For a deep dive into emerging AI techniques and technologies, join us September 26-27, 2016, for the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York. If a figure be anyhow divided and the compartments differently coloured so that figures with any portion of common boundary line are differently coloured--four colours may be wanted, but not more--the following is the case in which four colours are wanted. Query cannot a necessity for five or more be invented. That is, you'll never need more than four colors on an ordinary two-dimensional map in order to color every country differently from the countries adjoining it. A proof for the four-color conjecture evaded mathematicians until 1976, when Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken announced a solution.

Machine learning – the technology which allows machines to learn from data and self-improve – has significant potential for advancing a range of industries, as we've previously discussed in relation to manufacturing and the professions. On 8 September, the Royal Society held a workshop on the use of machine learning in the UK pharmaceutical sector. We explored what machine learning could do, and barriers to its use, with global pharmaceutical companies, sector associations, regulators, start-ups and SMEs. This blog post gives a few highlights from the discussion. Its ability to spot patterns in large volumes of data gives machine learning a range of applications in the pharmaceutical sector.

To Baldi, scientists should embrace deep learning without being "too anal" about the black box.

Right now, your apples are harvested by humans. But Washington may soon face a shortage of apple pickers: as soon as 2021, according to Washington State University economist Karina Gallardo. The labor pool is shrinking with tougher immigration enforcement and a growing Mexican economy. The solution could be automation - as in robots. But don't expect to see them soon.

SEOUL: Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Thursday it is acquiring U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) platform developer Viv Labs Inc, a firm run by a co-creator of Apple Inc's Siri voice assistant programme. Samsung said in a statement it plans to integrate the San Jose-based company's AI platform, called Viv, into the Galaxy smartphones and expand voice-assistant services to home appliances and wearable technology devices. Technology firms are locked in an increasingly heated race to make AI good enough to let consumers interact with their devices more naturally, especially via voice. Alphabet Inc's Google is widely considered to be the leader in AI, but others including Amazon.com, Apple and Microsoft have also launched their own offerings including voice-powered digital assistants. Samsung, the world's top smartphone maker, is also hoping to differentiate its devices, from phones to fridges, by incorporating AI.

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.

At the Gigaom Change conference in Austin, Texas, on September 21-23, 2016, Manoj Saxena (Chairman of CognitiveScale), Josh Sutton (Head of Data & Artificial Intelligence at Publicis Sapient) and Rob High (CTO for IBM Watson) talked with moderator and market strategist, Patricia Baumhart, about the next frontier in artificial intelligence and how the race to win in AI will soon reshape our world. Artificial intelligence is a field with a long history starting as early as 1956, but today what we're beginning to see emerge is a new convergence of 6 major technologies: AI, cloud, mobile, social, big data and blockchain. Each of the panelists agreed that as we enter into the next digital frontier, AI will be woven into each of these areas causing a "super-convergence" of capabilities. Saxena predicts that "this age of the Internet is going to look small by comparison to what's happening in AI." It's true. The proliferation of AI creates a new world of application and computation design, including embodied cognition in concierge-style robots that help when we need assistance.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

My team and I attended several legaltech-focused conferences this month and of course, as expected, machine learning and AI were the topics that everyone wanted to discuss in between sessions. Yet interestingly, at the Emerging Legal Technology Forum put on by Legalx, one of the panelists -- Mark Tamminga, leader of innovation initiatives at at Gowling WLG -- was against using these terms in reference to emerging legal technologies. He pointed out that often what is being called AI is really not that at all, and felt that these words were being used as fancy buzzwords that escape the real mechanics of these technologies. As someone deeply involved in the development community here in Toronto, I wholeheartedly agree with his perspective. Many of the conversations occurring in legaltech around what people are calling machine learning are actually algorithmic solutions preprogrammed (that's right, programmed by humans) to do a particular task; nothing that deviates greatly from anything that's already been done many years ago.

Another big application of this pattern is routing support tickets. Although this sounds simple, it's actually rather complicated. For those of you who run consumer apps or services, you must be accustomed to getting tons of customer feedback. If you process this feedback right and in a timely manner, you can deliver an amazing customer experience. But one big issue is that, if your app or service were to experience exponential growth, your support costs also go up exponentially, because as a business you do want to try your best to look at every support issue/ticket.