, if they signed up to drive for a new rival, Juno. New York City--which has no shortage of ways to get around, from pedicabs to one of the largest public-transportation systems in the world--is just one stage upon which a handful of companies are fighting to dominate the future of personal transportation. Juno has decided that the most effective way to do that is by being extra-nice to the drivers. After the men registered, they were ushered into a waiting room, where draped café tables had been set up with brochures: "How to Be a 5 Star Juno Driver." The drivers were soon called by name--"Khaleed?" "Julio?"--and brought into another room, where a Juno manager, Lucas Smith, was waiting for them with a laptop and an overhead projector. "Drive Your Future," the slogan on the screen urged. A pink-skinned forty-year-old in jeans with a bushy red beard and an intense gaze, Smith joined Juno last January. Like several of his colleagues, he was recruited from Apple's retail division, where he conducted training sessions for Apple-store employees, based on Apple's carefully designed protocols. In fact, many details of the drivers' experience had been modelled on the interactions that customers have when they enter an Apple store, from the "concierges" who greeted them to the low driver-to-employee ratio. At first, Smith was put off by the whiff of exploitation that he detected around rising Silicon Valley enterprises such as Instacart, where people buy your groceries for you, and TaskRabbit, where freelancers can underbid one another to take on errands and other jobs. In middle school, Smith told me, he was assigned a book by Ayn Rand. "I remember finishing it, and realizing that I wanted to be the opposite of everything that was in that book," he said. "Everything about the celebration of selfishness was just anathema." So he was initially skeptical about Juno. "I'm a super-progressive, and I have incredibly mixed feelings about the'sharing economy' and companies like Uber," he said. "Rather than creating wealth, they felt extractive.

One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley's top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, "This is Silicon Valley, right here." All the founders were graduates of Y Combinator, the startup "accelerator" that Graham co-founded: a three-month boot camp, run twice a year, in how to become a "unicorn"--Valleyspeak for a billion-dollar company. Thirteen thousand fledgling software companies applied to Y Combinator this year, and two hundred and forty were accepted, making it more than twice as hard to get into as Stanford University. After graduating thirteen hundred startups, YC now boasts the power--and the peculiarities--of an island nation. At the noisy end of the room, Graham was cheerfully encouraging improbable schemes. At the quiet end, Sam Altman was absorbed in private calculations. When founders came over to ...

The Terminator isn't arriving anytime soon, but concern is growing that artificial intelligence is already so pervasive in society--and getting more so all the time--that there needs to be more focus on how it's being used and potentially misused (even if by accident). Aside from futuristic killer robots, there are already real dangers ranging from faulty autonomous cars to algorithms used in hiring or recruiting that have an inadvertent bias against women or ethnic groups. The giants of artificial intelligence, especially as it affects consumers and businesses, have just joined together to form a nonprofit called the Partnership on AI, with founding members Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft. It's the latest effort to keep a collective eye on how AI is developed and used.OpenAI, founded in December 2015, has a similar goal of conducing research and conferences to promote responsible use of AI. "This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century," reads part of a statement from IBM's AI ethics researcher, Francesca Rossi. The Partnership on AI announcementlays out an ambitious agenda for research to be conducted or funded by members, in partnership with academics, user group advocates, and industry experts.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

If you want to become popular quickly in a new group of friends, you might find the best way to do this is by being narcissistic. Narcissists can make friends faster than other people, according to a new study, but only temporarily. The lack of empathy eventually shines through and people begin to prefer those who are more in touch with their emotions and who care about their relationships. Researchers led by the University of Krakow in Poland tested groups of college students. The scientists arranged the students into 15 groups of 20 and studied how the popularity of individuals in the group changed with time.

In tens years, our roads could be covered in self-driving cars. Hundreds of companies are working towards the technology, intending to give us more time to dedicate our attention to other things. But a new study shows many motorists do not plan on investing in the technology, and would even prefer to travel in a flying car rather than a driverless vehicle. The survey found 57 per cent of UK drivers would opt for a hovering car over a self-driving car like Google's autonomous vehicle (pictured). The idea of a flying car was most popular with 18-24-year-olds, with 60.3 per cent saying that they would rather take to the skies than surrender control of the driving to an on-board computer.

Children today have grown up with the Internet being an integral part of their lives. Babies use tablets to swipe through games and interactive programs. Toddlers can navigate apps on a smartphone. By the time children hit middle school, technology is a natural part of their everyday life, both in school and at home. And of course, their grasp on technological concepts comes, in some cases, faster for them than for their parents. How do you explain a concept like contextual search to a 12-year-old girl or boy?

But I see the same mistakes in both mindset and action again and again. In this post, you will discover the 5 most common ways that I see beginners slip-up when getting started in machine learning. I firmly believe that anyone can get started and do really well with applied machine learning. Hopefully, you can identify yourself in one or more of the traps below and take some corrective action to get back on course. How NOT To Get Started With Machine Learning Photo by Bart Everson, some rights reserved.