The world's largest education company is leveraging IBM's Watson platform as it tries to take college tutoring from campus libraries to the virtual world. Pearson is partnering with Armonk, New York-based International Business Machines Corp. to use the Watson artificial intelligence product as an online tutor for college courseware. The companies on Tuesday announced a pilot project that's already underway in the U.S. and is set to expand through 2017 and 2018. Both companies declined to disclose terms, costs or revenue projections from the venture. The project is part of Pearson's efforts to shift its business into the digital age, as it struggles with slumping textbook sales and lower college enrollments in the U.S. IBM is seeking to drive revenue growth by developing practical applications for Watson, its software that wooed the sector five years ago by beating two human champions on the TV game show Jeopardy!

A university without any teachers has opened in California this month. It's called 42 - the name taken from the answer to the meaning of life, from the science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The US college, a branch of an institution in France with the same name, will train about a thousand students a year in coding and software development by getting them to help each other with projects, then mark one another's work. This might seem like the blind leading the blind - and it's hard to imagine parents at an open day being impressed by a university offering zero contact hours. But since 42 started in Paris in 2013, applications have been hugely oversubscribed. Recent graduates are now working at companies including IBM, Amazon, and Tesla, as well as starting their own firms.

As artificial intelligence (AI) begins to power more technology across industries, it's been truly exciting to see what our community of developers can create with Watson. Developers are inspiring us to advance the technology that is transforming society, and they are the reason why such a wide variety of businesses are bringing cognitive solutions to market. With AI becoming more ubiquitous in the technology we use every day, developers need to continue to sharpen their cognitive computing skills. They are seeking ways to gain a competitive edge in a workforce that increasingly needs professionals who understand how to build AI solutions. It is for this reason that today at World of Watson in Las Vegas we announced with Udacity the introduction of a Nanodegree program that incorporates expertise from IBM Watson and covers the basics of artificial intelligence. The "AI Nanodegree" program will be helpful for those looking to establish a foundational understanding of artificial intelligence.

AI has a long way to go before people can or should worry about turning the world over to machines. Elon Musk's new plan to go all-in on self-driving vehicles puts a lot of faith in the artificial intelligence needed to ensure his Teslas can read and react to different driving situations in real time. AI is doing some impressive things--last week, for example, makers of the AlphaGo computer program reported that their software has learned to navigate the intricate London subway system like a native. Even the White House has jumped on the bandwagon, releasing a report days ago to help prepare the U.S. for a future when machines can think like humans. But AI has a long way to go before people can or should worry about turning the world over to machines, says Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist who has spent the past few decades studying and trying to solve fundamental problems in AI.

Artificial intelligence, the machine learning technology that allows "smart" machines to take over human tasks like driving cars or ordering pizza, is quickly becoming the go-to technology for many industries to hire talent for, including health care, auto, and finance. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates the AI market will grow to more than $5 billion by 2020, given the rising adoption of AI across these industries. That's why online education company Udacity is debuting a new way for workers to learn skills needed to be experts in developing artificial intelligence for the likes of IBM and others. Udacity originally launched "Nanodegrees" to train people hoping to land technical jobs, such as software developing. Nanodegrees also aim to teach people about the advanced and emerging technologies like self-driving cars or Android development for mobile phones.

UPDATE: Mar 20, 2016 - Added my new follow-up course on Deep Learning, which covers ways to speed up and improve vanilla backpropagation: momentum and Nesterov momentum, adaptive learning rate algorithms like AdaGrad and RMSProp, utilizing the GPU on AWS EC2, and stochastic batch gradient descent. We look at TensorFlow and Theano starting from the basics - variables, functions, expressions, and simple optimizations - from there, building a neural network seems simple! Deep learning is all the rage these days. What exactly is deep learning? Well, it all boils down to neural networks.

They finally did it: They made "artificial intelligence" a buzzword. Typically, buzzwords don't come from decades-old evolving disciplines of computer science. Making "machine learning," "AI" and "neural nets" into buzzwords means that millions of developers are likely having their first experience with this stuff now. In that vein, we bring you a nice long list of machine learning, deep learning, neural network and artificial intelligence how-to's. Buzzword or not, it's fairly obvious this stuff will be a big part of enterprise software for the next few decades.

In another five years, Watson will be helping a doctor diagnose a patient's symptoms and a company CEO calculate whether to buy a competitor. "The technology is not even moving fast. It's moving faster and faster every day," said John Kelly III, senior vice president of Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research. Ever since Watson, an intelligent system that uses machine learning and natural language recognition, beat Jeopardy champions in 2011, the system has been used in a variety of industries, and IBM is hoping to show how far it has come. However, Kelly wanted to focus on where Watson is going.

The following is a list of, mostly free, machine learning online courses for beginners. First, and arguably the most popular course on this list, Machine Learning provides a broad introduction to machine learning, data mining, and statistical pattern recognition. The course will also draw from numerous case studies and applications, so that you'll also learn how to apply learning algorithms to building smart robots (perception, control), text understanding (web search, anti-spam), computer vision, medical informatics, audio, database mining, and other areas. The course is 11 weeks long and averages a 4.9/5 user rating, currently. It is free to take, but you can pay $79 for a certificate upon course completion.

It sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie, but the truth is it's your inevitable reality. The rise of artificial intelligence, or AI, is poised to change the way we think of productivity. That's according to a new report from Accenture, which predicts that AI could boost productivity by up to 40 percent by 2035. Companies are already investing heavily in AI, and not just in the U.S. Put simply, AI is defined as the ability of a machine to mimic intelligent human behavior. It's essentially any sort of technology that is able to make sense of its environment and surroundings, and then act and react accordingly. One of the benefits AI will bring is taking care of mundane responsibilities so human employees can concentrate on others.