A year into the competition, the Korbell team won the first Progress Prize with an 8.43% improvement. They reported more than 2000 hours of work in order to come up with the final combination of 107 algorithms that gave them this prize. And, they gave us the source code. We looked at the two underlying algorithms with the best performance in the ensemble: Matrix Factorization (which the community generally called SVD,Singular Value Decomposition) and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). SVD by itself provided a 0.8914 RMSE, while RBM alone provided a competitive but slightly worse 0.8990 RMSE.

Twitter thrives on its ability to understand both your tweets and the hot topic of the day, and it needs every bit of help it can get -- including from computers. Accordingly, the social network just snapped up Whetlab, a startup that makes it easier to implement machine learning (aka a form of artificial intelligence). The two companies are shy about what the acquisition means besides an improvement to Twitter's "internal machine learning efforts." However, the likely focus is on highlighting the content that's most relevant to you based on your activity and who you follow, as well as hiding abusive tweets before you have to reach for the "block" option. Whetlab's technology could get the ball rolling on these robotic discovery techniques much faster than before, and give you a custom-tailored Twitter experience that requires little effort on your part.

Since 2008, Black Duck has done an annual review of the world of open source to recognise top new projects launched during the previous year. The selection committee is made up of members of our Product Management and Product Marketing teams with data analysis help from the team that manages Black Duck's OpenHub.net Our goal is to leverage Black Duck's unique insight, as a company that has amassed a KnowledgeBase of nearly a million and a half open source projects, to shed light on projects that might not otherwise be on the radar of mainstream tech media. The 2015 Black Duck Open Source Software "Rookies of the Year" were announced in early March 2016 and marks the eighth year of the awards. Much has changed in open source since our first awards in 2008.

Developing AI programs to master board games drove progress in the field -- including advances in techniques for search algorithms and evaluation functions. However, research in such "clean" game domains did not really address most real-life tasks that have a "messy" nature. Real-world tasks typically pose additional challenges, such as ambiguous, hidden or missing data, and "non-stationarity," meaning that the task can change unexpectedly over time. IBM is now turning our attention to solving these real-world challenges. IBM Research scientists Murray Campbell, Gerry Tesauro, and Eric Brown discuss "Extending Game-Based AI Research into the Wild."

Tech and the elderly are often thought of as being incompatible. Everyone has spent painful hours teaching their grandmother how to text, and entire days have been dedicated to setting up a computer for an elderly person. But tech can actually help the elderly in numerous ways. From smart homes to wireless trackers, tech for the elderly can increase independence, alleviate the concerns of carers and relatives, and generally make life a whole lot easier. The elderly tech market should not be underestimated: the proportion of Britons aged 85 and over is expected to double from 2.5% to 5% within 20 years.

Umbo CV has raised a 2.8 million seed round for its security cameras, which use artificial intelligence to identify suspicious activity and prevent crimes before they happen. The Taipei- and San Francisco-based startup's funding was led by AppWorks Ventures, with participation from Mesh Ventures, Wistron Corporation, and Phison Electronics. The two-year-old startup has already shipped its system--including cameras and a cloud-based management platform--to clients in Dubai, the United States, and Europe, and will begin mass manufacturing next month. Co-founder and chief executive officer Shawn Guan says Umbo CV has also received 1.4 million in pre-orders and letters of intent from other customers. Its funding will be used for research and hiring.

A team of researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) led by Li-Shiuan Peh has come up with a new infrared depth-sensing system. The new system, which works outdoors as well as in, was built by attaching a US 10 laser to a smartphone, with MIT saying the inexpensive approach could be used to convert conventional personal vehicles, such as wheelchairs and golf carts, into autonomous ones. Inexpensive rangefinding devices, such as the Microsoft Kinect, have been a great help to robotics engineers. Using the off-the-shelf product that relies on an infrared laser to measure distance, they allow for rapid prototyping and the ability to create robots that can sense and navigate in their environments without having to constantly reinvent the necessary technology. Unfortunately, Kinect and similar infrared-based systems tend to be a bit fussy when it comes to ambient light conditions.

Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup. He had just turned 40. His father was ill, his back was sore, and he found himself overwhelmed by life. "Don't laugh at me," he said, "but I was counting on the singularity." My friend worked in technology; he'd seen the changes that faster microprocessors and networks had wrought. It wasn't that much of a step for him to believe that before he was beset by middle age, the intelligence of machines would exceed that of humans--a moment that futurists call the singularity.

An amputee has said he has paid nearly 10,000 on a prosthetic limb because he was not told he could have been entitled to a similar one on the NHS. Ivor Sault, 69, from Devizes, Wiltshire, found a leg provided by the NHS was painful so decided to pay privately for a different type. Mr Sault has since discovered he could have got the replacement on the NHS. The NHS said a request for an alternative could have been considered if it had been aware he was unhappy. Mr Sault, who lost his leg in motorbike accident over 50 years ago, said a previous prosthetic limb, which he was happy with, wore out.

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 10, 2016 -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced a new version ofHPE IDOL. This latest offering applies data analytics and machine learning for organizations to automate and supplement a vast array of manual-based tasks such as trend analysis and video surveillance. HPE IDOL 11 combines context-based analytics and visualization capabilities to empower knowledge workers and help companies take a data-driven approach to their processes, operations, and customer interactions. "Companies across the globe are embracing the power of analytics in everything they do," said Fernando Lucini (@fernandolucini), CTO, Big Data, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "Traditional databases were never designed to analyze human information and often lack the key capabilities necessary to effectively and reliably understand unstructured data. With the addition of next generation artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning based capabilities we now enable organizations to harness 100% of their data."