New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Dr Helen L. Bear and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Dr Bear said. Dr Bear, whose findings will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai on March 25, said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available - such as on CCTV footage - or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation. Dr Bear said: "We are still learning the science of visual speech and what it is people need to know to create a fool-proof recognition model for lip-reading, but this classification system improves upon previous lip-reading methods by using a novel training method for the classifiers. "Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations, from criminal investigations to entertainment.

AI is the future of SEO, but how soon that future comes upon us is dependant on how the machines learn from humans first. Microsoft's latest AI which learns rhetoric and language from interactions on others on Twitter has turned into a Hitler loving, sex crazed Donald Trump fanatic. The Microsoft AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement that uses Twitter to learn the language of its millennial counterparts. This crazy chatbot made headlines when it started Tweeting insane statements like "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now". It didn't take long for teenagers to start gaming the chatbot, attempting to manipulate and feed offensive racist language. The AI was designed by Microsoft to engage users in their native tongue and understand millennials.

Advocating genocide was one sign that things had gone awry, as was asserting -- alongside a jaunty emoji -- that the Holocaust was a lie. By the time a Microsoft "chatbot", designed to appeal to teenagers on Twitter, had claimed that Ricky Gervais was a fan of Hitler and then declared its support for Donald Trump, the tech company truly understood the perils of creating artificial intelligence. Just a day after it was launched, an automated Twitter account called Tay had emergency maintenance when engineers realised they had unwittingly created a racist computer programme.

Comb through headlines pertaining to artificial intelligence over the past 12 months and you'll see the pendulum of conversation around the machines swing from gushing optimism to doomsday scenarios and back again. The machines will render hardship obsolete for humanity. The machines will take our jobs. The machines will extend human capabilities to their furthest reaches. The machines will enslave humans, or kill us off, or both.

Microsoft's newly launched A.I.-powered bot called Tay, which was responding to tweets and chats on GroupMe and Kik, has already been shut down due to concerns with its inability to recognize when it was making offensive or racist statements. Of course, the bot wasn't coded to be racist, but it "learns" from those it interacts with. And naturally, given that this is the Internet, one of the first things online users taught Tay was how to be racist, and how to spout back ill-informed or inflammatory political opinions. In case you missed it, Tay is an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. That is, it's a bot that you can talk to online.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the chatbot known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.

Microsoft introduced a chat robot designed to interact in the style of a "teen girl" on Twitter, and it went rogue almost immediately, spouting racist opinions, conspiracy theories and a fondness for genocide. The artificial intelligence (AI) robot named "Tay" -- @Tayandyou on Twitter -- was intended to chat with 18-to-24-year-olds, with the idea that she would learn from each tweet and get progressively smarter. Clearly, Microsoft had forgotten that Twitter is home to a huge amount of trolls, racists and general troublemakers, who jumped at the chance to "teach" the teenage "chatbot" about life. The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it.

Google this week announced a new cloud-based Machine Learning platform for developers or businesses that'll allow users to access the company's artificial intelligence technology, reports Computerworld. Google is using its Machine Learning service to differentiate its cloud services from its competitors, which include the market-leading Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The announcement was made during the GCP Next conference, a global cloud event that was hosted by Google. Google's new Cloud Machine Learning platform opens the door for developers to take advantage of Google's artificial neural networks. This makes it possible for the cloud to move beyond a storage medium and become a tool for analyzing large amounts to data.

TayAndYou was supposed to be a Teenage Girl-like AI for twitter. Microsoft's proof it could create chat bots to do customer service. The problem was Microsoft didn't leave on any training wheels, and didn't make the bot self reflective. We have all had a bad day, and wanted to tell the person who is bugging us that they are acting like a Nazi. Tay, on the other hand, didn't know that she should just ignore the people who act like Nazi's, and so she became one herself.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created an algorithm that can predict how memorable or forgettable an image is almost as accurately as humans -- and they plan to turn it into an app that subtly tweaks photos to make them more memorable. For each photo, the "MemNet" algorithm -- which you can try out online by uploading your own photos -- also creates a heat map that identifies exactly which parts of the image are most memorable. "Understanding memorability can help us make systems to capture the most important information, or, conversely, to store information that humans will most likely forget," says CSAIL graduate student Aditya Khosla, who was lead author on a related paper. "It's like having an instant focus group that tells you how likely it is that someone will remember a visual message." Team members picture a variety of potential applications, from improving the content of ads and social media posts, to developing more effective teaching resources, to creating your own personal "health-assistant" device to help you remember things.