LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.--International Business Machines Corp.'s Watson artificial-intelligence technology is on track to be used in some form by a billion people by the end of next year, Chief Executive Virginia Rometty said Wednesday. Ms. Rometty, speaking at The Wall Street Journal's WSJDLive 2016 technology conference, pointed to the company's new deal with General Motors Co. to pair Watson with GM's OnStar system in cars as an example of how IBM is extending Watson's reach. She said such partnerships will have put...

Deep Learning is becoming the next big area for companies and universities to explore. Deep Learning libraries are growing and their adoption is expanding. With Google's open sourcing of TensorFlow, there is a massive rise in deep learning adoption. I have started using it for it's very interesting Image Recognition capabilities which can be used out of the box with their ImageRecognition example. Google has released a new TensorFlow library - Image Recognition, Slim. TF-Slim is a lightweight library for defining, training and evaluating complex models in TensorFlow, which should speed up adoption and ease of use.

Almost a quarter century ago, a book was written about how organizations would focus on share of customer as opposed to share of market, building a personalized collaboration driven by big data. With advanced analytics, banking may finally getting close to realizing this vision. In 1993, a then revolutionary book, "The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time" was published, proposing the idea that as technology makes it affordable to track individual customers, marketing shifts from finding customers for products to finding products for customers. According to the authors, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., a company could use technology to gather information about, and to communicate directly with, individuals to form a commercial bond. The book became a bestseller, and was on every marketer's bookshelf … almost a quarter century ago.

Artificial intelligence and robots aren't coming for your job anytime soon, the U.S. White House's chief economic adviser says. Some technology experts worry about the economic impact of A.I.-powered computers and robots, but Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, predicts that A.I. will grow the economy instead of taking jobs away. While some jobs may disappear, A.I. will create new jobs and consumer demand for new products and services, he said Wednesday at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in Washington, D.C. While technology critics believe "the robots are going to take all our jobs away from us," A.I. won't change the basic rules of economics, Furman said. A.I. will create some economic challenges, just as other technologies have, he said.

It took less than 5 mins for me to activate and transfer money from my China Merchant's Bank account to a friend. Using facial recognition, the smartphone app directed me to tilt my head, blink my eyes and hold my face still to authenticate the transfer. Facial recognition is gaining traction at a startling pace in China. Real-world applications already range from verifying Uber drivers to identifying people seeking to withdraw cash from an ATM without a debt card. Chinese startups in this space have attracted serious funding: Face was most recently valued at $1B.

Is there a next phase for cloud computing? During the past few years, cloud computing has become a mainstream element of modern software solutions just as common as websites or databases. The cloud computing market is a race vastly dominated by four companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM with a few other platforms with traction in specific regional markets such as AliCloud in China. In such a consolidated market, it's hard to imagine a technology being disruptive enough to alter the existing dynamics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the type of technology with the potential to not only improve the existing cloud platform incumbents but also power a new generation of cloud computing technologies.

Austria based ANYLINE, the leading OCR Optical Character Recognition) technology provider for mobile devices, is solely focused on fast and accurate text recognition. Whether reading text across a room, a license plate on a car, or a gas meter in a manufacturing plant, the ANYLINE technology is able to deliver a fast and robust alternative to inputting data via voice recognition, typing, or button scrolling. This type of data import is still difficult to accomplish, as it requires a higher processor power and camera resolution. ANYLINE will now leverage the ... Read more

A startup bankrolled by Bill Gates is about to conduct the first public trials of high-speed body scanners powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the Guardian can reveal. According to documents filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Boston-based Evolv Technology is planning to test its system at Union Station in Washington DC, in Los Angeles's Union Station metro and at Denver international airport. Evolv uses the same millimetre-wave radio frequencies as the controversial, and painfully slow, body scanners now found at many airport security checkpoints. However, the new device can complete its scan in a fraction of second, using computer vision and machine learning to spot guns and bombs. This means passengers can simply walk through a scanning gate without stopping or even slowing down – like the hi-tech scanners seen in the 1990 sci-fi film Total Recall.

When Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, it shocked the humanitarian world. What's more, Dylan himself hasn't behaved like a traditional Nobel winner: he hasn't commented on the honor and has yet to give an acceptance speech. At least one member of the Nobel panel has called Dylan's silence "rude and arrogant," and the public has been reminded that if he doesn't give a lecture within six months, he won't receive the $900,000 prize money. Selecting Dylan as a Nobel laureate may be contentious, but it's mostly a sign of growth for intellectual society -- at least in Literature, no one is off-limits, not even mumbling masters of wordplay and songwriting. Growing pains are expected as the world of mainstream politics, activism and academia is suddenly forced to consider the potential of new industries, and vice versa.

Artificial intelligence and robots aren't coming for your job anytime soon, the U.S. White House's chief economic advisor says. Some technology experts worry about the economic impact of AI-powered computers and robots, but Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, predicts that AI will grow the economy instead of take jobs away. While some jobs may disappear, AI will create new jobs and consumer demand for new products and services, he said Wednesday at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in Washington, D.C. Some studies have suggested that automation will replace half of all jobs in the coming years, but Furman questioned those predictions. While some jobs may disappear, AI will create new jobs and consumer demand for new products and services, he said Wednesday at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in Washington, D.C.