Omar Abdelwahed, Head of Studio at SoftBank Robotics America, demos the capabilities of a humanoid robot, called Pepper, which is supposed to help customers shop in stores. "We designed Pepper to create empathy," says Steve Carlin, SoftBank Robotics America vice president in charge of sales and development. Steve Carlin, VP of Marketing and Business Development at SoftBank, discusses Pepper's new ability to help consumers shop at stores. "We've given Pepper a number of cues that will help people understand what it's doing," says SoftBank's Omar Abdelwahed, head of the company's robotics studio.

Rather than viewing these advances as threats to job security, we can look at them as opportunities for AI to fill in critical gaps in existing service providers, such as mental healthcare professionals. But what if artificial intelligence could bring quality and affordable mental health support to anyone with an internet connection? This is X2AI's mission, a startup that's built Tess AI to provide quality mental healthcare to anyone, regardless of income or location. Thanks to these psychologists we are able to offer behavioral health services directly to large employers or employer health plans, as the psychologists can take care of parts of the treatment and ensure to stand-by whenever additional human intervention is required.

Corporate giants like Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple and Salesforce, are competing in the race to acquire private AI companies, with Samsung emerging as a new entrant this month with its acquisition of startup Viv Labs, which is developing a Siri-like AI assistant. In 2014 Google acquired British company DeepMind Technologies for some 600M (Google DeepMind's program recently beat a human world champion in the board game "Go"). This year, it acquired visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai. Salesforce, which joined the race last year with the acquisition of Tempo AI, has already made two major acquisitions this year: Khosla Ventures-backed MetaMind and open-source machine-learning server PredictionIO.

New York-based Calrifai -- backed by investors including Google Ventures, Lux Capital, and NVidia -- entered the R/GA accelerator this year, after raising 10M in Series A in Q2'15. BI, Sales & CRM: Applications here include voice analytics to extract information from calls, automated customer response solutions, business data analytics, and sales targeting. To name a few, Palo Alto-based Mariana raised 2M in seed money from investors including Blumberg Capital; London-based True AI, previously seed funded by Entrepreneur First, entered the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Q3'16; another UK-based startup, Ripjar, raised funds from Winton Ventures in Q2'16. Three startups in the private sector using AI in e-commerce raised funding rounds this year: Reflektion raised 18M in Q1'16 from investors including Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, and Marc Benioff; ViSenze raised 10.5M in Series B from investors including Rakuten Ventures, Enspire Capital, and Phillip Private Equity; India-based Staqu raised angel funds in Q2'16.

Starting with this article, I will write a series of articles on deep learning covering the popular Deep Learning libraries and their hands-on implementation. Fast forward to 2012, a deep neural network architecture won the ImageNet challenge, a prestigious challenge to recognise objects from natural scenes. Nodes in the graph represents mathematical operations, while graph edges represent multi-dimensional data arrays (aka tensors) communicated between them. Here we solve our deep learning practice problem – Identify the Digits.

Artificial intelligence is now running robots, speech-to-text programs, cars, and doing everything from creating movie trailers to composing music. For now, Google is only offering Assistant on the Pixel, Google Home, and the messaging app Allo. Having an ever-present, artificially intelligent program looking through your contacts, your phone, your habits, and your daily life is a major decrease in privacy. With more information thanks to their new AI product, Google will be able to craft even better ad campaigns.

For Deep Knowledge Ventures, the Hong Kong-based venture firm that added a machine learning algorithm named VITAL to its board in 2014, it was about adding a tool to analyse market data around investment opportunities. For global professional service firms experimenting in this space, machine learning could allow deeper and faster document analysis. And though you may not think you are competing with Silicon Valley salaries for talent, you are if you want great people: a great data scientist can easily be 50 times more valuable than a competent one, which means that both hiring and retaining them can be pricey. As the machine learning ecosystem evolves, companies will find interesting ways to combine in-house industry experience with a range of off-the-shelf tools and open source algorithms to create highly-customised decision-support tools.

University of Southampton researchers have demonstrated that memristors, or resistors that remember their previous resistance, can power a neural network. And since the memristors will remember previous states when turned off, they should use much less power than conventional circuitry -- ideal for Internet of Things devices that can't afford to pack big batteries. The far-simpler memristor array in this test was limited to looking for patterns. You could have sensors that know how to classify objects and identify patterns without human help, which would be particularly helpful in dangerous or hard-to-reach places.

As machine learning - the ability of computers to learn without being explicitly programmed - gets more mainstream and involved in our lives, here is how machines learn.

A collection of our most popular articles for IT leaders from the first few months of 2016, including: - Corporate giants recruit digitally-minded outsiders to drive transformation - Analytics platforms to drive strategy in 2016 - Next generation: The changing role of IT leaders. This trend can be seen in Samsung's 6 October acquisition of Viv Labs, a US-based developer of open AI platforms that gives third-party developers the power to build conversational assistants and integrate natural language-based interfaces into mobile apps; or the launch of Google's Pixel smartphone, which includes an integrated AI assistant. The Global Mobile Trends report was produced by the GSMA's research arm, GSMA Intelligence, and compiled data on mobile subscriber growth trends, mobile internet adoption, devices and industry finances to present a comprehensive view of the megatrends influencing the worldwide mobile ecosystem. Summing up the report's findings, GSMA chief strategy officer Hyunmi Yang said: "In this year's report, we demonstrate evidence of a major shift in mobile to Asia, particularly India, which has now overtaken China to become the industry's key growth market, and the transition to a smartphone-powered'mobile-first' internet, which is delivering a new generation of internet users.