About 17,000 people attended this week's IBM World of Watson conference. Many of them were trying to figure out what exactly to do with the cognitive computing engine. After an initial Watson-specific conference drew just over 1,000 people to Brooklyn, N.Y., in May 2015, IBM this year combined that event into its much larger IBM Insight analytics conference and changed the name to World of Watson. But the growing interest shown in Watson by attendees is a testament to how hot all things related to artificial intelligence are right now. At the same time, many businesses are just starting to think about how they can use cognitive applications like Watson.

Companies worldwide will spend $3.5 trillion on IT in 2017, market research firm Gartner predicts. Above all else, companies are expected to increase their spending on software and services (as opposed to hardware), as they all rush to buy their tech via the cloud computing model, where tech is hosted in the vendor's data center and delivered as a service over the internet. Software spending is projected to be up 6 percent in 2016, and to grow another 7.2 percent in 2017 to a total of $357 billion. Meanwhile, companies will spend $943 billion on IT services, up nearly 5% over 2016 spending levels. All this means that there are billions of dollars at stake for the rising tech trends, things that emerged within that last few years are ready to take off and become mainstream next year.

Messaging platforms are coming of the age, and Chatbots are all the new trend now. They are touted as the next version of apps, like a huge change in the communication industry. Since Facebook has expanded access to its Messenger service, giving businesses the ability to reach customers better through different APIs, "Chatbots" has become the buzzword these days. Many questions are arising about Chatbots: What actually the Chatbots are? Are Chatbots a big opportunity for businesses?

The study was a success: the first two AIs learnt how to communicate securely from scratch. P input plaintext, K shared key, C encrypted text, and PEve and PBob are the computed plaintext outputs.The Google Brain team (which is based out in Mountain View and is separate from in London) started with three fairly vanilla neural networks called Alice, Bob, and Eve. Each neural network was given a very specific goal: Alice had to send a secure message to Bob; Bob had to try and decrypt the message; and Eve had to try and eavesdrop on the message and try to decrypt it. Alice and Bob have one advantage over Eve: they start with a shared secret key (i.e. this is symmetric encryption). Importantly, the AIs were not told how to encrypt stuff, or what crypto techniques to use: they were just given a loss function (a failure condition), and then they got on with it.

Researchers from the Google Brain deep learning project have already taught AI systems to make trippy works of art, but now they're moving on to something potentially darker: AI-generated, human-independent encryption. According to a new research paper, Googlers Martín Abadi and David G. Andersen have willingly allowed three test subjects -- neural networks named Alice, Bob and Eve -- to pass each other notes using an encryption method they created themselves. As the New Scientist reports, Abadi and Andersen assigned each AI a task: Alice had to send a secret message that only Bob could read, while Eve would try to figure out how to eavesdrop and decode the message herself. The experiment started with a plain-text message that Alice converted into unreadable gibberish, which Bob could decode using cipher key. At first, Alice and Bob were apparently bad at hiding their secrets, but over the course of 15,000 attempts Alice worked out her own encryption strategy and Bob simultaneously figured out how to decrypt it.

Artificial Intelligence News: Google Brain AI Can Create, Decode And Hide Its Own Encryption Only ... MIT's'Nightmare Machine' uses AI to give your photos a horrifying Halloween makeover Apple's touch-enabled MacBook Pro, tough Q4 results, 'Apple Car' China's Best Robots, Artificially Intelligent (AI) Assistants Can Understand How People Think Is Google AI's Encryption Better Than Human Encryption? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

Entering the hardware business is nothing unusual for an Internet giant like Google. But in launching its Pixel phone last week, Google GOOG is setting itself up to compete with its own direct customers. Unlike its previous Nexus smartphones, where most manufacturing and marketing is carried out by third parties--including Huawei, LG, and ASUS--the Pixel phone is completely Google's own creation. From design to development to branding to marketing, Google is behind it all. But what's peculiar is its determined pursuit in this less-profitable, asset-intensive side of business. Several studies, business academics, and consultants have shown the limits of asset builders, or companies that accumulate physical assets in order to market and distribute physical products.

MIT's'Nightmare Machine' uses AI to give your photos a horrifying Halloween makeover Apple's touch-enabled MacBook Pro, tough Q4 results, 'Apple Car' Is Google AI's Encryption Better Than Human Encryption? Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

On 26 October 2016, UBS held its second UBS Future of Finance Forum, this time in Zurich. The conference saw leaders and experts from the financial industry, fintechs, academia and regulators come together to discuss the future of Intelligent Automation and start to build a common understanding of what a successful approach would look like. We discussed evolving client preferences, what constitutes a'good' intelligent agent and how AI will impact our business. We sounded the drivers for automation and attempted to set its ethical boundaries, investigate the optimal human / co-bot collaboration, control risks and manage the new workforce. We debated sensible requirements from regulator and bank perspective and how to identify and manage liability.

I'm Evan, co-founder and CTO of Fuzzy.ai. Our team is very excited to be opening our doors for new registration today. These rules are optimized over time due to feedback from production use. We've applied this technique to a number of interesting business cases -- fraud detection, recommendations, content optimization, and dynamic pricing. Our Web-based developer environment makes it easy to design an agent quickly, and our SDKs for different programming languages make integrating with our REST API pretty painless.