The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is using IBM Watson technology to provide a robot that will answer customer questions and pass requests on to the right agents. A collection of our most popular articles for IT leaders from the first few months of 2016, including: - Corporate giants recruit digitally-minded outsiders to drive transformation - Analytics platforms to drive strategy in 2016 - Next generation: The changing role of IT leaders. This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. By submitting your email address, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant topic offers from TechTarget and its partners. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a discipline that has been revived. In the 1980s Artificial Intelligence and Expert systems were very fashionable and the British Computer Society had an Expert Systems Specialist Group run by the famous Alexander D'Agapeyeff. Other Scientists with great names doing pioneering work at this time included Robert Kowalski and Edward Feigenbaum. Everyone was talking about the fifth generation and AI was going to save the planet! The management consultancy where I worked at the time was looking for opportunities to use AI in a practical way in banks.

Marc Andreessen on why AI can spawn a new generation of big, important technology companies -- Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning are enabling computers to understand the world and respond intelligently to it. Maxim Harper / @maximharper: Liked the entire chat, but the reply regarding the evolution of retail is fantastic. Grady Booch / @grady_booch: If software is eating the world, then AI is eating our lunch. Brian Roemmele / @brianroemmele: Few people get deep magnitude of AI as well as the astounding Marc Andreessen. This is a must read, especially post Viv sale.

Customers at Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest may soon be sorting out issues with help from a virtual chatbot. Web-based Luvo will be able to answer simple queries such as how to order a replacement card. Designed using IBM Watson technology, the virtual agent is able to understand and learn from human interactions. In future, Luvo may be able to understand if a customer was feeling frustrated or unhappy and change its tone and actions accordingly, IBM said. The service will initially be rolled out to RBS and NatWest customers, starting in December with about 10% of RBS customers in Scotland.

To Dr. Ryszard Michalski, the man who coined the term "Machine Learning," did a lot to advance the field, and who, sadly, passed away on September 20, 2015. I first visited the prominent AI researcher Dr. Ryszard Michalski in 1990. At the time his research division at George Mason University (Virginia) was called "The Center for Artificial Intelligence." On a subsequent visit two years later it was called "The Center for Machine Learning." I was curious and asked Dr. Michalski why he renamed his center in spite of no visible change of direction in his research or that of his colleagues.

Every day we read about new developments in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Significant advances in machine learning, natural language processing, image recognition, and a myriad of other A.I. technologies are being used to solve previously insurmountable problems. And although these technologies are still in their infancy, there is a strong belief that they will radically disrupt much of how we see and engage with the world. There is a seeming inexorable march of this technology, with near-future uses that border on the fanatastical. But A.I. technology's futures are neither inevitable nor singular.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is opening tech labs in Oakland, Calif., and Harlem to build bridges to underserved communities as it seeks the next generation of African-American and Latino computer scientists. Code Next, a new initiative which officially launched Thursday, puts on free programs for middle school and high school students, working with local organizations such as Black Girls Code and local schools to nurture their interest in computer science. Google says its research shows that 51% of African-American students and 47% of Hispanic students don't have access to computer science classes in school. Code Next aims to fills that gap with hands-on curriculum that encourages creativity and experimentation, showing young people overlooked by the tech industry the possibilities that industry offers. Eventually Google, which is developing the two labs in collaboration with MIT Media Lab, plans to make the curriculum available to educators.

Hello all, I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this and if someone could point me in a better direction I would gladly take this elsewhere. I am a student in college and I have to interview someone in a career similar to the one I would like to be in. I am looking into a career in the artificial intelligence/machine learning field, so if any of you have a career in that or very similar to that I would love to ask you about 10 questions. If you are willing leaving a comment that I could PM you would be amazing. Thanks you for your time, have a great day!

To answer these and many other questions, Kaiser and Jeremy talk to Andrew Ng, founder and chairman of Coursera, an associate professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University, and the chief scientist of Baidu, where he heads up the company's research on deep learning and AI. The discussion delves into the differences between Chinese and American engineers, entrepreneurial culture in China, artificial neural networks, augmented reality, and the role big internet companies and their resources play in advancing AI. Check out the SupChina backgrounder on their conversation here.

Duolingo has been offering language learning tools for a while now, but today the company debuted a new tool inside its iPhone app that could make the task a bit easier. Thanks to AI-powered chatbots, the language-learning app offers a way to have conversations while you're trying to learn French, German and Spanish. That's a short list of languages for now, but Duolingo says more options are on the way. Right now, you can only interact with the chatbots via text, but the company does have plans to add spoken conversations in the future. Duolingo gave these bots a bit of personality to make them more like real people and created them to be flexible with the answers they'll accept when there's multiple ways for you to respond.