Mark Cuban is betting on what he believes will be the next industry to watch: artificial intelligence and the security designed around it. "AI is going to be … as important to companies as cash flow is," Cuban said. "You have to be good at it or you won't be able to compete." After all, he did create the first high-definition satellite television network, AXS TV, and help launch one of the first internet radio stations, Broadcast.com. "Whenever anyone calls me an idiot, that's usually a first good step," he said during a moderated luncheon at ASIS International's 63rd annual Seminar and Exhibits, an event for security professionals.

Amazon has finally added its chatty personal assistant, Alexa, to its music app. The change isn't simply a feature update but an entirely new way of requesting music from your phone, Amazon said. Now people can ask for specific tracks or artists simply by shouting at their phone. But they can also ask for more complicated things: requesting that the phone play them an automatically generated playlist of "happy 80s pop songs", for instance – which the app will then create. Alexa is already well known for her appearance in Amazon's collection of Echo smart speakers, which can play music simply by shouting at them.

Imagine a future where complex decisions could be made faster and adapt over time. Where societal and industrial problems can be autonomously solved using learned experiences. It's a future where first responders using image-recognition applications can analyze streetlight camera images and quickly solve missing or abducted person reports. It's a future where stoplights automatically adjust their timing to sync with the flow of traffic, reducing gridlock and optimizing starts and stops. It's a future where robots are more autonomous and performance efficiency is dramatically increased.

I recently started looking into object detection for a project of mine and was wondering if am missing something to get stuff off the ground. I want to implement a real time object detection system on a raspberry pi 3 for surveillance of an open spaces for eg a garden. I have already tried a few available solutions. I don't need to detect many classes(only 3 person,dog, bicycle) so maybe the fastest option can be retrained with fewer filters and parameters thereby decreasing the total compute time. Installed default darknet tested YOLOv2 and YOLO runs on a raspberry pi3 each frames runs for approx 450 secs for each image.

The sixth season of the HBO program Game of Thrones begins April 24. And if you're a fan of the books on which the program is based, you're not quite sure what to expect. Author George R. R. Martin has not yet announced a release date for the sixth book in the series. Which means the television show is about to move ahead of the books, in terms of where the plot is heading. Fans of the book are preparing for spoiler alerts of epic proportions.

The portrait of artificial intelligence that the film industry paints features polished, albeit conflicted, protagonists. Films such as "The Terminator" and "Ex Machina" center around attractive, humanized robots who go off the rails and threaten their makers. In real life, however, AI is an integral part of our everyday lives that should be a little less intimidating. A joint survey between the MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group found that while 61 percent of executives believe that AI should be a high priority for their organizations, only half those leaders have put a strategy in place. And for the leaders who hesitate, there's a lot to lose -- 84 percent of the MIT/BCG survey respondents think AI comes with a competitive advantage, while 75 percent believe it yields new business.

Machine learning has quietly integrated itself into our daily lives, from queuing up recommendations on Netflix and Spotify for us, to helping companies make real-time customer service and marketing decisions, AI has radically altered how organizations work and how we interact. When the iPhone X debuts, it will rely on machine learning to power their Face ID technology. We know that it's an important topic, because "machine learning" is one of the most searched terms on our site. To help bring you up to speed, we've compiled our top five posts on the topic. Angelica Valentine walks readers through how machine learning has taken retail to the next level when it comes to personalization and pricing.

If you close your eyes for a moment, stop and think about a customer experience which stands out to you. Think about what makes you remember that particular engagement and what this means to you. Customer Experiences which stay with you – which leave you with an impression – positive or negative – almost always have one thing in common. These interactions occur across multiple channels – in person, online, in social forums, by phone. And these experiences have a direct correlation to our engagement, and spend with that company. American Express have quoted that customers who have a positive customer experience spend 74% more! Whilst McKinsey have reported that 70% of buying experiences are based on how an individual "perceives" they are being treated. This perception comes back to the simplicity and personalisation of the engagement – and again the emotional reaction of the experience. Personal, simple and emotionally connected experiences – piece of cake right…??

One of the most useful features across both Google Home and the Amazon Echo series is getting a daily news briefing. Asking both devices to tell you what's going on for your day can include a customized look at news that matters to you from a variety of sources. As of today, there's a new option for getting a news update from your smart speaker, and it comes from a somewhat surprising source: former vice president Joe Biden. "Biden's Briefing" is essentially a short daily podcast featuring news and info curated by Biden -- the content itself is sourced from a wide variety of news publications, including Axios, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, New York Review of Books, Politico, Slate, Vice and Wired. How exactly the format will work isn't quite clear -- it sounds like Biden will be "curating" the content, but what's unclear is if the program will just replay stories from its sources or if Biden will be offering his own take.

Fall of the House of Usher is a 12-minute animation based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, where each still is generated by artificial intelligence. This is done by using a neural net (pix2pix) trained on the artist's ink drawings made of stills from the 1929 version of the film. Each still shown in the animation is not merely a filter that is applied to an existing image, but an entirely new image by a neural net. As all the stills that it was given to learn from came from the first four minutes of the film, it can output this reasonably well. But as the animation progresses, it has less and less of a frame of reference to draw on, leading to uncanny moments where the information starts to break down, particularly at the end of the piece.