Watson, can you grow into a multibillion-dollar business and become the engine of IBM's resurgence? IBM is betting its future that the answer is yes. Its campaign to commercialize Watson, the company's version of artificial intelligence technology, stands out, even during the current A.I. frenzy in the tech industry. IBM has invested billions of dollars in its Watson business unit, created at the start of 2014, which now employs an estimated 10,000 workers. Its big-ticket marketing push includes clever television ads that feature Watson trading quips with famous people like Serena Williams and Bob Dylan.

Artificial intelligence, or "AI," is the current direction of technological innovation, but if the U.S. does not step up its game, another world power may lead the future. The number of journal articles mentioning "deep learning" or "deep neural networks" produced by China…

Rand Fishkin posted another brilliant Whiteboard Friday last week on the topic of optimizing for RankBrain. In it, he explained how RankBrain helps Google select and prioritize signals it uses for ranking. One of the most important signals Google takes into account is user engagement. As Rand noted, engagement is a "very, very important signal." Engagement is a huge but often ignored opportunity.

OpenAI wants to build the technology that will finally create a computer that can converse in a way that is indistinguishable humans. The nonprofit, backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, brought on NVIDIA's supercomputer DGX-1, which has 170 teraflops of computing power, to help hone machine learning systems to create algorithms that can comprehend language and teach robots to respond appropriately. That should solve one of the biggest hindrances to making AI systems that can learn complex interactions: the slowness of current computers. "The speed of our computers is in some sense the lifeblood of deep learning," OpenAI research director Ilya Sutskever in an NVIDIA video. The goal of this project is to allow a robot to become smart enough to not only recognize speech, but to also use the data it gathers to formulate appropriate responses on its own--and to do that, computers need to digest data more quickly than they are currently capable of. The DGX-1, which is optimized for an arm of machine learning called deep learning, can feed copious amounts of natural language data into OpenAI's network much quicker than ever before.

Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci robot is a technical marvel. Nearly half a million operations were performed in the U.S. by surgeons controlling its large, precise arms last year. One in four U.S. hospitals has one or more of the machines, which perform the majority of robotic surgeries worldwide and are credited with making minimally invasive surgery commonplace. But when executives from Verb Surgical, a secretive joint venture between Alphabet and Johnson & Johnson, presented at the robotics industry conference RoboBusiness late last month, they made the da Vinci sound lame. Intuitive's machine, with an average selling price of 1.54 million, is too expensive and bulky, they grumbled.

This is for those of you who have no backup of your current iTunes library, and are replacing the computer your phone normally syncs with or are just replacing the hard drive. Any attempt to sync such content with a second computer will result in ALL iTunes content being first erased from your phone & then replaced with the content from the second computer. This is a design feature and cannot be overridden. Because you replaced your computer, or hard drive, your phone will see this as a "new" computer.

Technology company Nauto has entered into agreements with BMW i Ventures and Toyota Research Institute, as well as with Allianz Ventures, part of the leading global financial service provider and insurance company Allianz Group. Nauto developed deep learning capabilities that run both in the cloud and on retrofit devices that can be mounted in any vehicle. Nauto is already deployed into commercial passenger, logistics and delivery fleets and enables these fleets to manage vehicle and driver safety and operate more efficiently. Nauto detects driver attention, coaches drivers and warns of collisions, keeps fleet managers in touch with their drivers and helps them optimize vehicle deployment. In fact, Nauto claims, its algorithms provide 5X more risk differentiation between the best and the worst drivers.

It appeared first on the Bloomberg Terminal. Artificial intelligence software solutions will likely be the top disruptor in technology in the next decade. Software's ability to self-learn by processing data may spur consumer and enterprise applications. Companies embracing AI may get a competitive edge; ones that don't run the risk of being disrupted and phased out. AI is nascent, but the pace of innovation and disruptive potential of startups will accelerate as compute costs shrink and machine-learning algorithms advance.

When it comes to gaming, Carnegie Mellon students are usually the ones beating the computer. But this time, the computer beat the students. Carnegie Mellon University computer science students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, recently made an artificial intelligence (AI) agent in the video game Doom that outplays computer-generated agents and human gamers. They accomplished this by applying deep-learning techniques that taught their agent, Arnold, to manipulate the game's 3-D design. "The work is purely a result of our passion for artificial intelligence and video games," Chaplot said.

On Thursday, before President Obama had arrived, the Frontiers conference began with several sessions explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) and data science affect various levels of policy. The local and national sessions, called tracks, took place on the second floor of the Cohon Center. The panels were a who's who of academic and corporate giants in the field of AI such as Engineering Director at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center Raffi Krikorian and Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research Jeanette Wing. The local policy track also featured municipal government officials who embody the spirit of making data "work for us" as the president often says. The National Frontiers track opened with Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf telling the story of innovation in Pennsylvania, beginning with William Penn's idea of freedom of conscience, winding through the founding ideas of American government born in Pennsylvania, touching on the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and finally landing on the transportation revolution which still roils on today as self driving cars become frequent sights on the streets of Pittsburgh.