I wish I had an artificial-intelligence slave. A digital avatar--call it MY AI--that knows ("knows"?) I spent last weekend at New York University listening to philosophers, scientists and engineers jaw about "Ethics of Artificial Intelligence." How can we ensure that driverless cars, drones and other smart technologies--such as algorithms that decide whether a human gets parole or a loan or has breast cancer--are used ethically? Also, what happens if machines get really smart?

Ocado Technology announced a new approach to handle their 500,000 customer base and their pool of email requests through a partnership with Google and its Cloud Platform (GCP). The work focuses on automating email categorization using TensorFlow and its Python APIs hosted on the GCP. Ocado decided the email pool classification is a good candidate for production-scaled machine learning and automation, specifically, natural language processing (NLP). The workflow adopted by many support-centers is for people to manually process the email queues in a consistent and reliable manner. This doesn't scale well if the business grows quickly or if the overall customer support volume requires an ever-growing support staff.

Stephen Hawking, the famous scientist who once said intelligent machines could be mankind's biggest threat, opened an artificial intelligence lab in Britain this week to help develop robot surgeons and Terminator-style military droids. Britain's Cambridge University will play host to the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) as it uses a 10 million grant to bring together experts from many disciplines to develop AI robots. Scientists from around the world will use the AI lab to design and test intelligent robots that could potentially transform mankind, according to SpaceDaily. "Perhaps with the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one – industrialization." Calling the creation of AI, the biggest event in the history of civilization, Hawking said the British lab hoped to help eradicate disease and poverty in our lifetime, according to Phys.org.

Just over 19 years ago, a milestone in the world of AI was achieved when IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. Until then, he was the undefeated world Chess champion – probably the greatest human player of all time. This was a momentous event in AI's brief history. Computer chess programs had been playing good chess since the 1970's, and had improved to the point where their level of play would beat the vast majority of the population. I myself recall buying a chess program in the early 1980's which offered 6 levels of play from beginner to advanced. Even then, I had difficulty beating the machine above level 3.

This year, we've watched Apple, Google, Facebook, Samsung, Microsoft, and many other tech giants make acquisitions or launch products to get into the bot business. They're building bot ecosystems around their chat app platforms -- in SMS, web pages, and elsewhere -- but they're still facing one of the biggest problems in this age of artificial intelligence: How do you find the very best bots? Microsoft wants to expand its bot directory, Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, told VentureBeat in an interview Wednesday, and the company wants to do it with the help of developers and other chat app platforms. "My hope is that we can do something more like search does with web pages, rather than a very closed directory that just Microsoft owns, and we kind of lean that way anyway because we support all these channels," Cheng said. No prospective launch date has been set for an expanded Microsoft bot directory, but Cheng said Microsoft wants to work with the bot developer community and other platforms to create a directory that includes names like Skype, Facebook Messenger, Kik, and Slack -- some of the biggest chat app platforms in the world.

Hard on the heels of the White House's new report about artificial intelligence's potential to address major societal challenges, NVIDIA will be holding Washington's largest ever AI conference. GTC DC will feature some of the most prominent leaders in government and industry when it takes place Oct. 26-27, at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington. The event is the latest in a series of GPU Technology Conferences, which have attracted 16,000 people so far this year across Silicon Valley, Europe and Asia. The timing is right for policymakers and AI experts to meet, following yesterday's White House report concluding that "AI has the potential to help address some of the biggest challenges that society faces" and recommending increased funding in AI research to fuel economic growth. The report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, published by the National Science and Technology Council, notes that "the effectiveness of government itself is being increased as agencies build their capacity to use AI to carry out their missions more quickly, responsively and efficiently."

Artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and neural networks represent incredibly exciting and powerful machine learning-based techniques used to solve many real-world problems. In addition, each neuron applies a function or transformation to the weighted inputs, which means that the combined weighted input signal is transformed mathematically prior to evaluating if the activation threshold has been exceeded. Architecturally, an artificial neural network is modeled using layers of artificial neurons, or computational units able to receive input and apply an activation function along with a threshold to determine if messages are passed along. Models can become increasingly complex, and with increased abstraction and problem solving capabilities by increasing the number of hidden layers, the number of neurons in any given layer, and/or the number of paths between neurons.

Udacity President Sebastian Thrun spoke Thursday at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit. Prepare for your car to become an intellectual giant -- and for you to like it. In a highly optimistic forecast at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, computer scientist Sebastian Thrun said artificial intelligence will radically reshape our lives for the better. "In the last 200 or 300 years, we have made ourselves into superhumans," able to plow a field a thousand times faster than our ancestors, fly across the Atlantic Ocean and talk to a person in Australia from thousands of miles away, he said. Artificial intelligence will take us to the next step: "Rather than replacing our muscles, we're going to be making our brains stronger."

Researchers working for Google have produced a new kind of computer intelligence which can learn in ways less immediately dependent on its programmers than any previous model. It can, for instance, navigate its way through a map of the London underground without being explicitly instructed how to do so. For the moment, this approach is less efficient than the old-fashioned, more specialised forms of artificial intelligence, but it holds out promise for the future and, like all such conceptual advances in computer programming, it raises more urgently the question of how society should harness these powers. An algorithm is simply a sequence of instructions. Law codes can be seen as algorithms.

Where can you find an unbiased, personal finance app that serves purely in your interests? An app that analyzes your bank accounts, your recurring subscriptions and your spending habits to figure out how to save you money? Clarity Money is cofounded by Adam Dell, Michael Dell's brother, and backed by some heavy hitters including the Soros Fund, Maveron Partners and Bessemer Venture Capital. Once you download the app and link your bank accounts, Clarity Money promises to analyze your accounts and make suggestions to save you money. It uses data science and machine learning to negotiate bills, create a savings account, find lower interest rate credit cards and/or personal loans, transfer money between accounts, and deliver actionable insights based on your spending patterns, credit score and credit cards.