This is the fourth installment in a series that aims to explain and peer inside the black-box algorithms that increasingly dominate our lives. Early computers were mostly just big calculators, helping us process large numbers. Now, however, computers are so powerful that they are learning how to make decisions on their own in the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence. But AI-enabled machines are only as smart as the knowledge they have been fed. Microsoft learned that lesson the hard way earlier this year when it released an AI Twitter bot called Tay that had been trained to talk like a Millennial teen.

Microsoft's speech-recognition AI could eventually be used to enhance Cortana's accessibility features, say, for deaf people. Microsoft researchers have developed a system that recognizes speech as accurately as a professional human transcriptionist. Researchers and engineers from Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group have set a new record in speech recognition, achieving a word error rate of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent reported a month ago. The word error rate is the percentage of times in a conversation that a system, in this case a combination of neural networks, mishears different words. Microsoft's system performed as well as humans who were asked to listen to the same conversations.

Looking back on Dennis Mortensen and x.ai's update at our PSFK conference and the future of artificial intelligence At PSFK 2015, Dennis Mortensen presented x.ai, the AI email assistant affectionately named Amy that facilitates email scheduling with the ebullient personality of a human personal assistant. Over the last couple years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has become more nuanced working its way into everything from care taking, to finance tools, to customer service. Along with this, there has been a huge proliferation of branded bots, finding their place in retail and service, and helping customers get what they need more efficiently. Amid the increasing awareness and interest in what artificial intelligence means for us, we want to look back at where this is coming from. Check out this talk from 2015 highlighting some of the challenges x.ai's assistant Amy is able to tackle and the promise AI holds for the workforce of the future.

AI imbued throughout the enterprise is the major technology trend for 2017, according industry watcher Gartner Group. The company announced its prognostications today at the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. "Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017 set the stage for the Intelligent Digital Mesh," said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "The first three embrace'Intelligence Everywhere,' how data science technologies and approaches are evolving to include advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence allowing the creation of intelligent physical and software-based systems that are programmed to learn and adapt. The next three trends focus on the digital world and how the physical and digital worlds are becoming more intertwined. The last four trends focus on the mesh of platforms and services needed to deliver the intelligent digital mesh."

"Although remarkable progress has been made in the field of computer vision, the vast majority of both these theories and technologies have yet to transition to the real automotive world, where you have a huge variety of road infrastructure, side buildings, road signs, vehicles, and most importantly, human driving behaviors," stated Nexar co-founder and CTO, Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz. "At Nexar, we've assembled a first class technical team dedicated to propelling the automotive industry into the future using deep learning. Alongside fellow industry leaders participating in the BDD Consortium, the Nexar team will apply its rapidly expanding data network and industry know-how to infuse state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for the optimal and safest driving experience." Since its launch in February 2016, Nexar has tracked upwards of 20 million miles and recorded more than a half-million instances of driving incidents worldwide. This has provided the company with a large and diverse panel of data of real-world driving conditions, a databank that continues to expand every day and serves as a vital resource for the future success of the autonomous car industry.

Your commute could get a lot shorter without you even knowing thanks to traffic lights with artificial intelligence brains inside. Over the past couple years, a startup named Surtrac has been mentally upgrading traffic lights in Pittsburgh with artificial intelligence. These lights collect data on the amount of traffic from cameras and radar signals, and the network of lights coordinates to ensure that all the traffic passes through intersections as fast as possible. The AI system began with nine intersections in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood in 2012 and has quietly expanded to 50 intersections. The startup plans to implement their network across the whole city.

Artificial intelligence, aka AI, is features with IBM's Watson: computer science, machine learning, environment and decision taking all-in-one!

Stephen Hawking has been provided his visionaries about AI(Artificial Intelligence). Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be "either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity", and praised the creation of an academic institute dedicated to researching the future of intelligence as "crucial to the future of our civilisation and our species". Hawking was speaking at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at Cambridge University, a multi-disciplinary institute that will attempt to tackle some of the open-ended questions raised by the rapid pace of development in AI research. "We spend a great deal of time studying history," Hawking said, "which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. So it's a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence."

The Associated Press and Graphiq, which specializes in using artificial intelligence to rapidly create interactive data-driven infographics, announced a new partnership Tuesday. The partnership, whose financials were not disclosed, will make it easier for the AP to provide data infographics for its stories while exposing Graphiq to a worldwide user audience. "Today we're reaching hundreds of millions of readers a month, but the AP reaches half the world's population every day," Alex Rosenberg, Graphiq vice president, told Inc. Rosenberg noted that Graphiq will embed some of its staffers in AP newsrooms to be readily available throughout the news outlet's reporting process. The AP will also make Graphiq's entire visualization catalog--the company creates thousands of new visualizations each week--readily available to news wires' countless clients.

You've probably seen this scenario play out on a police procedural show on television: A crime has been committed and officers are tasked with looking through security footage to see if any of it was caught on camera. On TV, they can cut away to commercial and have the answer back as soon as they return. In real life, however, analyzing huge quantities of video data is a task that's rarely accomplished effectively by human operators. There's just too much data to sift through, and the cost for the man hours required is too high. But that problem is being overcome with machine learning and video analytics.