Prime time television viewers have undoubtedly noticed the slew of recent commercials featuring IBM's Watson computing platform in conversation with celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Carrie Fisher, Serena Williams, and Stephen King. These ads showcase continuing advances in Watson's speech capabilities and intelligence applied to various disciplines, which were initially exhibited in Watson's championship performance on the Jeopardy! The public and much of the press tend to think of such computing capabilities as "artificial intelligence" (a.k.a. AI), although that term can bring with it connotations of technology run amuck, à la HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator's Skynet, and many other popular depictions. Outside the realm of fiction, technology business leader Elon Musk has tweeted that AI is "potentially more dangerous than nukes," and physicist Stephen Hawking warned "development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

Michael Gartenberg has covered the personal technology beat for more than two decades at places like Gartner, Jupiter Research and Altimeter Group. Most recently, he spent a few years at Apple as Sr. Director of Worldwide Product Marketing. I'm afraid I can't do that – HAL 900 Apple is the new Blackberry is the latest twist on "Apple is DOOMED". Apple may be missing out on Artificial Intelligence and/or Machine Learning. Alexa, Facebooks "bots", and Google's new Assistant, clearly, there's a huge sea change that's happening, and Apple is going to be left out.

Google is launching a new project to see whether artificial intelligence can create art. In a talk at Moogfest, a US technology festival, Google researcher Douglas Eck described a project that would seek to understand whether or not a computer can create art. Magenta, which will launch in early June, is part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research. Eck said the project was in part inspired by DeepDream, an artificial intelligent system trained to find patterns in pictures. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," said Eck. "The question Magenta asks is, 'Can machines make music and art? If not, why not?'," he said.

Gravity, her forthcoming EP (due out May 27th on Universal Germany) and moody first single, explores a familiar theme: the push and pull of an irresistible lover. But this being a Simonne Jones' joint, that heartache is wrapped in a blanket of industrial beats and physics-based metaphor. "You've set me in motion / The stars are blurs around the sun / The push and pull, the force of your body / Closer you get, I'm overcome / Bound by attraction / Floating on axis / Around your atlas / You're holding me like gravity, all around." In less skilled hands, this scientific approach to lyrical matters of the heart could've come off as ham-handed, and run the risk of alienating listeners from the song's emotional content by shoehorning it within dense concepts. Yet, it succeeds, lending to the seductive timbre of Jones' soft voice, because this is how her mind works.

Google Home is an always-on speaker coming later this year. LOS ANGELES - We know that Big Brother has been watching our every move for years--but are you ready to have your home conversations monitored as well? Following on the footsteps of Amazon's smash Echo connected speaker, which reads the weather and news, plays music, and turns lights on and off, based on your voice instructions, Google is set to launch its rival product, Google Home, later this year. And this week reports surfaced saying Apple could be joining the fray with its own speaker featuring the Siri personal digital assistant from the iPhone. Which begs the question--how do you feel about buying a connected speaker for the kitchen that could listen to every word you're saying?

We live in a world of information abundance. The ability to create, produce, market and distribute content in almost any form has become very easy. So easy that a shocking amount of what we're reading is created not by humans, but by computer algorithms - perhaps even this post;). In the most recent post on strategy4telcomediatech I highlighted the need to consider the role that'bots' play particularly in automating conversational commerce - 'sales and service'. In this post I take a look at the use of'bots' or algorithmic content in digital media, how it is shaping our consumption habits, content creation and some of the capabilities required in both traditional and new media organisations. Algorithms and natural language generators have been around for a while.

Advanced Machine Learning in Imaging: The Zebra Approach Think about your busiest days – ones filled with dozens of images flying at you from referring physicians, as well as the emergency room. Wouldn't it be nice to take those images, feed them into a computer program, and have the program spit back a diagnosis within minutes? Your time savings would be significant, and you might even be able to catch clinically significant issues that you would otherwise overlook. The good news is that this capability largely exists and is currently available in a growing number of radiology areas. Making diagnosis easier via an automated engine is the founding principle behind Zebra Medical Vision, said Elad Benjamin, the company co-founder and chief executive officer.

Based on presale numbers, "Warcraft" is one of China's most anticipated films of all-time. But more importantly, it could give Hollywood another avenue to capitalize on a nearly 7 billion movie market that's growing at nearly 50 percent a year -- but has a select few preferences. Industry analyst Jonathan Papish of China Film Insider noted Universal Pictures' "Warcraft," based on the video game series from Activision Blizzard has reeled in 2 million in ticket presales for its midnight premiere 12 days before it happens, which is already the sixth-best ever. That doesn't necessarily mean "Warcraft" will be a long-tail hit in China like "Furious 7" or "Zootopia." After all, "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" also had strong China presales numbers but ended up being a major disappointment, dropping 80 percent in its second weekend amid reports of bored crowds playing on their phones.

The Jeopardy! Watson system in 2011 had three main abilities, as Schneider explained. First, it could understand unstructured text. "[Normally] we don't have to think about it, but we inherently understand what sentences are, and how verbs, nouns, etc. come together to produce text," Schneider said. Watson could read through human-generated content and parse it in a way that other systems haven't been able to do before. Next, Watson could come up with its own hypotheses, and then return the one with the highest confidence.

The amount of BS being shoveled by manufacturers and vendors is outrageous. If your tooling doesn't use fp64 and you need to use Cuda then Nvidia is the choice but the retail cards have been systematically crippled in favour of floating points the size if big into.