Lee tells Faber for him, "a glimpse into the future," in Silicon Valley is a "glimpse into the present."

Strategic messaging that precedes human-robot interaction can help build the trust needed for effective human-robot communication and positive interaction outcomes, according to a study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. The article entitled "Advancing the Strategic Messages Affecting Robot Trust Effect: The Dynamic of User- and Robot-Generated Content on Human-Robot Trust and Interaction Outcomes" examines the impact of Strategic Messages Affecting Robot Trust (SMART). The researchers conducted two experiments in which they studied the effects of either user-generated information or robot-generated content delivered in the pre-interaction stage on human-robot trust and interaction outcomes. "As human robot interactions become more prevalent in both our personal and professional lives, it becomes increasingly more important that we understand how to work together most effectively," says Editor-in-Chief Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCB, BCN, Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, California and Virtual Reality Medical Institute, Brussels, Belgium. "Drawing on lessons learned from previous animal-human interaction training prior to our engagement may serve to create improved trust and communications."

Those results were pretty close to human performance but still short. That previous best is no longer valid as that same team has made history in speech recognition. In the same test, Microsoft's speech recognition system managed a 5.9% WER. When the team compared those results with human transcriptionists, they were identical, making the speech recognition software as accurate as human beings when it comes to writing/reciting words spoken to them. Geoffrey Zweig, who manages the Speech & Dialog research group, was happy to finally make this breakthrough.

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." While the world-renowned physicist has often been cautious about AI, raising the risk that humanity could be the architect of its own destruction if it creates a superintelligence with a will of its own, he was also quick to highlight the positives that AI research can bring.

Hidden Decision Trees is a statistical and data mining methodology (just like logistic regression, SVM, neural networks or decision trees) to handle problems with large amounts of data, non-linearities and strongly correlated dependent variables. The technique is easy to implement in any programming language. It is more robust than decision trees or logistic regression, and help detect natural final nodes. Implementations typically rely heavily on large, granular hash tables. No decision tree is actually built (thus the name hidden decision trees), but the final output of an hidden decision tree procedure consists of a few hundred nodes from multiple non-overlapping small decision trees.

Trained neural networks at Microsoft are now as good at recognizing the human voice as humans are, researchers announced today. In a report released Monday, researchers pitted Microsoft's NIST 2000 automated system against professional transcriptionists and found for the first time a higher error rate among humans than computers. "This marks the first time that human parity has been reported for conversational speech," said the report published Monday. Better speech recognition could impact a range of Microsoft products in the future. "The milestone will have broad implications for consumer and business products that can be significantly augmented by speech recognition. That includes consumer entertainment devices like the Xbox, accessibility tools such as instant speech-to-text transcription, and personal digital assistants such as Cortana," Microsoft said in a blog post published today about the achievement.

As an example of how the above mentioned will help businesses, one project I have been working on implements these capabilities with an E-Commerce system, to provide not an E-Commerce store with a chatbot, but an Artificially Intelligent E-Commerce store. I have teamed up with API.AI, recently acquired by Google, to integrate their state of the art natural linguistics platform to enhance the user experience. From a visitors point of view, they can navigate the store, speak to the A.I to identify products or services they are interested in, manage their cart and account, all by simply interacting with the A.I via speech or text. From a business owners point of view, their A.I comes pre trained with the capabilities of seamlessly learning the products added to the store, and how to interact with the front end allowing them to assist site visitors. Through the GUI businesses can train their A.I exactly how they want, allowing them to mold their A.I in a way that best fits the image of their business.

Donald Trump is stepping on Veep's toes. The satirical TV show was forced to pull a joke planned for an upcoming episode after Trump's comments about grabbing women "by the pussy" came out in a tape from 2005. "We had a scene where a minor character gets picked up on a DUI and he's being a little mouthy to a female police officer and we sort of had a run using [the P-word]," Veep showrunner David Mandel told the Los Angeles Times. "It was pretty funny and they basically threw it in the garbage. While in this instance life got ahead of art, Mandel said there have been other moments that played out on Veep and then were later repeated on the real-life campaign trail. "In some ways, we're ahead of the election," Mandel said. "We had a story line last season where there were running jokes about the pronunciation of Nevada.

Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research group has claimed in a paper published this week that its speech recognition system can now understand human conversations, marking the first time "human parity" has been reported for conversational speech. According to Network World, Microsoft's researchers are now working on ways to make sure that speech recognition works well in more real-life settings. "The error rate of professional transcriptionists is 5.9% for the Switchboard portion of the data, in which newly acquainted pairs of people discuss an assigned topic, and 11.3% for the CallHome portion where friends and family members have open-ended conversations. In both cases, our automated system establishes a new state-of-the-art, and edges past the human benchmark. This marks the first time that human parity has been reported for conversational speech".

For the vast majority of organizations, customers should be the number one priority. Without their support, revenue streams dry up and businesses quickly fail. For small businesses that have a face-to-face relationship with their clients keeping them happy is straightforward, but in larger organizations ensuring that the relationship between business and customer is as positive as it can be is not always easy. Imagine being in charge of a global, multi-national company with thousands of customers in disparate locations. Each of these customers has their own specific needs and businesses can't afford to treat them all as a single homogeneous entity.