Surex Direct, Canada's fastest growing online insurance brokerage, continues to propel the artificial intelligence and machine learning movement – from a broker's perspective – as evident by their latest feature in CI Top Broker magazine. Already incorporating AI to automate and optimize billing processes, Surex Direct is focused on researching and developing AI and machine learning processes in-house. ''We take pride in being a trailblazer in the online insurance space,'' Lance Miller, CEO of Surex Direct, said. Aside from the development and deployment of AI, Surex Direct plans to license products, allowing other brokerages to increase their efficiencies. ''We're fully invested in the AI and machine learning movement,'' Matthew Alston, COO of Surex Direct, said.

From Google's Arts & Culture App--which uses facial recognition technology to match selfies to thousands of artworks--to Pizza Hut's plans for driverless pizza delivery. The application of Artificial Intelligence to improve the customer experience is on the rise. In fact, this year the Consumer Electronic Show featured its first ever Artificial Intelligence Marketplace to showcase the latest innovations designed to perform human tasks. Products ranged from big data analytics to speech recognition to advanced decision-making to predictive technology. Many of these solutions are already being leveraged by great companies to add a magic touch to their services.

Amazon has just introduced a new Alexa-powered speaker that's targeted at young users. Called the Echo Dot Kids Edition, the all-new Amazon smart speaker is a child-friendly device with a brightly colored protective case. On Wednesday, the Amazon product page for the Echo Dot Kids Edition went live, revealing all the important details about the $79.99 device. The new smart speaker comes with a protective case that has three color options: Blue, Green and Red. Preorders are now open, and the product is expected to ship on May 9. "Now Alexa is a kid-friendly DJ, comedian and storyteller -- and she's always getting smarter. Just ask and Alexa will play music, answer questions, read stories, tell jokes and more -- all with younger ears in mind," Amazon said in the product description for the Echo Dot Kids Edition.

The S&P 500 tech sector, up 1.8% in 2018, is still among the best-performing groups in the broader index. But more than a third of the 69 stocks in the sector have declined in 2018, the most for any full year since 2011. In 2017, only six of them had lost ground. The divisions are likely to come into sharper focus as more tech-focused companies report financial results in the coming days. With valuations already stretched by traditional measures, investors are contemplating which companies warrant the higher multiples that typically come with the tech label.

Sound event detection (SED) methods are tasked with labeling segments of audio recordings by the presence of active sound sources. SED is typically posed as a supervised machine learning problem, requiring strong annotations for the presence or absence of each sound source at every time instant within the recording. However, strong annotations of this type are both labor- and cost-intensive for human annotators to produce, which limits the practical scalability of SED methods. In this work, we treat SED as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, where training labels are static over a short excerpt, indicating the presence or absence of sound sources but not their temporal locality. The models, however, must still produce temporally dynamic predictions, which must be aggregated (pooled) when comparing against static labels during training. To facilitate this aggregation, we develop a family of adaptive pooling operators---referred to as auto-pool---which smoothly interpolate between common pooling operators, such as min-, max-, or average-pooling, and automatically adapt to the characteristics of the sound sources in question. We evaluate the proposed pooling operators on three datasets, and demonstrate that in each case, the proposed methods outperform non-adaptive pooling operators for static prediction, and nearly match the performance of models trained with strong, dynamic annotations. The proposed method is evaluated in conjunction with convolutional neural networks, but can be readily applied to any differentiable model for time-series label prediction.

It is my goal in the following article, to trace out, in as short a compass as I can, how you can use C# WPF applications to create a low-level Artificial Intelligence system. In the terminology that I am using for this article, a high-level Artificial Intelligence system can solve problems for you, but a low-level one requires that you still do some of the work yourself manually. Both a low-level and a high-level AI system contain a knowledge base. Each item in the knowledge base "connects" something that humans understand to something that the computer understands. We can think of a knowledge base as being a dictionary of key-value pairs, where the "key" is the part that humans understand and the "value" part is the component that the computer understands.

The voice assistant that lives inside Amazon's Echo speakers will soon thank kids for shouting out questions "nicely" if they say "please." The new response is part of a kid-friendly update that's coming next month, giving parents more control over the voice assistant. Adults can set Alexa to go silent at bedtime, block music with explicit lyrics and even call kids down to dinner.

Amazon has unveiled the Echo Dot Kids Edition with a custom version of Alexa that will read to kids, play music, answer questions and do other chores. It uses a new flavor of its FreeTime app called FreeTime for Alexa that includes parent controls and family-friendly features that run on any Echo device. It will give kids a different experience than adults; for instance, when they say "please," it will reply "thanks for asking so nicely" to reinforce their politeness. FreeTime for Alexa (available in free or subscription versions) will also answer questions differently. The regular version will merely reply "eight" if you ask how many planets are in the solar system, but the kids version will name each planet and explain why Pluto is no longer in the club.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Echo Dot Kids Edition comes in blue, red and green. Politeness counts, at least when your child asks Alexa a question on an Amazon Echo speaker. Soon, when your youngster asks Alexa to solve a math problem by exhibiting good manners--"Alexa, please tell me what 5 plus 7 is"--the voice inside the Echo will not only supply the right answer, but will then add positive reinforcement: "By the way, thanks for asking so nicely." This new "magic word" feature, as Amazon calls it, starts to roll out via a software upgrade for the Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot smart speakers on May 9, as part of a set of free parental controls called FreeTime for Alexa.

EU Digital Market Commissioner Andrus Ansip said Wednesday the Commission itself will increase its investment in research and development to $1.8 billion and hopes it will trigger $3 billion more in public and private funding.