After decades of dystopian science fiction novels and movies where sentient machines end up turning on humanity, we can't help but worry as real world AI continues to improve at such a rapid rate. That's why Amazon, Facebook, Google's DeepMind division, IBM, and Microsoft have founded a new organization called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. Williams is encouraged that tech giants like Facebook and Google are even asking questions about ethics and bias in AI. Ideally, the group will help establish new standards for thinking about artificial intelligence, big data, and algorithms that can weed out harmful assumptions and biases.

Salakhutdinov researches very large neural networks used in a technology called deep learning, which lets a computer learn to perform a difficult task by consuming copious training examples. Speaking recently, Salakhutdinov said that there are three big areas where AI is progressing: giving computers better language understanding; enabling them to learn through repetition and positive reinforcement; and developing ways for machines to learn from unlabeled data. In recent years, competitors such as Google and Facebook have hired leading figures in deep learning to lead their AI efforts. Deep learning has gained prominence in recent years, after proving spectacularly good at enabling machines to recognize objects in images and spoken words in audio.

We think the next era will belong to "the conversational layer" -- both text- and voice-driven -- that will use chat, messaging, or natural language interfaces to interact with people, brands, services, and bots. This interaction will occur at the exact time the user demands a product or service, and in the exact terms she thinks of that product or service, in the language and communication methods she typically uses (intent, words, shortcuts, emojis, etc.). In order to reach user conversations today, brands will need to decide which platforms to target and build on. Many of the tools that are provided by the messaging and bot platform providers are from the open-source space, and companies can perform low-cost experiments with a reduced set of users to learn more about conversational interactions and use cases that yield the desired results.

As the tech world salivates over its game-changing potential, Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company plans to first use artificial intelligence for customer service rather than for something like trip-planning. Another plus on the side of business versus leisure travel is that business travelers aren't as focused on price, Walker said, adding they expect high-quality service. Gerstner stated that startups such as venture-backed Lola are trying to combine artificial intelligence, messaging and human travel agents but he predicted that a revival of the travel agent sector isn't in the offing. "When you start thinking about machine learning, Big Data, AI -- whatever you want to call it – … the advantage is to the largest player because they have all the data," Gerstner said.

Besides being a major player in the earthquake prediction method discussed here, the ionosphere is important because it's the layer of the atmosphere that reflects electromagnetic waves back to Earth and enables radio communication. There was increased ionization over Japan before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and a spike in radio wave emissions near Haiti before the 2010 quake there. Enough historical data linking ionospheric activity to earthquakes needs to be collected in order to generate patterns, and the patterns then need to be matched to real-time data. When the Tohoku earthquake hit, Tokyo residents received a one-minute warning via Japan's earthquake early warning system.

Three key guiding philosophies were presented across the reports: AI needs to augment humanity instead of replacing it, AI needs to be ethical, and there must be an equal opportunity for everyone to develop these systems. Human-machine collaboration in its many forms is major theme in the reports, titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence" and "National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan." "The walls between humans and AI systems are slowly beginning to erode, with AI systems augmenting and enhancing human capabilities," the Strategic Plan report says. The White House imagines virtual personal assistants housed in smart glasses, automated factories that assist humans in complex building tasks, and systems that provide better data for farmers, all in the context that these could be job creators and not job stealers.

These systems don't just require more information than humans to understand concepts or recognize features, they require hundreds of thousands times more, says Neil Lawrence, a professor of machine learning at the University of Sheffield and part of Amazon's AI team. Once they've been trained, they can be incredibly efficient at tasks like recognizing cats or playing Atari games, says Google DeepMind research scientist Raia Hadsell. A solution to this might be something called progressive neural networks -- this means connecting separate deep learning systems together so that they can pass on certain bits of information. One way of doing this is revisiting an old, unfashionable strand of artificial intelligence known as symbolic AI or Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), says Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London (and also the scientific advisor on Ex Machina).

In 1996 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted. The Accountability portion of the law requires that healthcare providers protect the privacy of patient health information and includes security measures that must be followed. Provider success has been mixed and has recently come under intense scrutiny due to the number and size of reportable breaches of health information.

Washington, D.C. - IBM, a pioneer in the advancement of artificial intelligence, today welcomed the release of a White House report on the future and promise of this exciting technology: "We commend the Administration, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in particular, for launching an open and inclusive dialogue that helped shape today's report. The document recognizes what IBM has believed all along, that artificial intelligence (AI), or cognitive computing systems like IBM Watson, will jump start economic opportunity and help solve some of humanity's biggest challenges. Embedding ethical training into computer science education, as the report recommends, is a positive way to prepare the next generation of technology experts to appropriately guide the advancement of AI systems. Cybersecurity is one area in particular where IBM agrees that AI can be a true game-changer, and one where we are actively preparing IBM Watson to make a real and tangible difference in the push to better defend America's digital networks.

The latest AI-powered upgrade for Google Photos brings four tricks. In a blog post today, we learned about four new features for the service, including the simplest one, which autodetects sideways pictures and prompts you to correct them. Two others dig into its talent for facial recognition, as it will detect people in your new photos, and offer to "rediscover old memories" of those same people in older pics, or, it can pop up a highlight reel showcasing the best pictures of a frequent subject.