Microsoft has quietly announced a few early partners that plan to bring their Windows 10 apps to the Xbox One. In a press release from its 2016 Build developers conference, Microsoft mentioned that Nickelodeon, Dailymotion, NASCAR, and Hulu will launch Xbox versions of their Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps later this year. All four partners already offer apps in the Windows Store, and all but Nickelodeon have upgraded to universal Windows 10 apps, which is supposed to make for an easy transition to Xbox. While Hulu already offers a native app for the Xbox One, the Windows 10 version is more powerful, with support for playing videos through "Hey Cortana" voice commands. A similar feature seems likely for the Xbox One when Cortana heads to the console as part of this summer's "Anniversary Update."

As other people pointed out, PCFGs can express all probabilistic pushdown automata, while HMMs can express all probabilistic finite state automata. So there are things which PCFGs can model (like recursion) which HMMs can't. On the other hand it's pretty difficult to induce PCFGs from data with EM, as the latent variable space is really huge, while for HMMs this is easy. You can think of a PCFG as a hierarchical HMM in the following way. To generate observations from an HMM you start from the initial state and use the transition probabilities to sample the next state, and then use the state's emission probability to sample a symbol, until the next state sampled is the end of sequence state.

Want to inject some color to your photographs in a hurry? Well, new software can take an alarmingly good guess at what a color version of your black-and-white photographs may look like. Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new computer vision system that takes a grayscale image and then adds color to it in a way that looks convincing to humans. That careful description is important: It doesn't necessarily choose the right colors, merely ones that look plausible. It uses what's known as a convolutional neural network to perform its party trick, having been trained on a set of over a million color images.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labors of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than 50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programed verbal commands spoken into a microphone. "I figured I should just do it when the timing is right and realize my dream. If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," said Ma, who had to learn about fields completely new to him before he could build the complex gadget.

Lucasfilm screencapWho knew Han was so self-conscious? One of IBM Watson's many talents is analyzing personality traits by looking at written text. The supercomputer assesses traits based on the popular Big Five test, which rates subjects for extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It can also identify different tones such as fear, joy, confidence, and openness. These skills have been used to do everything from assist customer service agents in analyzing how their phone calls went to providing dating tips. We tested out Watson last week on the "Harry Potter" universe and were wowed by its conclusions.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple 40 years ago. On Friday, Apple reaches a major milestone in its history, celebrating 40 years since it was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It was a long road to becoming one of the world's biggest tech names, nearly reaching the edge of a financial collapse before Jobs returned to save the company and launch arguably its most important products. On Apple's 40th birthday, we look back at the 40 biggest moments in company history: While hanging out together as part of the Homebrew Computer Club, the two friends formed Apple from Jobs' garage. "We first met during my college years, while he was in high school," Wozniak said in a 2007 interview with ABC News.

When Tesla CEO, Elon Musk was asked about artificial intelligence, he said it was like'summoning a demon' who shouldn't be called unless you can control it. Yes, this is the founder of the same company whose cars are pushing new limits of technology every day. When Stephen Hawking was asked this same question by BBC, he cautioned the public by saying that any further advancement to artificial intelligence could be a fatal mistake. In another interview, he mentioned that AI has the power to re-design itself and take off on its own whereas humans have slow biological evolution, and they wouldn't be able to compete. Bill Gates, too, expressed his concern about this topic during a Reddit Ask me Anything session.

The machine overlords of the future may now, if it pleases them, eliminate all black and white imagery from the history of their meat-based former masters. All they'll need is this system from Berkeley computer scientist Richard Zhang, which allows a soulless silicon sentience to "hallucinate" colors into any monochrome image. It uses what's called a convolutional neural network (several, actually) -- a type of computer vision system that mimics low-level visual systems in our own brains in order to perceive patterns and categorize objects. Google's DeepDream is probably the most well-known example of one. Trained by examining millions of images of-- well, just about everything, Zhang's system of CNNs recognizes things in black and white photos and colors them the way it thinks they ought to be.

Imagine a future where life's most boring or dangerous tasks are handled by machines. Time otherwise spent commuting, scheduling appointments, sifting through mail, could be devoted to human passions instead. That's the best-case scenario for noted computer scientist Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also known as "AI2," founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. "An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them," he explains on a new episode of GeekWire's radio show. "Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or where human creativity still shines, in science. They're engaged in those activities because of the interaction. Another one would be, of course, interaction between people and not because they need to make a buck."

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be traced back to John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956 to define the concept of computers working as a human mind. Today, the scientists and tech-pundits define AI to be more creative than a human mind, something that can surpass and learn from the data gathered. Data Science can be defined as the part of AI, which analyses the data gathered with ever changing algorithms and has the capability to transform a program into self learning. Here are a few startups transforming the way people perceive AI and most of all, helping people and businesses transform by automating work. Jukedeck is based on state-of-the-art tech, brings artificial intelligence to music composition.