Almost a third (32%) of consumers surveyed globally by PwC plan to buy an AI device including robots or automated assistants, with retailers watching closely as'voice commerce' develops in the home. The findings are published today in PwC's Global Consumer Insights survey, which assesses the shopping behaviour, habits and expectations of over 22,000 consumers in 27 countries. The study reports that 10% of respondents already own artificial intelligence (AI) devices, such as robots and automated personal assistants like Amazon Echo or Google Home, and 32% said they plan to buy one. Both consumer and retailer habits and offerings still need time to adapt however, to make the most of the new voice commerce channel. Interest in the devices is strongest amongst consumers in emerging economies including China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand.

This is a continuation of the three part series on machine learning for product managers. The first note focused on what problems are best suited for application of machine learning techniques. As I had mentioned in Part I, the core skill sets required of a PM do not change whether you work in a machine learning driven solution space or not. Product managers typically use five core skills -- customer empathy/design chops, communication, collaboration, business strategy and technical understanding. Working on ML will continue to leverage these skills.

Amazon's Alexa is becoming less hospitable to people who prefer to buy music instead of just signing up for a music subscription service such as Spotify. Until recently, Amazon Music Storage was the best way to stream your personal music collection onto Alexa devices--provided it was encoded as MP3 files. But in December, Amazon stopped supporting new uploads for the free service; it stopped accepting paid subscriptions a month later. In January 2019, Amazon will shut down Music Storage entirely, rendering your MP3 collection inaccessible on Echo devices unless you purchased the songs directly through Amazon's digital store. To play your own MP3s (or music encoded in other formats, such as FLAC) on the Echo or other Alexa devices, you can still use Plex or My Media Server for Alexa, both of which allow you to stream songs that you've stored on another device.

Humans must leave Earth in the next 200 years if we want to survive. That was the stark warning issued by Professor Stephen Hawking in the months before his death today at the age of 76. The legendary physicists believed that life on Earth could be quickly wiped out by a disaster, such as an asteroid strike, AI, over-population and climate change. He believed, if our species had any hope of survival, future generations would need to forge a new life in space. Humans must leave Earth within 200 years if we want to survive.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been widely used for processing sequential data. However, RNNs are commonly difficult to train due to the well-known gradient vanishing and exploding problems and hard to learn long-term patterns. Long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) were developed to address these problems, but the use of hyperbolic tangent and the sigmoid action functions results in gradient decay over layers. Consequently, construction of an efficiently trainable deep network is challenging. In addition, all the neurons in an RNN layer are entangled together and their behaviour is hard to interpret.

LONDON – Stephen Hawking, Britain's most famous scientist, who dedicated his life to unlocking the secrets of the universe, has died at age 76. His children, Lucy, Robert and Tim, said in a statement carried by Britain's Press Association news agency on Wednesday: "We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. "He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years." Born on Jan. 8, 1942 -- 300 years to the day after the death of the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei -- he believed science was his destiny. But fate also dealt Hawking a cruel hand. Crippled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which attacks the nerves controlling voluntary movement, he spent most of his life in a wheelchair. Hawking defied predictions that he would only live for a few years, overcoming the debilitating effects of ALS on his mobility and speech that left him paralyzed and able to communicate only via a computer speech synthesiser. "I am quite often asked: how do you feel about having ALS?" he once wrote. "The answer is, not a lot.

Aw come on now, if you're going to implement this in a database: use the database. Store the weights and biases in a table, and use JOIN and GROUP BY operations to form the dot products. If you reformulate the inputs as a design matrix, you can store the weights and biases for each layer in a single table. In addition to making your code readable, this has the added benefit that the update operation can be implemented as a literal update (i.e. on the weights table) as opposed to running a pass through the network to output new weights which then need to be passed in directly to a new select statement. The way the author implemented it, it would be extremely expensive just on the client's bandwidth to run either a forward or backwards pass on a large model since you'd need to pass all of the parameters over the connection twice for a single update. The database should store and manage all the parameters.

Making audiovisual/broadcasting content available in virtually any language – this is the goal of news.bridge, Since we already published a post on news.bridge To help you pick the right NLP ( natural language processing) tool for your tasks, we're also working on a benchmarking service. Last, but not least, there will be an editor to manually improve output -- because we all know that NLP hasn't reached perfection yet." The news.bridge consortium involves three other European partners (LETA, LIUM, Priberam) and is funded by Google's Digital News Initiative.

Is nothing safe from the reach of the machines? After replacing humans at repetitive tasks, beating them at games of skill, artificial intelligence is now making inroads into the arguably the last frontier: the creative arts. Ping An Technology, a subsidiary of China's second-largest life insurance company, has developed an award-winning computer algorithm that can generate original melodies after "studying" hundreds of pieces of piano music. But the company has no intention of stopping there. It is working towards using AI to create virtual singers and write original pop music based on individual tastes with a longer term goal of composing a symphony to potentially rival Beethoven. "Be it a Chinese version of break-up songs similar to Taylor Swift's style or a Shanghai accented voice that raps like Justin Bieber, with the upgrade of the AI music system we will be able to create whatever music you like as long as we know the genre and the type of singers you adore," said Xiao Jing, chief scientist of Ping An Technology.

After reading this research paper, I'd buy into an ICO for the IcoRating Coin for sure. But on a serious note, this is both well-timed and invaluable. While many people that invested around November (hopefully) learned their lesson on doing their own research and investigation into those same sources that your ML system analyzes (white paper, team member Linkden pages, Github repos, the website itself... etc), this is undoubtedly impressive work and should assist in analyzing the neverending onslaught of offerings going forward.