In an effort to reflect consumers growing dependency on customized mobile interactions, Google s new branded smartphone, Pixel, contains a fully integrated artificial intelligence assistant alongside complete virtual reality compatibility. During the live stream of yesterday s product unveiling event, Google lifted the curtain on its newest machine learning and AI capabilities, revealing its answer to Apple s virtual assistant, Siri, as well as its latest offering into the smart home device space. The search giant s executives highlighted the world s ongoing shift from being mobile-first to AI-first, signaling that other heavyweights in the consumer technology sector including Apple and Amazon could face stark competition from Google in this respect. We re at a seminal moment in computing, said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, during yesterday s live stream. Our goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user.

Time for "How Scared Should I Be?" the column that quantifies the scariness of everything under the sun and teaches you how to allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear. The singularity is a hypothesis from computer scientist and novelist Vernor Vinge, who said in 1993 that technology is about to cause a shift as dramatic as the emergence of life on Earth, and that afterward "the human era will be ended." By this he meant that, for better or worse, computers will be running shit. Some futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, think that when the singularity hits, it's going to be fucking awesome. Ever-improving machines will start repairing our cells from the inside, thinking for us whenever we don't want to think, and generally making everything better.

Humans have so far failed to keep up with the scale and sophistication of cyber attacks -- so security companies are now starting to put their faith in artificial intelligence to protect networks from hackers. From Apple to Twitter, tech companies are snapping up artificial intelligence start-ups and using the technology to do everything from predicting customer behaviour to interacting with users via virtual personal assistants. For security companies, the growth of more sophisticated artificial intelligence promises the opportunity to catch up with hackers, who experts say have the upper hand. For example, as the industry struggles to find qualified engineers, many companies are turning to artificial intelligence to supplement their workforces. Tomer Weingarten, chief executive at security software provider SentinelOne, says cyber security is one of artificial intelligence's most promising applications. "It can look at all the behaviours and interactions that happen on a given machine, the malware [cyber attack software], what happens when someone is attacking you, to learn what'badness' looks like, how an attacker behaves and what they will do once they try to compromise the device," he says.

"Amy" saves entrepreneur Gillian Morris about 43 productive hours a year. Morris, the founder of Hitlist, a travel app that alerts users to cheap flights, has been using Amy, a virtual assistant from x.ai for about two years, to schedule meetings. To ask for Amy's help, Morris sends an email to the person or people she wants to meet with and copies Amy. From there, Amy takes Morris out of the email chain and handles the back and forth about dates and times. Morris estimates Amy schedules about 10 meetings for her a week, and spares her from having to read or respond to any related emails herself.

IBM Research and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have joined forces to further develop the scientific field of machine vision – a core aspect of artificial intelligence. Big Blue and MIT will build the IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension, or BM3C, in Cambridge, Mass. Together they plan to develop cognitive computing systems that mimic the human ability to understand and integrate input from multiple sources for use in a variety of computer applications in industries such as healthcare, education, and entertainment. MIT researchers will collaborate with IBM scientists and engineers who will provide technology expertise and advances from the IBM Watson platform. The BM3C will address technical challenges around both pattern recognition and prediction methods in the field of machine vision that are currently impossible for machines alone to accomplish.

One day, not too long from now, we're going to encounter the greatest unemployment emergency in human history. Whether that will be good or bad depends altogether on how we prepare for it. What happens when innovation propels so far that machine intelligence can play out all human work? It might sound pleasant at first – maybe even utopian – however the implications are more startling than you might suspect. Artificial intelligence is as of now being utilized to supplant a few tasks, even in common white collar jobs.

In the midst of a protracted squabble, the union representing voice actors has come up with a contract for low-budget indie game developers. SAG-AFTRA is promoting a new agreement for titles under 250,000 that would limit difficult vocal sessions (presumably involving yelling or other vocal gymnastics) to two hours. Actors would also be paid double for such work, and collect residuals above the normal rate ( 825.50 for four hours) for games that sell 500,000 units or more. SAG-AFTRA threatened a strike last year after its previous agreement expired, and negotiations with indie game producers for a new one broke down. Actor and alpha geek Wil Wheaton unwittingly became the poster boy for the cause after tweeting support for the union and explaining in a post why actors need a new deal.

Google ratcheted up its rivalry with Apple and Amazon by unveiling new smartphones, an internet-connected speaker that channels a digital assistant, and other gadgets the company hopes to make indispensable. The devices announced Tuesday are part of Google's bold move to design and sell its own hardware, instead of just supplying Android and other software for other companies to make products. Google's previous attempts at hardware have had limited distribution and included such high-profile flops as its internet-connected Glass headgear. This time around, Google is betting that it can design software and hardware to work seamlessly with each other. That's an art Apple mastered over the past 15 years as it turned out finely crafted iPods, iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Neural attention has been applied successfully to a variety of different applications including natural language processing, vision, and memory. An attractive aspect of these neural models is their ability to extract relevant features from data, with minimal feature engineering.Brian Cheung is a PhD Student at UC Berkeley working with Professor Bruno Olshausen, as well as an Intern at Google Brain. By drawing inspiration from the fields of neuroscience and machine learning, he hopes to create systems which can solve complex vision tasks using attention and memory. At the Deep Learning Summit in Singapore, Brian will share expertise on the fovea as an emergent property of visual attention, ways we can extend this ability to learning interpretable structural features of the attention window itself, and finding conditions where these emergent properties are amplified or eliminated providing clues to their function. I asked him a few questions ahead of the summit to learn more.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)