Branch of AI: Artificial intelligence is the study and development by which a computer and its systems are given the ability to successfully accomplish tasks that would typically require a human's intelligent behavior. Supervised learning: in this type of learning, the correct outcome for each data point is explicitly labeled when training the model. In a classification context, the learning algorithm could be, for example, fed with historic credit card transactions each labeled as safe or suspicious. Machine learning is used to find meaningful relations and to predict outcomes while data experts serve as translators to make sense of why the relation exists.

Amazon has completed its first customer delivery by drone. First-ever #AmazonPrimeAir customer delivery is in the books. Amazon's drones are fully autonomous and are dispatched from a local centre. After customers make their order, their boxed goods are placed inside the body of the drone.

Artificial intelligence has a new target in its cross hairs for 2017: StarCraft, a real-time war strategy game series. The AI's ability to win at Go was particularly impressive owing to the complexity of the ancient Chinese game. Mastering the chaos in StarCraft will therefore have implications beyond video games: it should improve AI's ability to deal with reality. "Mastering the chaos of StarCraft should help AIs deal with reality" This article appeared in print under the headline "Gamers in AI's cross hairs"

A computer vision system has been developed that detects suspicious behaviour in CCTV footage as it happens. Researchers involved in the P-REACT project, which is the work of a consortium of European companies and organisations and is partly funded by a grant from the European Commission, say the surveillance technology could help catch criminals in the act and relieve police of "digital evidence overload" by highlighting video clips most likely to be relevant to investigations. "If a camera at a gas station picks up suspicious activity, the video footage will be sent to the cloud, people at the gas station will be alerted, and nearby cameras will be told to look out for the criminals too," says project coordinator Juan Arraiza at Vicomtech, a research foundation in San Sebastian, Spain. Its algorithms have been trained on sample scenes of people fighting, chasing someone or snatching a bag.

The fusiform gyrus is thought to play a role in recognising faces, something that adults are better at doing than children. Brain scans of 47 people of different ages found – after taking into account the differing overall sizes of their brains – that adults had 12.6 per cent more solid brain matter in this area than children did. The team compared the growth of the face recognition region with a different area, responsible for recognising places. Inadequate growth of the brain's face recognition areas might contribute to autism, Duchaine suggests, as well as conditions that make people unable to recognise faces.

Last year was huge for advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The idea has been around for decades, but combining it with large (or deep) neural networks provides the power needed to make it work on really complex problems (like the game of Go). Invented by Ian Goodfellow, now a research scientist at OpenAI, generative adversarial networks, or GANs, are systems consisting of one network that generates new data after learning from a training set, and another that tries to discriminate between real and fake data. The hope is that techniques that have produced spectacular progress in voice and image recognition, among other areas, may also help computers parse and generate language more effectively.

A technology incubator in the company, called Jigsaw--formerly known as Google Ideas--says it intends to spot and remove digital harassment with an automated program called Conversation AI. So if Conversation AI or similar tools make it easier and more efficient to exercise such control, it's a reminder that "solving" the abuse problem, whether through human or automated means, requires moving away from maximal inclusivity as the highest ideal online. The Wild West nature of those sites will become only more apparent if tools like Conversation AI make moderated sites function even better. While Jigsaw efforts like Project Shield aim to provide defenses for politically sensitive websites, Conversation AI makes it easier to filter out unwanted speech--but the question is, unwanted by whom?

While robots and computers will probably never completely replace doctors and nurses, machine learning/deep learning and AI are transforming the healthcare industry, improving outcomes, and changing the way doctors think about providing care. Machine learning is improving diagnostics, predicting outcomes, and just beginning to scratch the surface of personalized care. Lumiata has developed predictive analytics tools that can discover accurate insights and make predictions related to symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, and medications for individual patients or patient groups. The Care Trio team has developed a three-pronged approach that helps doctors devise and understand the best care protocols for cancer patients.

It was in this same dingy diner in April 1993 that three young electrical engineers--Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and Nvidia's current CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang--started a company devoted to making specialized chips that would generate faster and more realistic graphics for video games. "We've been investing in a lot of startups applying deep learning to many areas, and every single one effectively comes in building on Nvidia's platform," says Marc Andreessen of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Starting in 2006, Nvidia released a programming tool kit called CUDA that allowed coders to easily program each individual pixel on a screen. From his bedroom, Krizhevsky had plugged 1.2 million images into a deep learning neural network powered by two Nvidia GeForce gaming cards.

Dubbed as Amazon AI, the new service offers powerful AI capabilities such as image analysis, text to speech conversion, and natural language processing. On the analytics front, Amazon is adding a new interactive, serverless query service called Amazon Athena that can be used to retrieve data stored in Amazon S3. With this, customers can run and manage workloads in the cloud, seamlessly from existing VMware tools. Extending Lambda to connected devices, AWS has announced AWS Greengrass – an embedded Lambda compute environment that can be installed in IoT devices and hubs.