Computer scientists are not often invited to present their research at The Science of Consciousness annual conference, but University of California San Diego development engineer Stephen Deiss did just that. He spoke to the meeting in Tucson, AZ, in late April on the subject of "Romancing the Oxymoron: The'Hardware Problem' of Machine Consciousness." "I presented my view that our preconceptions – about causality and mechanisms – bias us against accepting the possibility that machines can be conscious," said Deiss (at left), who earned his M.S. in computer science at Purdue University. "It leaves us believing that there is something spooky and unnatural about our own awareness, but I argue that consciousness is fundamental and scale-free in nature." Supported by CSE since 2013, Deiss first worked with the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory of CSE Prof. Steven Swanson, but now splits his time between the Integrated Systems Neuroengineering Lab of Bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs, and the new Pattern Recognition Laboratory of the Qualcomm Institute (both with CSE support). "We are focused on neurally-inspired or otherwise non-von Neumann computing paradigms," said Deiss, referring to new architectures that, unlike most of today's computers, are not based on executing instructions sequentially.

This is largely due to the invaluable insights we gain through the analysis of thousands of calls received each day by the typical call centre. With speed being of the essence in making the right decision at the right time for each caller many call centres are turning to machine learning to automate their data analysis and make crucial customer experience decisions within seconds. Whether you're running an inbound or outbound contact centre, the interactions between your company representatives and your customers is a crucial area for customer success. Thanks to machine learning algorithms, businesses are able to manage those customer-facing moments more efficiently. According to techtarget.com, "Emotion analysis through text and speech analytics can paint a more complete picture when combined with the overall first call resolution (FCR) metric, indicating the level of confidence customers feel about whether the answer they received has resolved the issue at hand."

Through natural language understanding, we designed the app to feel like you are talking to a person next to you in the car. A simple hand gesture (a high five) wakes up the app to initiate voice-driven text exchange. To eliminate errors, the app reads your text back before sending. It automatically informs you of incoming texts, and you decide if you'd like to listen, respond or cancel without ever looking at or touching your phone. Depending on the streaming music app you use, you can also request specific artists, songs, playlists, or genres, and give commands like "pause" and "skip."

That said, current technology won't allow us to make anything larger than the printing machines themselves. Some smart people have suggested that we should look to nature to see how it builds things--specifically, spiders, and the way they can swarm together to build massive nests for themselves. Siemens, the German engineering and telecommunications company, has taken this concept to heart. A team of researchers at its Princeton, New Jersey, laboratory are creating autonomous spider-like robots that can work together to 3D-print structures on command. While Siemens isn't known for its robotics research, Livio Dalloro, the head of the company's "Product Design, Simulation & Modeling Research" group in Princeton, said in an interview that the company views the bots as a "moonshot."

The future is closer than we think, said Kevin Ho -- and it's not going to be terrifying at all, he claims. Life today would be unimaginable for people from a few decades or a few centuries ago, explained Ho, President of Huawei's handset line, speaking Wednesday morning at the CES Asia 2016 event in Shanghai, China. Just imagine trying to explain ships and trains and even airplanes, all of which would have been terrifying to someone from 10,000 years ago. Then imagine bringing that same person to the modern world. "What if coming to today's society, somebody showed you a black box -- a smartphone -- with video phone functionality? What would people from ancient society think knowing that we can fly?" he asked the crowd.

As someone who recently bought--and was quickly enchanted by--Amazon's Echo connected speaker, I've been thinking of ways to get its Alexa virtual assistant into more rooms of the house. Of course, I could just buy another Echo speaker, or some other Alexa-infused device such as the Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, or Invoxia's Triby. But what if I could just use my smartphone to access Alexa instead? Or better yet, what if I could repurpose an old smartphone to act like an Echo full-time? Such is the promise of a couple new smartphone apps that have Amazon's Alexa assistant built-in.

The catalyst builds on last year's demonstration which was awarded'Most Significant Contributor to a Catalyst Program of New Technology Solutions'. It will be showcasing the ability to dynamically adjust virtualized network functions in real time and monitor them constantly to maximize both technical performance, resource utilization and, critically, business profitability. Achieving this enables the service provider to continually achieve a network that is truly optimized, not only technically but also against business criteria. Dr Jay Perrett, CTO of Aria Networks comments: "The end goal for service providers is a highly-automated business, based on intelligent consideration of all the factors that can affect profitability, from moment to moment. SDN and NFV add to the range of options that service providers have, which means more complex decisions to make. That's the sort of problem that only AI can solve."

When Robyn Exton first launched her dating and social networking app for lesbians and bisexual women, a lack of cash for advertising meant she'd go to nightclubs armed with bottles of spirits. "In the early days I'd go to nightclubs with a bottle of sambuca in one hand, and tequila in the other, and encourage girls to download the app in return for a shot," says the 29-year-old. Then at UK lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) festivals Manchester and Brighton Pride, she targeted women by standing outside the portable toilets handing out toilet paper with flyers promoting the app. This was back in 2013, and Ms Exton's low cost, but innovative, approach to marketing soon saw user numbers rise steadily, then further gaining traction thanks to positive word of mouth. Founded in London, but with its headquarters moving to San Francisco last year in order to be closer to US investors, and to be in the thick of the burgeoning social network scene, the Her app now has more than one million female users around the world.

Qualcomm has been talking about their deep learning machine intelligence platform, Zeroth, for a number of months now. When the company first started talking about including the technology into System-on-Chips, this might have meant that the Snapdragon 820 was going to include a Qualcomm Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, as part of the hardware. Instead, Qualcomm included the Zeroth software on the device rather than a core. Over the weekend, Qualcomm has announced that they are releasing the Zeroth SDK so that developers can start to utilize this specialist software on the device rather than relying on cloud computing to process this data. Neural processing has been used for a number of years now.

The article goes on, "Qualcomm Technologies, with the introduction of the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine, is the first mobile SOC provider to offer a deep learning toolkit optimized for mobile. This SDK will allow OEMs to run their own neural network models on Snapdragon 820 devices such as smart phones, security cameras, automobiles and drones, all without a connection to the cloud. Common deep learning user experiences that can be realized with the SDK are scene detection, text recognition, object tracking and avoidance, gesturing, face recognition and natural language processing. The Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform is a Snapdragon-optimized software platform designed for mobile machine learning. Zeroth technology currently drives visual intelligence software such as Snapdragon Scene Detect and advanced malware detection software found in Snapdragon Smart Protect."