WHEN the first printed books with illustrations started to appear in the 1470s in the German city of Augsburg, wood engravers rose up in protest. Worried about their jobs, they literally stopped the presses. In fact, their skills turned out to be in higher demand than before: somebody had to illustrate the growing number of books. Fears about the impact of technology on jobs have resurfaced periodically ever since. The latest bout of anxiety concerns the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI).

No matter how many Amazon Echo commercials you see, it takes a little time to adjust to Alexa. Putting a virtual assistant in your home signals a change in lifestyle, sort of like adopting a puppy. There will be a lot of trial-and-error, but once you find your rhythm, you'll forget what life was like without her. The Amazon Echo listens for the wake word, "Alexa." But, frankly, I was shocked by how many conversations were recorded by my Echo that did not include the wake word. Click here to learn how to listen to everything Amazon Echo has ever heard.

"We should study Science Fiction in order to understand what someday could become Science Fact." This is the time of year when everyone makes his or her predictions for 2018. I have my predictions as well, but wanted to do something a bit more fun. So I thought I'd look backwards to the state of technology 50 years ago to gain some insights that we can use to make projections about 2018. That is, what "predictions" made in the 1950's might tell us about 2018.

If we use word embedding in our seq2seq model, why don't we just use the distance between 2 vectors as a loss function instead of softmax cross entropy?

For this episode, I have created another chatbot that is aimed at helping factory workers to intervene on machines whenever they encounter operating problems. This factory comes with a specific jargon and workers are surrounded by permanent noise which can obfuscate worker statements when they give vocal orders. We'll tackle these constraints by leveraging the Custom Speech service with the bot framework. We'll also see how Custom Speech differs from Speech Priming that I talked about in episode 8. If you're not yet familiar with the bot framework and the cognitive services in general, I strongly advise you to watch my other episodes as I will only focus on Custom Speech and I will not explain things I have already explained in the previous episodes.

Has any work been do on neural networks that can generate their own labels? The thought would be, humans can improve at games like chess without being told explicitly what good moves are. Someone can play lots of games and start to lable certain ideas as good or bad. Maybe they notice that having center control leads to more wins, and moving the same price many times leads to losses. With this in mind I am wondering if this type of idea has implemented before, learning off of only wins and losses.

Data science is a multidisciplinary practice that involves computer programming, advanced mathematics, artificial intelligence, data visualization, database administration, data warehousing, and business intelligence. If you're an expert in only one or two of these subjects, it's a good time to expand your …

The main technique behind recent advances in AI hardly lives up to the name "artificial intelligence". There is little intelligent about it: machine learning is a brute force exercise in big data analysis, looking for hidden patterns that have predictive value.

Facebook artificial intelligence researchers have come up with a novel way to make cartoonish avatars look like they're really playing musical instruments. The work could lead to fascinating augmented reality or virtual reality experiences in the future. In a new paper, Facebook research scientists Eli Shlizerman and Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and collaborators Lucio Dery and Hayden Schoen talk about how they trained AI systems using YouTube videos of piano and violin recitals. They then used the trained systems to make avatars move their hands and fingers with fake instruments based solely on audio recordings, with the help of Apple's ARKit AR software for developers. Teaching machines to understand how people move is an active area of AI research and one that has been explored by researchers at other technology companies, including Google and Microsoft.