TORONTO, Oct. 20, 2016 /CNW/ - RBC today announced two new initiatives in collaboration with the University of Toronto designed to ensure Canada remains a leading centre of development in machine learning and artificial intelligence. RBC Research in Machine Learning will be a state-of-the-art research practice working to push the boundaries of the science around machine learning. RBC is also partnering with the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, becoming a Founding Partner of the Lab's Machine Learning Initiative focused on artificial intelligence-enabled companies. "RBC Research in Machine Learning is part of our commitment to the advancement of machine learning and artificial intelligence in Canada," says Gabriel Woo, vice-president of innovation at RBC. "We are not only building our own capabilities, we're also big believers in creating jobs in this space to retain the amazing talent we have in Canada. RBC Research in Machine Learning will be housed at the Banting Institute at the University of Toronto, and will be headed up by successful inventor and entrepreneur Dr. Foteini Agrafioti. Dr. Agrafioti is the co-founder and co-inventor of Nymi, the first wearable device to authenticate users using the biometric technology HeartID. "This has really never been done before in Canada," says Dr. Agrafioti, who was named "Inventor of the Year" in 2012 by the University of Toronto for inventing HeartID. "We've lost so much talent in this country to other companies and institutions, but RBC has both the scale and commitment to ensure Canada remains a centre of excellence in machine learning." Under the leadership of Dr. Agrafioti, the RBC Research in Machine Learning team will collaborate with academics from the University of Toronto and other institutions, publishing new research in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence. They will also be connected to the teams within the bank working on artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide expertise and help solve business challenges. RBC also extends its close collaboration with the University of Toronto through a new partnership with the Creative Destruction Lab, a seed-stage program for massively scalable, science-based companies. The Lab employs an objectives-based mentoring process led by highly accomplished entrepreneurs and angel investors with the goal of maximizing the equity value creation of its ventures. As part of the agreement, RBC is contributing to the Creative Destructions Lab's programming fund and will assume a role on the Lab's Advisory board. "We're thrilled to partner with RBC on this initiative," says Rachel Harris, director of The Creative Destruction Lab. "With their support we are able to scale our program.

Ever since the field of artificial intelligence research was founded at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, it has undergone a rapid expansion of applications to a multitude of other fields and subjects. Starting off originally as a way to compute mathematical equations, artificial intelligence is now used in everyday items on a regular basis. This technology can be seen through obvious examples, such as Siri on your iPhone, characters in video games and in the currently developing technology that will power smart cars. It is also prevalent in more subliminal cases, like fraud detection on your credit card, news generation by popular information outlets like Yahoo! or Fox, purchase prediction on Amazon or recommended viewings on Netflix. Perhaps one of the most popular examples of A.I. technology today is IBM's supercomputer, otherwise known as Watson, which appeared on a special addition of Jeopardy! in 2011.

John Bassett, a British spy who worked for the agency GCHQ for nearly two decades, has told Daily Express that the U.S. was considering plans to employ thousands of robots by 2025. At a meeting with police and counter-terrorism officials in London, he said: "At some point around 2025 or thereabouts the U.S. army will actually have more combat robots than it will have human soldiers. Many of those combat robots are trucks that can drive themselves, and they will get better at not falling off cliffs. But some of them are rather more exciting than trucks. So we will see in the West combat robots outnumber human soldiers."

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 next step is to have traffic signals talk to cars. Pittsburgh is the test bed for Uber's self-driving cars, and Smith's work on AI-enhanced traffic signals that talk with self-driving cars is paving the way for the ultimately fluid and efficient autonomous intersections.

What goes into making a computer understand the world through senses, learning and experience, as IBM says Watson does? To build a body of knowledge for Watson to work with on Jeopardy, researchers put together 200 million pages of content, both structured and unstructured, including dictionaries and encyclopedias. When asked a question, Watson initially analyzes it using more than 100 algorithms, identifying any names, dates, geographic locations or other entities. It also examines the phrase structure and the grammar of the question to better gauge what's being asked. In all, it uses millions of logic rules to determine the best answers. Today Watson is frequently being applied to new areas, which means learning new material.

The future of artificial intelligence (AI) taking human jobs as predicted by the White House last week is far less extreme than what English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is expecting to happen. "In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity," he told an audience at the launch of the new Cambridge University's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) on Wednesday night in the U.K. "We do not know which." Over the past few years, Hawking, who once warned that AI could spell the end of mankind, has been joined by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft founder Bill Gates in sounding the alarm on the dangers associated with it. "I am very glad someone was listening to me," Hawking, a former professor at the university, said, in reference to his and others' warnings. But Hawking's predictions for the future of AI -- and humans -- were far more optimistic than his previous doomsday comments.

In order to protect the world's iconic marine wildlife including whales, sea turtles and sharks, we first have to understand their biology. However, this is often easier said than done. In this 45-minute interactive lesson, students will be taken around the world to learn about new and exciting ways that marine scientists are uncovering the lives of these elusive creatures. Track humpback whales as they feed in Alaska, and come along for the ride as video cameras are deployed on sea turtles in Western Australia. The lesson uses photos and videos from a variety of active research projects, begins with historical context about human impacts on marine wildlife populations and ends with a discussion of what students can do in their lives to help learn about and protect our oceans.

AppTek, a leader of automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine learning and artificial intelligence, today announces the newest mobile application addition to its Talk2Me product suite: Talk2Me Mobile. The speech-to-speech translation app, now available for free on iOS and Android markets, is used for instantaneous bi-directional Spanish/English and Arabic/English translations. In addition to live speech-to-speech translation, the app supports the ability to record, transcribe and archive content for future offline use. Whether for customer service calls, interviews, conference calls, web conferences or peer-to-peer conversations, Talk2Me converts audio and video assets into searchable, actionable data to help organizations draw comprehensive insights and transform the way people and businesses operate. "Our advances in speech technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence are lowering the barrier for people and businesses to effectively navigate, retrieve and transact across multiple languages," stated AppTek's CEO, Adam Sutherland.

This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. The paradox of automation: Earlier this year, Facebook exorcised those pesky human editors who were introducing political bias into its Trending news list and left the job to algorithms. Now, reports Caitlin Dewey in The Washington Post, the Trending news isn't biased, but some of it is fake. Turns out the algorithms can't tell a real news story from a hoax. Facebook says it can improve its algorithms, but errors of judgment aren't the only pitfall in transferring human tasks to machines.

The people who study artificial intelligence for a living say the technology should not make us fear for our lives. This is the gist of the first in a series of reports from a Stanford University team about the effect AI will have over the next century. "The frightening, futurist portrayals of Artificial Intelligence that dominate films and novels, and shape the popular imagination," the report reads, "are fictional." The report focused on how AI might affect the typical American city in 2030. The most sweeping changes laid out were on the transportation front, as self-driving cars are expected to become more commonplace.