Compared to Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google, Apple's AI research projects have been largely inscrutable. But now, that looks like it's about to change. Apple has hired esteemed Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Russ Salakhutdinov as its director of artificial intelligence research, with plans to build a team of researchers for the company in the coming months. Salakhutdinov will remain in his post as an associate professor at CMU, Apple confirmed to BuzzFeed News. Excited about joining Apple as a director of AI research in addition to my work at CMU. Apply to work with my team https://t.co/U2hQl2GdhA

Much of today's hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is concentrated in a few areas: enabling futuristic applications like self-driving cars, helping conversational interfaces like chatbots come to life, and making business more efficient and predictable. But in this episode of "Behind The Numbers," we focus on how AI is being used to spur creativity in areas like art, music and storytelling. The podcast kicks off with a new intro song--at least for this episode. The song, titled "Daddy's Car," is unique because it was generated by AI from Sony's Computer Science Research Lab in Paris and arranged by a human composer, Benoît Carré. Much of the track is generated from suite of Sony's AI tools called Flow Machines, which is trained from around 13,000 existing compositions across a variety of styles.

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research branch have created a speech recognition system that can pick up the words in a conversation as well as most humans can. The new system was announced by Microsoft in a blog post and the team's findings were published on Monday. The record-breaking tech has hit what the team is calling "human parity" -- that is, it's not perfect, but it makes the same or fewer mistakes in transcription than human professionals. The word error rate of the system was down to 5.9 percent, from the 6.3 percent error rate reported just last month. That's more impressive than it sounds, as humans will commonly mishear words like "have" for "is", or "a" for "the" in transcribing.

You cannot get better at it by reading books and blog posts. In this post, you will discover the simple 6-step machine learning project template that you can use to jump-start your project in R. Machine Learning Project Template in R Photo by Jaguar MENA, some rights reserved. Working through machine learning problems from end-to-end is critically important. You can read about machine learning. You can also try out small one-off recipes. But applied machine learning will not come alive for you until you work through a dataset from beginning to end.

Considering how much significance Gartner is placing the future influence of artificial intelligence and algorithms, it comes as little surprise that the group is saying that technology will be one of the most strategic and potentially disruptive for 2017. At its Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow detailed the key technology trends for 2017 as the group sees them including how data science technologies are evolving to include advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence is helping create intelligent physical and software-based systems that are programmed to learn and adapt. Other key trends include the impact of melding of the physical and digital environments and how digital technology platforms are influencing the enterprise. "Applied AI and advanced machine learning give rise to a spectrum of intelligent implementations, including physical devices (robots, autonomous vehicles, consumer electronics) as well as apps and services (virtual personal assistants [VPAs], smart advisors), said Cearley. "These implementations will be delivered as a new class of obviously intelligent apps and things as well as provide embedded intelligence for a wide range of mesh devices and existing software and service solutions." Backing up the growing machine intelligence idea, Daryl Plummer, managing vice president, chief of research and Gartner Fellow stated that by 2020, algorithms will positively alter the behavior of more than 1 billion global workers global workers. More on Network World: Gartner: Get onboard the algorithm train! "Contextualization algorithms have advanced exponentially to include a variety of behavioral interventions such as psychology, social neuroscience and cognitive science.

With traditional software engineering techniques we always define functions to solve problems. The idea is that the neural network finds the right weights for each neuron to eventually learn how to calculate the expected output. But even better, there's a library called Keras, also written in Python, which creates a higher level API and uses TensorFlow as it's backend. Let's teach a neural network to understand the XOR gate.

Along with taking part in the social experiment, Gemma will front the factual programme and delve into the advances that have been made into artificial intelligence. She will look at technology - such as driverless cars - and speak to British A.I. researcher Demis Hassabis and his DeepMind project, which is working toward creating machines that can learn even more by themsleves than ever before. "This film pushes the boundaries of what is possible using the technology that is increasingly influential in our lives," said Tom Porter, Channel 4's acting Commissioning Editor, Science.

With more selection available to online shoppers than ever before, finding items that are perfect for you and your budget can be time consuming. At eBay, our focus is to help shoppers find their version of perfect and simplify the shopping experience. In addition to major enhancements we've been making to our core platform, we've also been hard at work on a new commerce experience powered by artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and human judgement. We're starting to bring this experience to life with eBay ShopBot, which debuts today in beta on Facebook Messenger. Our vision is to make shopping with eBay as easy as talking to a friend, whether you are looking for something specific or just browsing for inspiration.

British AI talent is about to be given a boost after Founders Factory, a company specialising in growing startups, announced today that it will receive a "multimillion pound" investment from a top Chinese private equity firm. CSC Group is one of China's largest private equity firms, specialises in tech investment, and has previously pumped 400m into AngelList, an US startup accelerator. Now, the firm is turning its attention to the UK. CSC has agreed to a five-year deal with Founders Factory to invest in and scale five AI startups and co-create two new companies every year. "The partnership will build a bridge between AI talent in Europe and China; giving Founders Factory startups access to the Chinese market and Chinese talent the opportunity to enter the European tech ecosystem," Founders Factory said.

DENSO Corporation and Toshiba Corporation have reached a basic agreement to jointly develop an artificial intelligence technology called Deep Neural Network-Intellectual Property (DNN-IP), which will be used in image recognition systems which have been independently developed by the two companies to help achieve advanced driver assistance and automated driving technologies. This Smart News Release features multimedia. DNN, an algorithm modeled after the neural networks of the human brain, is expected to perform recognition processing as accurately as, or even better than the human brain. To achieve automated driving, automotive computers need to be able to identify different road traffic situations including a variety of obstacles and road markings, availability of road space for driving, and potentially dangerous situations. In image recognition based on conventional pattern recognition and machine learning, objects that need to be recognized by computers must be characterized and extracted in advance.