An artificial intelligence company that uses computers, not lawyers, to sift through thousands of legal documents in search of key information is moving part of its operations to Toronto. ROSS Intelligence co-founder Andrew Arruda calls opening a research and development centre here a "no brainer." Canada'lost the lead' on artificial intelligence. Here's how Toronto will get it back Arruda, one of the University of Toronto graduates who founded the company, was back on campus Monday to announce the news, calling the city "the hub of artificial intelligence development." While the company's headquarters remain in San Francisco, "Toronto is where we always knew we had to be," Arruda told a crowd who gathered on campus for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Uber Technologies Inc.'s incoming chief executive officer, Dara Khosrowshahi, inherits an embattled global business with crises sprawling across continents. Since Uber's founding in 2009, the San Francisco-based company has tested the world's tolerance for disruption and rule-breaking. The company's toe-stepping ways, overseen by co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick, helped the ride-hailing company grow to more than 600 cities and a $69 billion (about ¥7.45 trillion) private valuation. But the startup's aggressive approach left a trail of self-inflicted wounds along the way. Those controversies -- including raising doubts about a passenger's rape, the use of software meant to evade law enforcement officials, an intense human resources investigation sparked by sexual harassment charges, and a fierce legal battle with Alphabet Inc.-- ultimately felled Kalanick after some of Uber's largest investors asked for his resignation in June.

Your life is about to be significantly changed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), whether you want it to be or not. Every once in while, something happens that tosses a huge rock into the pond of human affairs. Such rocks include things like the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, written language, movable type, the telegraph, computers, and the Internet. These kinds of massive disturbances produce pronounced, remarkable, unexpected changes, and radically alter human life. Artificial Intelligence is just such a rock, and will produce exactly those kinds of disturbances. We're not prepared for the tsunami that AI is going to throw at us. AI has been the technology of the future since the 1960s, but one that always seemed just over the horizon, and never arrived.

With the availability of large databases and recent improvements in deep learning methodology, the performance of AI systems is reaching or even exceeding the human level on an increasing number of complex tasks. Impressive examples of this development can be found in domains such as image classification, sentiment analysis, speech understanding or strategic game playing. However, because of their nested non-linear structure, these highly successful machine learning and artificial intelligence models are usually applied in a black box manner, i.e., no information is provided about what exactly makes them arrive at their predictions. Since this lack of transparency can be a major drawback, e.g., in medical applications, the development of methods for visualizing, explaining and interpreting deep learning models has recently attracted increasing attention. This paper summarizes recent developments in this field and makes a plea for more interpretability in artificial intelligence. Furthermore, it presents two approaches to explaining predictions of deep learning models, one method which computes the sensitivity of the prediction with respect to changes in the input and one approach which meaningfully decomposes the decision in terms of the input variables. These methods are evaluated on three classification tasks.

Uber's quest for a new chief executive to succeed Travis Kalanick has taken another twist after one of America's most senior corporate figures ruled himself out. Jeffrey Immelt, the former chief executive of General Electric, said via Twitter that he had "decided not to pursue a leadership position at Uber", while expressing "immense respect" for the cab-hailing company and its founders. I have decided not to pursue a leadership position at Uber. I have immense respect for the company & founders - Travis, Garrett and Ryan. Meg Whitman, chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is now the frontrunner to become the new Uber boss, the New York Times reported, despite Whitman stating publicly last month that she would not be leaving HPE.

The AI will have to be accountable, so different from DL, with outcomes you can explain to average judges and users in simple, legally valid words. Even where humans take final decisions, the AI tools should give detailed reasons that humans can either figure out as wrong (and so override, reverse the AI decision), or quickly accept by simply copy, paste and sign explanations prepared by AI. In the case of GDPR, only human staff can reject an application: the AI can automate the positive outcomes, else, if the AI denies a loan, job etc., it should pass the task to human staff, that will handle those negative decisions that make users angry, inquisitive. The risk is that the human staff, to save time and money, will make up fake explanations for AI rejections, and blindly accept AI approvals.

Neuralink Corp., the technology start-up aiming to link computers to human brains founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has raised $27 million from a dozen investors and plans to raise as much as $100 million, according to financial documents filed Friday. The San Francisco company is at the forefront of so-called neural lace technology, which implants electrodes into the brain with the goal of allowing people to upload and download thoughts and information. The financial disclosures about the fundraising were made to the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, in a series of tweets Friday, Musk denied that the company was seeking investment. "Neuralink is not raising money," Musk wrote in a reply to a tweet from Wall Street Journal reporter Rolfe Winkler.

Living in New England, it seems like I can never catch a break from high utility bills. If paying your utilities hurts your wallet every month, there are a lot of different ways you can slash those bills down to a more manageable number. For one, smart home technology can help you be more efficient with both heating and cooling, as well as with water and electricity use. Here are 10 smart products that can help reduce your utility bills and put money back in your pocket. Are you forever leaving the living room light on?

Everyone now is learning, or claiming to learn, Deep Learning (DL), the only field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that went viral. Paid and free DL courses count 100,000s of students of all ages. Too many startups and products are named "deep-something", just as buzzword: very few are using DL really. Most ignore that DL is the 1% of the Machine Learning (ML) field, and that ML is the 1% of the AI field. Remaining 99% is what's used in practice for most tasks.

Six-year-old Jamil starts school on September 11. There will be no ISIS fighters in his first grade class in Ulm, Germany, but Jamil, haunted by nightmares, is still fighting the ISIS demons. The boy's ordeal began in northern Iraq on August 3, 2015. Then four-years-old, he was one of many Yazidis captured by ISIS, crammed into a bus, and taken to Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, then under ISIS control. The Yazidi people are an ancient, non-Muslim religious community regarded by radical Islamists as infidels worthy of death.