While Netflix dropped a day-and-date trailer for its Cloverfield flick, HBO has a more traditional reveal for season two of Westworld. Its Super Bowl spot (the first one HBO has ever aired for a specific series) showed off the network's "most-watched freshman series ever" with some new scenes that were interesting without revealing too much about where the show will go. We won't go too deep into the specifics for those who haven't checked out the first season yet, but at least now the vision of robots running amok includes massive mechanical bulls. Richard's been tech-obsessed since first laying hands on an Atari joystick.

I was looking forward a high-level explanation of these technologies. "we want to use the surrounding words to represent the target words with a Neural Network" This could use some rewording I think? I get what you mean, but it seems to mean we're representing words with a neural network, as opposed to use a neural network to compute a vector representation of a word. "For CBOW, all the examples with the target word as target are fed into the networks, and taking the average of the extracted hidden layer." I don't think I got this... in CBOW the vector(?) representing a word is the average (a scalar?) of the middle layer of the NN?

It was a striking story. "Machine Bias," the headline read, and the teaser proclaimed: "There's software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it's biased against blacks." ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit news organization, had analyzed risk assessment software known as COMPAS. It is being used to forecast which criminals are most likely to reoffend.

To my eye, the birds look entirely real. Another, a forest green tail, with a long beak that looks perfect for hooking bugs out of tree bark. But these photos I'm looking at are complete fictions. They're images that come straight from the imagination of Microsoft's latest AI, dubbed AttnGAN. They were created by typing a sentence into the system, like, "this bird is red and white with a very short beak." AttnGAN then generated these highly realistic, 256 x 256 pixel photos of fictional birds from nothing.

Bias – both human and data-based – is the biggest ethical challenge facing the development and adoption of artificial intelligence, according to a panel of world-leading AI luminaries. Speaking at last week's Dreamforce conference, Salesforce chief scientist and adjunct professor of Stanford's computer science department, Dr Richard Socher, said the rapid development of AI will inevitably impact more and more people's lives, raising significant ethical concerns. "These algorithms can change elections for the worse, or spread misinformation," he told attendees. "In some benign natural language processing classification algorithms, for example, you may want to maximise the number of clicks, and find something with a terminator image has more clicks so you put more of those pictures in articles." But it is the bias coming through existing datasets being used to train AI algorithms that arguably presents the biggest ethical problem facing industries.

Simple, someone has done the homework and checked Kurzweil's predictions against reality. At best, I think he is not better than 50/50. Importantly, his methodology is quite simple, too. If anyone cares to, I don't personally think it's something that is beyond an above-average person's capability.

Cambridge startup Intellegens has secured a landmark maiden deal for its Alchemite artificial intelligence technology. The company has revealed its first commercial collaboration – with e-Therapeutics, an Oxford-based pioneer of Network-Driven Drug Discovery. Alchemite will enable e-Therapeutics to generate improved predictions, correct errors and fill in gaps in the large-scale biological and chemical information repositories housed in the company's proprietary databases. Alchemite is the result of intensive research by Dr Gareth Conduit, CTO and Intellegens co- founder. Working at the world-famous Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge, Dr Conduit discovered a new method of analysing sparsely populated matrices using deep neural networks and novel machine learning approaches.

Newswire) CognitiveScale today announced a completed project with NBCUniversal using its artificial intelligence (AI) technology to transform the way NBCUniversal analyzes video to determine what makes a successful ad. The first-of-its-kind project resulted in valuable insights that empowers NBCUniversal to use AI to deliver new ad sales options and services to its clients. With the successful video project, CognitiveScale demonstrated how augmented intelligence can span all forms of data to deliver AI-powered technological innovations to increase everything from content creation and monetization to programming and customer retention to pricing and market share. Before now, media and entertainment companies had vast amounts of information contained within video, but had limited ways to derive actionable insights at scale from that data. Early promises of analytics for big data have fallen short, as often organizations do not know the right questions to ask of the data, let alone gather the types of actionable insights that can help them drive new services and improve customer offerings.

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There is currently much fear and hype around Artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on accountants. In Gartner's Hype Cycle of Artificial Intelligence, the majority of AI applications are climbing and cresting the Peak of Inflated Expectations--meaning that expectations are high and many technologies are already failing to meet those expectations. But this doesn't mean that AI is going to go away. It means that we're starting to push through the hype and figure out realistic applications for AI--some of which will be useful to accountants and many of which will be leveraged by the organizations we serve. Part of the challenge with an emerging technology is that there is often an unclear definition of what technology is, and what it is not.