Artificial intelligence might conjure images of a robotic Haley Joel Osment in Spielberg's film AI, or it may make you think of Data from Star Trek. Yet the impact of artificial intelligence in everyday life is more understated and far-reaching than science fiction might suggest. Artificial intelligence has the potential to offer $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. You already encounter it every day. Think of all those times Amazon recommended a book to you or Netflix suggested a film or TV show.

Several people who own Amazon's Echo speakers have reported a strange bug: the Alexa voice assistant has been laughing for no reason. Some users on Twitter and Reddit say the outbursts have been entirely spontaneous. Others have said that Alexa has laughed after being asked to turn on the lights -- and may have misheard the command. "Having an office conversation about pretty confidential stuff and Alexa just laughed," Twitter user @DavidSven wrote recently. "Anybody else ever have that? It didn't chime as if we had accidentally triggered her to wake. Said another Twitter user, @taylorkatelynne: "[So] my mom & I are just sitting in the living room, neither of us said a word & our Alexa lit up and laughed for no reason.

Machine Learning/ AI development is one of the fields that I am looking into. I was wondering if you guys can tell me anything about the the job climate, how hard it is to get a job in the field and anything else that I should know.

The technology will support the "industry standard" ONNX format for machine learning models, so AI veterans won't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel to incorporate their work. Microsoft hasn't said when that Windows 10 update will arrive beyond this year, although programmers will get an early peek at it in the Visual Studio Preview 15.7 release. You should hear more about the feature both at its Windows Developer day on March 7th as well as at the Build conference in May. This isn't an unheralded event when Google is already including an AI platform (TensorFlow Lite) as part of Android Oreo, but it's relatively new in the PC world and could have a transformative effect. Microsoft is hoping that you'll see "more intelligence" across Windows devices, even if it's for simple tasks like auto-generated music playlists -- it won't have to be limited to developers with deep enough pockets to tackle AI on their own.

Health Catalyst introduced Touchstone at HIMSS18 and, in so doing, described it as a performance discovery, prioritization, benchmarking and recommendation tool. "Touchstone is built from the ground up on the latest AI and software from Silicon Valley," said Dale Sanders, President of Technology, Health Catalyst. "Touchstone's recommendation engine, which borrows from Amazon and Netflix, gives you not just comparative benchmarks but recommendations to improve your performance against benchmarks." The technology includes risk models based on artificial intelligence and anomaly detection algorithms that hospitals can use to pinpoint underperforming areas. Touchstone performs risk-adjusted benchmarking by culling data in claims, cost-accounting systems, EHRs, external benchmarks and operations to risk-adjust benchmarking, to "guide users to the data and analyses of greatest relevance to their work and to the organization's goals," the company said.

Manjoo stopped looking at news online for two months, and instead reverted back to getting real paper newspaper subscriptions. I won't give away the whole story, but one of his verdicts was that he felt as though reading an actual newspaper, he felt he was was getting some actual real news. Of course, if bots are your thing, you may want to know about the $13.5 million Series A round that Voicera just raised. Voicera's elevator pitch is that it wants to make it simpler to record meetings and pull out action items automatically using AI. It will do so by recording and creating a transcript of the meeting.

By cutting the number of ads it shows viewers and the overall amount of ad time, NBC is hoping to meet consumer demand for fewer ads. At the same time, the network is betting on digital technology -- something a growing number of traditional TV entities are doing -- to enhance the remaining inventory so it is more relevant and by extending the reach to social media, where many viewers are actively engaged while watching their favorite programs. The higher-quality, more relevant ad inventory will likely come with a premium price tag, as NBC will still need to maintain revenue levels. Marketers will have to decide if they're willing to pay more to be surrounded by fewer commercials from other brands. NBC Universal's new AI system for matching advertisers with programming will help the network create opportunities for marketers to better target specific segments with more contextually relevant spots.

I wrote a NN in C 98. I never really considered myself good enough to apply for a machine learning job and have been focusing on Django and Android professionally, but have secretly wanted to break into machine learning. Seeing this kinda got me excited again tho. What does one typically need to break into a machine learning job? I've compiled and played with Tensor Flow and Caffe too, but haven't really gotten any solid work like experience with them nor applied them to anything useful.

Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics might be seen as early safeguards for our reliance on artificial intelligence, but as Alexa guides our homes and automated cars replace human drivers, are those Three Laws enough? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, hosts and moderates a lively discussion about how A.I. is opening doors to limitless possibilities, and if we're ready for them. The 2018 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate took place at the Museum on February, 13, 2018. For a full transcript of this debate, visit: https://www.amnh.org/explore/amnh.tv Listen to a podcast version on our blog: https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blo... Or search for Science@AMNH on iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I don't have a link handy (I've mostly seen these kinds of capchas on small, home-grown websites). It should be trivial to code one up yourself though. Edit: In general, there are a large class of problems that are trivial for humans but would require nearly general AI to be able to solve. Answering the question "What is my username?" is one example. Merely parsing this post to extract the question is challenging, nevermind actually answering it. For a more well-defined set of examples, games of imperfect information (full-ring poker, Starcraft) are still beyond the current state of the art, although I expect starcraft to fall within the next few years.