If there were a World Series of big data baseball analytics, Claudio Silva would be in the starting lineup. By tracking every movement of every player and the ball throughout the game, it's changed how coaches evaluate and train players and how fans watch the game. But Silva is swinging for the fences. He's now using GPU-accelerated deep learning to reveal minute details of player behavior and game patterns, which has the potential to revolutionize how coaches manage players and plan strategy. It could even give them the ability to make predictions about some aspects of the game.

It sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie, but the truth is it's your inevitable reality. The rise of artificial intelligence, or AI, is poised to change the way we think of productivity. That's according to a new report from Accenture, which predicts that AI could boost productivity by up to 40 percent by 2035. Companies are already investing heavily in AI, and not just in the U.S. Put simply, AI is defined as the ability of a machine to mimic intelligent human behavior. It's essentially any sort of technology that is able to make sense of its environment and surroundings, and then act and react accordingly. One of the benefits AI will bring is taking care of mundane responsibilities so human employees can concentrate on others.

Israel's PointGrab has raised $7 million in funding for its sensors for smart buildings. The investors include lighting company Philips Lighting; Mitsubishi UFJ Capital Co. (MUCAP), a venture capital arm of Japan's largest financial group; and existing investors ABB Technology Ventures (ATV) and others. Israel-based PointGrab makes CogniPoint, a smart-sensing solution that detects people in buildings and shuts off lighting if there's no one around who needs it. The goal is to enable effective building management and save money through energy efficiency. By embedding deep learning neural networks technology into cost-effective, miniature, and connected optical sensing devices, PointGrab's CogniPoint sensing solution provides analytics in the detection of occupants' locations, count, and movements.

Masayoshi Son, one of the world's most successful investors, is putting his money behind the artificial intelligence revolution. Son, the world's 82nd richest man by Forbes' reckoning, leads Softbank, a Japanese telecommunications powerhouse that also holds investments in dozens of companies. The newest in the stable is ARM Holdings, developer of the chip designs that power nearly all phones, which Softbank acquired for $32 billion this year. Those ARM chips will help spread artificial intelligence and propel the world toward the so-called singularity, Son said, speaking Tuesday at ARM's developer conference here in Santa Clara, California. The singularity is the moment futurists envision when computing progress has accelerated to the point where we no longer can predict what's next for technology or humanity.

Want to watch this again later? Need to report the video? This feature is not available right now. Are you ready to inject your body with new Artificial Intelligence technology that will "spider web" your brain and turn you in a hybrid?

There are more than 30 million research papers out there, and more than 3,000 papers are published every day. Put simply, you haven't a chance in hell to read all of them. So what's a poor researcher to do when set a challenge in a brand new field of research? Once the wave of blind panic and urge to drink copious amounts of gin has dissipated, you reach for a technology solution. Iris believes it has just the thing.

Salesforce Einstein has ushered in a new era of curiosity about AI. It wasn't the first commercial AI usage, and others will crop up alongside it, but the buzz these past couple of weeks is a surefire indication that companies are really considering AI as a viable technology for short-term gain as well as far-fetched, long-term big ideas. I look at the opportunity in front of us and I think to myself: "Yes! The energy is contagious, but with it comes more questions than answers. As marketers, what does it all mean?

Hot on the heels of Bank of America's announcement yesterday that it is launching a new chatbot named Erica, Mastercard has unveiled its own personal finance bot named KAI at Money 20/20. Mastercard's artificial intelligence-powered bot responds to more than 1,000 queries about personal finances and other subjects. It was developed by Kasisto, a spinoff of Siri creator SRI International. Available to US consumers later this year, Mastercard KAI will converse about a customer's account history and account balance, as well as make payments, identify spending patterns and set alerts for specific kinds of spending. In addition to the Mastercard bot for banks, the financial services provider is also launching a bot for merchants.

Spookily powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems may work so well because their structure exploits the fundamental laws of the universe, new research suggests. The new findings may help answer a longstanding mystery about a class of artificial intelligence that employ a strategy called deep learning. These deep learning or deep neural network programs, as they're called, are algorithms that have many layers in which lower-level calculations feed into higher ones. Deep neural networks often perform astonishingly well at solving problems as complex as beating the world's best player of the strategy board game Go or classifying cat photos, yet know one fully understood why. It turns out, one reason may be that they are tapping into the very special properties of the physical world, said Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a co-author of the new research.

Idling in rush-hour traffic can be mind-numbing. It also carries other costs. Traffic congestion costs the U.S. economy $121 billion a year, mostly due to lost productivity, and produces about 25 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics Stephen Smith told the audience at a White House Frontiers Conference last week. In urban areas, drivers spend 40 percent of their time idling in traffic, he added. The big reason is that today's traffic signals are dumb.