Entitled "Bringing AI and Intelligent Live Streaming to the Smart City," this presentation will be led by key members of CrowdOptic's technical team: Richard Smith, VP of Product, Austin Markus, VP of CrowdOptic Labs, and Joshua Davis, Principal Director of Engineering. There are already hundreds of thousands of cameras in many smart cities, but how intelligent are their video cameras and video management systems? This session will dig into the use of artificial intelligence to control cameras, and will explain how sensor data can be used to analyze video stored at the edge. CrowdOptic Intersect APIs expose developers to triangulation and cluster detection algorithms, guiding them through the basics of how CrowdOptic works with camera lines of sight to bring artificial intelligence to the smart city. A quick demonstration will drive home the depth of these APIs, showing how smart phones leverage cameras in the smart city to effectively look through walls and around corners.

Anyway, at some point I got a bit tired of reading papers of various algorithms claiming to be the fastest and most accurate, so I built a benchmark suite called ann-benchmarks. It pits a number of algorithms in a brutal showdown. I recently Dockerized it and wrote about it previously on this blog. So why am I blogging about it just three months later? Well…there's a lot of water under the bridge in the world of approximate nearest neighbors, so I decided to re-run the benchmarks and publish new results. I will probably do this a few times every year, at my own questionable discretion.

In what may be the biggest rollout of conversational AI from IBM since Watson, IBM Research today debuted Project Debater, an experimental conversational AI with a sense of humor, little tact, and occasionally powerful arguments. Training of Project Debater began six years ago, but it only gained an ability to participate in debates with people two years ago, said Noam Slonim, IBM Research principal investigator and creator of Project Debater. Debater's smarts come from hundreds of millions of interactions with millions of journal and newspaper articles. The AI system's ability to deliver persuasive arguments was demonstrated for an audience of tech journalists gathered at IBM offices in San Francisco, where the AI system participated in debates about whether governments should subsidize space exploration and whether telemedicine should play a bigger role in health care. When Project Debater gets a new topic, it searches its corpus of articles for sentences and clauses that are relevant, argumentative, and support its side of the debate.

Early applications of deep learning to imagery and video focused primarily on cataloging that content, identifying the objects, activities, locations and text within. As neural algorithms have improved and new techniques developed, there has been an increasing focus on using deep learning approaches to actually generate completely new visual content autonomously. The cost of such AI generated synthetic content is dropping rapidly to the point that in the very near future you'll likely be able to generate it on your smartphone with a click of a button. These images and videos are a far cry from the ham-handed Photoshop jobs of yesteryear, with some appearing nearly flawless even to a trained eye. At the same time, we've taught society that "seeing is believing" and to put far more trust in visual material we see online – an image might be miscaptioned, but the picture itself is likely real.

Before Siri and Cortana, pop culture offered up several versions of feminised artificial intelligence – but none of the artists perhaps envisioned how the reality could take us backwards rather than propel us into a new, more equal world. Charli XCX's latest album, Pop 2, has been dubbed as the "sequel" to pop music. The 10-track mixtape is riddled with a slew of pop sirens, underground up-and-comers and club-ready anthems: "Go fuck your prototype I'm an upgrade of your stereotype," Charli sings in Femmebot. In 2010, Robyn's Fembot interrogated the intersection of womanhood and androidism, while Christina Aguilera's sixth album that same year, Bionic, toyed between electro-pop beats (the machine) and stripped-back ballads (the woman). The phenomenon has long been computed into film and pop culture (Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014), Stepford Wives (1975), Metropolis (1927)), but only recently have physical manifestations entered our reality. Just as we acknowledge the wiring of femmebots and female pop stars, we should also consider the broader parallel between women and technology, and the increased feminisation of artificial intelligence.

A new report from Temenos, the leader in global banking software and Forbes Insight warns that wealth managers face an existential crisis if they fail to leverage the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence (AI). 'AI and the Modern Wealth Manager' reveals that whilst only a third (34 per cent) of wealth managers are currently deploying AI within their firms and a further 25 per cent are testing it, 99 per cent plan to deploy AI within the next three years. The predictive aspect of AI is expected to be a driver of transformative personalisation in wealth management, with the biggest impact on risk management, with better analysis and forecasting--the same elements that will deliver true predictive investment guidance. As a result, each client will get a whole new level of attention. However, there were some discrepancies between the views of wealth managers around the world and investors.

IBM has unveiled Project Debater, a conversational artificial intelligence which can hold a debate using information from journals and newspaper articles. Project Debater began its training six years ago but it could only hold a debate with people two years ago. A demo was held for journalists at IBM's offices in San Francisco where the AI debated issues relating to healthcare and the subsidisation of space exploration. The company didn't give its AI an easy time either – it was competing against Dan Zafrir, President of the International Debate Society in Israel, and 2016 national Israel debate champion Noa Ovadia. Debater opened its supporting argument for space exploration subsidisation with facts such as how it benefits humankind because it helps advance scientific discoveries and inspires young people to think beyond themselves. Ovadia countered the argument saying there are better applications for government subsidies, including for scientific research here on Earth.

Bangalore: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next big step for retail and FMCG companies following the implementation of advanced big data and analytics (BDA) solutions, which can unlock huge data volumes in an automated way in real-time and ultimately lead to maximum profitability, according to GlobalData. The company's Disruptor Database revealed that although retailers have grown to their current size by capitalizing on profitable bits of digitalization, they are often challenged in understanding what their customers need at scale. There is a colossal amount of customer data with enterprises, but only a handful are able to generate value deemed from low conversion rates of below 5% overall. This broadens the scope for retailers and consumer goods companies to use predictive analytics to enhance decisions related to supply chain management, customer behavior, staff allocation and the likelihood of goods being damaged, lost or returned. "While most analysis related to understanding market trends, achieving greater customer personalization, and improving operational efficiency can be performed with BDA methods, AI in many cases is less cost intensive and faster - at times even instant.. Intelligent machine learning systems can replace expensive armies of data scientists and provide solutions or product recommendations in an automated way. The timing of the analytics is crucial, since opportunities for cost savings or additional sales are frequently limited to minutes or even seconds," said Rena Bhattacharyya, Technology Research Director - GlobalData.

"Fighting technology means fighting human ingenuity," an IBM software program admonished Israeli debating champion Dan Zafrir in San Francisco Monday. The program, dubbed Project Debater, and Zafrir, were debating the value of telemedicine, but the point could also apply to the future of the technology itself. Software that processes speech and language has improved enough to do more than tell you the weather forecast. You may not be ready for machines capable of conversation or arguing, but tech companies are working to find uses for them. IBM's demo of Project Debater comes a month after Google released audio of a bot called Duplex booking restaurants and haircuts over the phone.

SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM computers famously won at Jeopardy! and beat world class chess masters. At a media gathering here Monday afternoon, a black, artificial intelligence-infused IBM computer with a screen for a face more than held its own debating seasoned human debaters. In one debate face-off, IBM's "Project Debater" AI computer made the case in favor of the government subsidizing space exploration against Israeli debate champion Noa Ovadia, who took the opposite position. Ovadia was judged the winner by the crowd of journalists in "delivering" the argument--the computer's attempts at humor didn't measure up to the personality of a human -- but IBM handily outscored Ovadia on the question of "knowledge enrichment." IBM's computer fared better in a second debate persuading the crowd that telemedicine is worth pursuing against another human debater, Dan Zafrir.