Google will this week launch the first smartphones that carry its own brand and design, as part of a batch of new devices aimed at competing in markets with Apple and Amazon. The new gadgets, which will include a voice-responsive "smart speaker" modeled on Amazon's Echo, are the first products of a new hardware division set up earlier this year. Google has in the past mainly developed hardware to show off its software and services and to encourage other consumer tech companies to create a mass market for the technology. But like Microsoft, whose Surface has become the leading product in a new category of tablet/laptop hybrids, Google has been drawn deeper into developing its own distinctive products. The new devices are about Google "owning more of the hardware category", said Jan Dawson, senior analyst at Jackdaw Research, though the main impetus will still be "about showing partners the way forward".

A new robot for lonely people made by Toyota Motor Corp. can do little other than chatter in a high-pitched voice. The 39,800, 10-cm-tall, doll-like Kirobo Mini -- whose name comes from kibo (hope) and robot -- supposedly has the smarts of a 5-year-old. Its value, according to general manager in charge of the project Fuminori Kataoka, is chiefly emotional. It comes equipped with a camera, microphone and Bluetooth, and connects to smartphones installed with a certain app. Ideally, it will turn its head toward the speaker, though that function sometimes fails because its voice recognition ability is far from perfect.

Five years of owning smartphones has conditioned my thumbs to navigate tiny virtual keyboards with speed and precision. I imagine many feel the same way, given smartphone owners worldwide are spending between 50 and 200 minutes every week using messaging apps. Yet an increasing number of voice dictation apps are making it easier than ever to communicate not with our thumbs, but with our voices. The latest example of such an app is TalkType, an Android keyboard created by Baidu Research and launching Monday. What separates TalkType from the myriad other smartphone keyboards out there is that its users aren't greeted with a QWERTY typing pad, but rather a round microphone icon.

In 2008, international financial and banking markets were hit by the economic crisis, which was the result of bursting the so called credit bubble. The title "Decision Tree" is a mechanism, which was for many years, successfully used for determining creditworthiness. The movie tells the story of a group of specialists who notice that banks stopped acting according to the procedures, and are giving out loans to people, who have no chance of paying them back. "Do you have a loan?" and "Did you have any problems in paying the loan installments in the last 12 months?"

When a different analytic model is used in training versus deployment, results can be disastrous. Here's how to avoid the anti-pattern. I recently stumbled over a great slide deck presented by Netflix engineers about "Design Patterns for Real World Machine Learning Systems." The presentation warns of a dangerous "anti-pattern" when applying analytic models to production systems. The anti-pattern, aka the "Phantom Menace," basically involves using different platforms, tools and technologies to develop and deploy an analytic model.

While idea of the "killer app" has turned out to be mostly hyperbole, the prediction that bots are "app killers" seems to be coming to fruition. With messaging platforms like Slack and WeChat offering convenient methods of communication with A.I.-based interactions and Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa removing the need for touch or visual interaction, bots are quickly usurping the app craze by driving more efficient business practices than ever before. Well on their way to the tipping point that apps reached years ago, bots are skyrocketing upward. Early adopters have ensured that these innovative tools will grow into increasingly indispensable roles. In order to take full advantage of the expanding bot market, businesses need to know when to get on board.

Machines enrich and enhance our lives, whether it's the smartphones that allow us to stay connected or the supercomputers that solve our toughest computational problems. Imagine how much more productive and innovative our world will be when computers become infinitely more powerful. Indeed, the growing field of quantum computing may make our current technological capacities look feeble and primitive in comparison. It could even transform the workings of the human brain and revolutionize how we think in ways we can't begin to imagine. Today, computers operate at the most basic level by manipulating two states: a zero or a one.

We've been providing commentary for the past two years on the potential for AI and IoT to solve the huge inefficiencies in food production – a huge positive disruption…now we are seeing the first practical uses. From Engadget;" Artificial intelligence technology doesn't just have to solve grand challenges. Sometimes, it can tackle decidedly everyday problems -- like, say, improving a cucumber farm. Makoto Koike has built a cucumber sorter that uses Google's TensorFlow machine learning technology to save his farmer parents a lot of work. The system uses a camera-equipped Raspberry Pi 3 to snap photos of the veggies and send the shots to a small TensorFlow neural network, where they're identified as cucumbers. After that, it sends images to a larger network on a Linux server to classify the cucumbers by attributes like colour, shape and size. An Arduino Micro uses that info to control the actual sorting, while a Windows PC trains the neural network with images. Koike estimates that it takes about 2-3 days to train the sorting AI, even using very low-resolution (80 x 80) pictures. And even the 7,000 photos Koike used for that training probably weren't enough. While the sorter recognized 95 percent of test images, real-world sorting dipped to about 70 percent. Having said that, it's not the immediate results that matter."…more…

In the 2013 film Her, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a computer operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The relationship embodies a shared vision of a future when human connections are radically changed by interactions with computers powered by artificial intelligence (AI). That reality is actually not far away. Amazon's Echo listening device has transformed the market. The device is controlled by a user's voice and is always listening for commands such as questions about the weather or the latest sport scores.

The journal has a broad scope and publishes high quality papers on all aspects of computational intelligence and artificial intelligence related to games. TCIAIG has been accepted into the Thomson Reuters Web of Science and will, by mid-2012, have an Impact Factor listed in the Journal Citation Report (JCR). The journal is co-sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society and the IEEE Sensors Council. It is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and the IEEE Communications Society.