Machine learning is entering production at Twitter as a way of ranking tweets and boosting engagement. Twitter engineers this week unveiled the social media platform's ranking algorithm driven by deep neural networks. In a blog post, company engineers said their approach leverages an in-house artificial intelligence platform that includes new modeling capabilities. Among the results, wrote Nicolas Koumchatzky, a software engineer with Twitter's AI team called Cortex, are "more relevant timelines now, and in the future, as this opens the door for us to use more of the many novelties that the deep learning community has to offer, especially in the areas of [natural language processing], conversation understanding and media domains." Currently, Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) timelines are arranged chronologically based on a user's last visit.

The initiative will be driven by a government-wide partnership comprising NRF, the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO), the Economic Development Board (EDB), the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), SGInnovate, and the Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS). AI:SG will bring together research institutions, AI start-ups and companies developing AI products, to grow knowledge, create tools and develop talent to power Singapore's AI efforts. AI.SG will work with companies to use AI to raise productivity, create new products, and translate and commercialize solutions from labs to the market. Mr Tan Kok Yam, Deputy Secretary, Smart Nation and Digital Government Office, said: "Through AI.SG, we intend to work with AI research performers, start-ups and companies to audaciously tackle tough challenges in areas such as transportation and urban management.

It's 2017 and unless you've been living under a rock, you will have seen that Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, and having an impact on (pretty much) everything. Artificial Intelligence is the here and now; it's making leaps and bounds throughout the world of tech and beyond. But what exactly is AI and why should we be embracing it? Defining AI can be pretty tricky and is often heavily disputed. If we're speaking via textbook definitions, then we can define AI as the development of computers that can embody and perform the same so-called'intelligent' actions of humans.

At the moment, artificial intelligence lives in the cloud, but Google -- and other big tech companies -- want it work directly on your devices, too. At Google I/O today, the search giant announced a new initiative to help its AI make this leap down to earth: a mobile-optimized version of its machine learning framework named TensorFlowLite. The original TensorFlow was released in November 2015, and quickly became popular with both researchers and developers as a way to build AI tools. TensorFlow is flexible, reliable, and comes with a big stack of documentation that makes it easy for beginners to get started. The newly announced version, TensorFlowLite, will build on this, helping users slim down their machine learning algorithms to work on-device.

The future is looking bright for New Zealand businesses when they begin integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and new technologies into products, NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller says. A recent United States survey found 80 percent of consumers are excited about the way AI and machine learning will change their lives. US consumers are optimistic about technology developments in smart machines, AI, and robotics. The report from global creative consultancy firm Lippincott surveyed 2000 leading edge US consumers to determine their emotional state around technology, and draw conclusions about what the customer of the future will be looking for from businesses. A number of events are being held this week, as part of NZTech's national Techweek, to discuss AI and its implications.

Evan Nisselson is a partner at LDV Capital. Major technology companies and new startups are at war over having the most valuable artificial intelligence and at the core of this war is having unique high quality visual data. This battle will be won by owning the connected camera. The majority of the data our brains analyze is visual, and therefore the majority of the data needed for artificial intelligence to have human (or better than human) skills, will rely on the ability for computers to translate high quality visual data. One of the business sectors that will be revolutionized by artificial intelligence is e-commerce.

Artificial Intelligence can help us, dammit. The notion of a coming AI apocalypse has grown tiresome, especially because it invariably makes the leap from the nascent forms of AI we experience now to a terrifying future were every robot can out-think and, eventually, annihilate us. I'm not saying it's not an eventuality, but it is also decades or more away. It's time to focus on the now, which is why I was so pleased with Google's I/O 2017 developer's keynote on Wednesday. In it, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described the fundamental shift from a mobile-first landscape to an AI-first one. In fact, mobile hardware and software remain a crucial part of Google's strategy, but now all of it is infused, at some level, with artificial intelligence and, especially, machine learning.

Two days before delivering the keynote at Google I/O, the company's annual State of the Union address, Sundar Pichai is worried about losing his voice. Sitting at the coffee table inside his remarkably spartan office at company headquarters, the Google CEO speaks softly, even by his standards. Step by careful step, he explains the major themes that will run through his keynote speech, and at first, they seem less weighty than they should, considering they represent the near-future of the world's largest internet business. That's partly because Pichai isn't feeling too well and partly because those themes aren't all that different from the themes that drove last year's speech. Google, he keeps saying, is now an "AI-first company."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai talks about Google Lens, which lets you point your phone's camera at places and objects to get information about them. On Wednesday, Google kicked off its I/O developers conference with a keynote providing a peek into what the tech giant has planned for its range of services, including its artificial intelligence-powered Google Assistant. Here's what we learned from the first day of I/O: The company wants to make it easier for search users to discover job postings. Welcome to Google for Jobs, which will organize job listings more efficiently. So, if you search for, say, a software engineering job in a specific city, those listings pop up right at the top of search results.

Today at the company's annual developer conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai uttered a phrase that will no doubt be repeated in corporate board rooms across the world for the foreseeable future: "AI first." It wasn't the first we've heard of the formerly "mobile first" company's focus on artificial intelligence, but Google I/O 2017 marked the first time we saw many of the tools that will backup that new catchphrase. "When we started working on search, we wanted to do it at scale," CEO Sundar Pichai said at the conference's opening-day keynote today. "That's why we designed our data centers from the ground up and put a lot of effort into them. Now that we're evolving for this machine-learning and AI world, we're building what we think of as AI-first data centers."