Other projects include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Reporting to the Head of Technology, as a Tech Lead you will be responsible for initiating and driving quality and efficiency improvements in their existing agile process.

Local arts group Therefore already incorporates elements of theater, performance art and music into their work. Now creative director Dean Terry is adding artificial intelligence to the mix. For their latest show, the group will have scripted live interactions with home assistants such as Amazon's Alexa.

On this week's Tech Tent we hear why China's determination to be a leading player in artificial intelligence could lead to tensions with the United States. We have two other reports on this week's programme.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have entered the spotlight more and more in recent years, as major tech companies have each made innovating around AI a focus.

Machines are beginning to outperform humans at highly-specific tasks that often take humans years to master.

A lot of press about artificial intelligence (AI) focuses on its scary side. Many paint the vision of robots, smart houses (think back to the 1999 Disney movie "Smart House" of a cyborg maid that takes over) and artificial beings crafting our experiences. This fear is not all hype, as Microsoft's AI-powered …

November 15, 2017 Written by: Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D As a huge Star Wars fan, I have always wanted to have a set of supernatural powers, such as the ability to sense impending attacks; influence the thoughts of others, known as the "Jedi mind trick;" and even see the future. In essence, the Force – meaning the wisdom, expertise and ability to know exactly what will happen next and what I should do in the moment. Of course, there is only one problem with all this--our current reality. Wilson predicted, the world will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time and think critically about it to make important choices wisely. And, that is exactly what IBM Watson is doing today.

The Boston public access station WGBH has partnered with PBS for another short series in its long-running Nova family of programs. Nova Wonder will follow three researchers exploring big scientific mysteries. Each episode tackles a different complex question: Do animals have a secret language? Which AI technologies could surpass human abilities? How ethical is it to grow life in a lab?

We present MILABOT: a deep reinforcement learning chatbot developed by the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) for the Amazon Alexa Prize competition. MILABOT is capable of conversing with humans on popular small talk topics through both speech and text. The system consists of an ensemble of natural language generation and retrieval models, including neural network and template-based models. By applying reinforcement learning to crowdsourced data and real-world user interactions, the system has been trained to select an appropriate response from the models in its ensemble. The system has been evaluated through A/B testing with real-world users, where it performed significantly better than other systems. The results highlight the potential of coupling ensemble systems with deep reinforcement learning as a fruitful path for developing real-world, open-domain conversational agents.