The company unveiled some of those latest capabilities yesterday during an event in San Francisco. They include a preview version of Insights, a new service that automatically identifies trends and patterns in Excel spreadsheets, along with new intelligent search features for Bing. Yesterday, Microsoft also announced a partnership with the news aggregation and social media site Reddit that will provide Bing searches with relevant results from Reddit conversations and communities. Those results will include content from Reddit's AMA, for "Ask Me Anything," conversations with well-known figures from a wide variety of industries and walks of life. All the AI-powered enhancements Microsoft has been rolling out recently are aimed at providing users with "richer, more useful information," the company said.

Would you pay extra for Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube? That's how they do it in England, reports Jefferson Graham. Could that happen here too, in the wake of the relaxed FCC Net Neutrality rules? LOS ANGELES -- Like turning on lights and making phone calls, we consider it a right that we can watch free entertainment on YouTube, post travel photos on Facebook and listen to online music. After all, we treat Internet providers another utility, just like the electric or phone company, with our monthly service fees.

You could be forgiven for wondering why AI is so big all of a sudden. Hasn't humankind been dreaming about human-like robots for a long time? The first Star Wars film (with crowd-pleasing'droids' R2D2, C-3PO) was released in 1977; Terminator (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg assassin) was a massive success in the mid -1980s, a few years after Blade Runner (starring synthetic – or not? The idea of an intelligent machine is not exactly a new one, yet our ability to create something with Artificial Intelligence has increased dramatically in the last decade or so. There is now scope to use AI to make legal assessments, create games, predict purchases, navigate through traffic, translate words into different languages and diagnose diseases.

Instead of hiring a larger team, Hearst Newspapers is solving the problem with Google Cloud AI. Using Google Cloud Natural Language API to enable content classification with powerful machine learning models in an easy-to-use REST API, Hearst Newspapers can understand what its content is about, regardless of how it is structured and presented on the company's many websites. Although Hearst Newspapers previously used a legacy system that attempted to automate the classification process, it was not as fast or as accurate. "Google Cloud Natural Language API is unmatched in its accuracy for content classification," says Naveed Ahmad, Senior Director of Data at Hearst Newspapers, who is responsible for data centralization and business intelligence using Google Cloud Platform. At Hearst Newspapers, we publish several thousand articles a day across more than 30 properties.

Robin van Ittersum, CTO – AI CompanyBangalore: Technology alone is rarely enough to unlock sustainable business growth. When a new technology is combined with a'new ways of doing business,' true value is created, says Robin van Ittersum, CTO – AI Company. "Through our work and research, we have identified four emerging trends in artificial intelligence for 2018. Executives should learn to shape the outcome rather than just react to it," adds Ittersum. In 2018, more SME businesses will learn how to use their solutions and full service platforms. They have managed to optimize Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing in such a way that it will most likely outperform any other (smaller) player in this field.

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966[1] at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.[2] Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, Eliza simulated conversation by using a'pattern matching' and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events.[3] Directives on how to interact were provided by'scripts', written originally in MAD-Slip, which allowed ELIZA to process user inputs and engage in discourse following the rules and directions of the script. The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs. As such, ELIZA was one of the first chatterbots, but was also regarded as one of the first programs capable of passing the Turing Test.[clarification needed] ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum regarded the program as a method to show the superficiality of communication between man and machine, but was surprised by the number of individuals who attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, including Weizenbaum's secretary.[2] Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those suffering from psychological issues and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment.[2][4]

But that job is suddenly looking iffy as A.I. gets better at reading scans. A start-up called Arterys, to cite just one example, already has a program that can perform a magnetic-resonance imaging analysis of blood flow through a heart in just 15 seconds, compared with the 45 minutes required by humans. Maybe she wants to be a surgeon, but that job may not be safe, either. Robots already assist surgeons in removing damaged organs and cancerous tissue, according to Scientific American. Last year, a prototype robotic surgeon called STAR (Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot) outperformed human surgeons in a test in which both had to repair the severed intestine of a live pig.

Microsoft today announced a partnership with Reddit to surface the social news site's content high up in Bing search results, so that searching for specific Reddit communities, pages, and info will spit back information gleaned from subreddits, AMAs, and other threads in a dedicated section. The news, part of a suite of new artificial intelligence-powered features underlying Bing's search function, works by way of what Microsoft calls intelligent search. The company says intelligent search uses natural language processing to pair Reddit content with the appropriate search terms. The Reddit integration works in three ways. First, by typing in the name of a subreddit on Bing, you'll get a live snapchat of that subreddit's top threads displayed in the search results with links to the individual pages. Bing will also include Reddit AMA questions and answers for a celebrity who's done an AMA, with the content showing up on the person's search card, which will be accessible just by searching that person's name.

In every federal agency, critical insights are hidden within the massive data sets collected over the years. But because of a shortage of data scientists in the federal government, extracting value from this data is time consuming, if it happens at all.

The Optimizing Government Project brings together scholars and researchers to discuss the use of machine learning by government. In recent years, the private sector has succeeded in finding many ways to leverage machine learning--a type of artificial intelligence that enables computers to "learn and adapt through experience." Well-known private sector applications of machine learning include Google's self-driving car project, online recommendations personalized for customers on websites like Amazon and Netflix, and fraud detection by credit card companies. But as the private sector embraces machine learning in new ways, the application of machine learning by government agencies has only started to take root. The use of artificial intelligence by government, though, raises important questions for a democratic society--about fairness, equality, transparency, and accountability.