Even though it was billed as a hardware event, Google's product launch Tuesday was really about artificial intelligence, which is now under the hood of almost all the new gear coming out this year. The power of Google's computer brain is a result of all the searching you and everyone else in the world have done on Google over the years. And now the company is using all that data to build a voice-enabled personal assistant, which will debut on Pixel, Google's new smartphone, as well as Google Home, the company's answer to Amazon's Echo. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said they've gotten really good at helping people figure out what they want to know. Google's Knowledge Graph, that small box on the top of search results with the quick answer you're looking for, now holds 70 billion facts, all of which help power its new AI assistant.

Microsoft Corp. announced on Thursday that it will be expanding its artificial intelligence efforts by launching the Microsoft AI and Research Group. The organization, which will be led by Harry Shum, will bring together more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers. "We live in a time when digital technology is transforming our lives, businesses and the world, but also generating an exponential growth in data and information," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement. "At Microsoft, we are focused on empowering both people and organizations, by democratizing access to intelligence to help solve our most pressing challenges. To do this, we are infusing AI into everything we deliver across our computing platforms and experiences."

Following a AU 1.2 million investment, the Victorian government, in conjunction with the Transport Accident Commission and VicRoads, has partnered with automotive parts giant Bosch for the development of the first self-driving vehicle in Australia. According to Victorian Minister for Roads and Road Safety Luke Donnellan, the vehicle under construction in Clayton, Victoria, has been designed to navigate roads with or without driver input and includes the ability to detect and avoid hazards such as pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. "By removing human error from the equation, self-driving vehicles will play a critical role in reducing deaths and serious injuries on Victorian roads," Donnellan said. "This self-driving car is at the forefront of automated vehicle technology and it's been developed right here in Melbourne by local engineers." The minister said trials of the self-driving vehicle will be used to inform the development of regulations and infrastructure to enable similar cars to operate on the state's roads in the future.

Back in 2010, an Intel researcher said 1,000-core processors would be feasible. We're in that era, and the race to make chips faster and more power efficient is gaining steam. The latest mega-chip is a 1,024-core processor called Epiphany V, which was announced by Adapteva on Wednesday. Adapteva claims it will have enough juice to outperform some of the latest gaming and server processors. It has a mere 24 more cores than the 1,000-core KiloCore, a test chip made by researchers at University of California, Davis.

There are two main approaches to machine learning – supervised and unsupervised – and each has specific applications in the context of healthcare. And even though their impact has not yet sent shockwaves through the industry, the potential of each is enormous, according to John Guttag, head of the Data Driven Inference Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. At its basic level, machine learning involves looking at data, and from that data finding information that is not readily visible. Example: Applying machine learning to data about patients infected with Zika or another virus and using what we can learn about what happens to those people to inform care decisions regarding the best ways to treat people who get infected in the future. "Typically we use machine learning to build inference tools, where we find patterns in existing data that allow us – when presented with new data – to infer something interesting about that data," said Guttag.

KDnuggets recently ran an Automated Data Science and Machine Learning blog contest, which garnered numerous entries and lots of appreciation for the winning posts and a pair of honorable mentions. The winning post, titled Contest Winner: Winning the AutoML Challenge with Auto-sklearn, written by Matthias Feurer, Aaron Klein, and Frank Hutten, all of the University of Freiburg, provides an overview of Auto-sklearn, an open-source Python tool that automatically determines effective machine learning pipelines for classification and regression datasets. The project is built around the successful scikit-learn library and won the recent AutoML challenge. Given the popularity of the post, we asked the authors if they would be interested in answering a few followup questions on themselves, their project, and automated data science in general. What follows is the result of this conversation. What if we start by having you introduce the members of the team and provide a little information on each of your backgrounds?

Ahead of the product announcements, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to the stage to say that technology development today has reached a "seminal moment" by shifting from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world. Building on years of work and investment in machine learning, he added, Google is marking that shift by bringing its intelligent Google Assistant to both the new Pixel phones and the new smart Google Home device. Designed and built by Google, the Pixel smartphones -- available for pre-ordering beginning today at a base price of 649 -- will also be the first phones to have built-in support for the company's new Daydream virtual-reality system. The 129 Google Home can also be pre-ordered starting today and are set to begin shipping on Nov. 4. "We're at a seminal moment in computing," Pichai said at the start of today's even.

"It was customary in old times for all Authors to enter the world of letters on their knees, and with uncovered head, and a bow of charming meekness write themselves some brainless dolt's "most humble and obedient servant." In later days, the same feigned subserviency has shown itself in other forms. One desires that some will kindly pardon the weakness and imbecility of his production; for, although these faults may exist in his book, he wrote under "most adverse circumstances," as the crying of a hopeful child, the quarrels of his poultry, and other disasters of the season. Another, clothed with the mantle of the sweetest self-complacency, looks out from his Preface, like a sun-dog on the morning sky, and merely shines out the query, "Am I not a Sun?" while he secures a retreat for his self-love, in case any body should suppose he ever indulged such a singular sentiment. They hold out to the world no need of aid in laying the foundations of their fame; and, however adverse the opinions of the times may be to their claims to renownThe Oregon Territory forms the terminus of these Travels; and, as that country is an object of much interest on both sides of the Atlantic, I have thought proper to preface my wanderings there by a brief discussion of the question as to whom it belongs.

In recent months we've seen investments in artificial intelligence (AI) from all the big players – Google, Salesforce, Amazon, and Microsoft – which suggest that AI everywhere may not be that far off. One area where AI is poised to make a big impact is in sales. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85 percent of all B2B transactions will take place without human intervention. With that in mind, could your sales team eventually be replaced by robots? The experts suggest that AI could do a lot to help salespeople accomplish their targets and let them focus on what really matters – closing deals.

San Francisco (AFP) - Google took on rivals Apple, Samsung and Amazon in a new push into hardware, launching premium-priced Pixel smartphones and a slew of other devices showcasing artificial intelligence prowess. The unveiling of Google's in-house designed phone came as part of an expanded hardware move by the US company, which also revealed details about its new "home assistant" virtual reality headset and Wi-Fi router system. The San Francisco event marked a shift in strategy for Google, which is undertaking a major drive to make Google Assistant artificial intelligence a futuristic force spanning all kinds of internet-linked devices. "We are evolving from a mobile-first world to an AI-first world," Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said. "Our goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user."