The way humans interact with machines is at an inflection point and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is at the center of the transformation. Alexa, the voice service that powers Amazon Echo, enables customers to interact with the world around them in a more intuitive way using only their voice. The Alexa Prize is an annual competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI. The inaugural competition is focused on creating a socialbot, a new Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events. Participating teams will advance several areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning.

Inc. (AMZN) have come together to form a non-profit partnership for artificial intelligence. Called the "Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society," the venture is intended to promote understanding of artificial intelligence in the public domain and, also, is a means for the companies to collaborate and publish research regarding the technology under an open license. The list of topics that it intends to cover is broad and range from ethics and fairness in AI to interoperability and collaboration between people and AI systems. Tesla Motors Corp. (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk's organization OpenAI and Apple Inc. (AAPL) are notable absentees from the list of organizations in this partnership. With its Siri chatbot that assists smartphone users, Apple is an AI pioneer and is said to be ramping up its investments in this space.

As the Publisher and Editor for App Developer Magazine, Richard has several industry recognitions and endorsements from tech companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google for accomplishments in the mobile market. He was part of the early Google AFMA program, and also involved in the foundation of Google TV. He has been developing for mobile since 2003 and serves as CEO of Moonbeam Development, a mobile app company with 200 published titles in various markets throughout the world. Richard is also the founder of LunarAds, a mobile cross-promotion and self-serv mediation network for developers. He has been a featured presenter at trade-shows and conferences, and stays active with new projects relating to mobile development.

It seems like we hear about a new breakthrough using machine learning nearly every day, but it's not easy. In order to fine-tune algorithms that recognize and predict patterns in data, you need to feed them massive amounts of already-tagged information to test and learn from. For researchers, that's where two recently-released archives from Google will come in. Joining other high-quality datasets, Open Images and YouTube8-M provide millions of annotated links for researchers to train their processes on. The Open Images set comes from a collaboration between Google, Carnegie Mellon and Cornell, with 9 million entries that were tagged by computers first before having those notes verified and corrected by humans.

SAN FRANCISCO – A high-profile Google event Tuesday is widely expected to highlight a new emphasis on hardware, challenging rivals Apple and Amazon and launching a new strategy for the online giant. While the company has offered no official preview, it is expected to unveil a new line of Google-branded smartphones, a tablet and a home virtual assistant. Analysts anticipate that the internet titan will expand on a vision laid out by chief Sundar Pichai at its developers conference early this year. The strategy would seek to take Google's strength in software and merge that with its devices as Apple, Amazon and smartphone leader Samsung all work to get a tighter grip on consumers. Google fired off a Twitter message with hashtag #madebygoogle and a video of what appeared to be a long rectangular search term box morphing into a silhouette of a smartphone.

Silicon Valley is going to war against disease, cancer, aging, and perhaps even death, with advanced computing, AI and machine learning, genomics, DNA engineering, biotech and nanotech. Tech giants and mega-rich philanthropists are spending billions to permit hacking biology all the way down to DNA, and perhaps we could see breakthroughs in only a few years. Yes! Together we can cure disease by the end of the century. Zuckerberg and his wife, physician and educator Priscilla Chan, have enlisted a "dream team" of scientific leaders to oversee a US 3-billion effort to boost basic research, Nature News reports. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has been launched with the goal of helping cure, prevent and manage all diseases in our children's lifetime.

Bank of America analysts claim there's a 20-50% chance we currently live in the Matrix. SpaceX founder and Tesla motors co-founder Elon Musk is one of those who is almost certain that there is a chance that our world is being run by artificial intelligence developed by a future civilization. Nick Bostrum's report: http://www.simulation-argument.com/si... Baby Mice Created From Sperm Alone (No Female Needed) https://youtu.be/voSmUk2e7yY HOW TO BECOME BATMAN IN REAL LIFE https://youtu.be/CL62CGI2wQY Top 5 Accidental Deaths (Darwin Awards) https://youtu.be/4XDtbRTWIvg 5 Times Pokemon Go Ended In Murder & Mayhem!

Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Google's DeepMind subsidiary have agreed to create a non-profit organisation that will work to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) and come up with best practices for the sector. The alliance, dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, has a stated aim to "conduct research, recommend best practices and publish research under an open licence in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems;

Will artificial intelligence replace humans, or assist humans? We'll see this debate play out over and over, from the Westworld HBO television show that begins on Sunday to tech events that happen every week in the valley. I recently moderated a debate about artificial intelligence in the CEO suite at the NetEvents Global Press & Analyst Summit at the beautiful Mountain Winery in Saratoga, Calif. A.I. is on an accelerated improvement path. Deep learning neural networks have made huge progress in the last five years. We're seeing improvements in tech such as voice recognition, face recognition, autonomous cars are coming. So the question is, will we have The Terminator and Skynet? Or Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is aided by all the computers that he needs? Science fiction has taught us to distrust A.I. and to believe in human intuition, instead. But what happens in the CEO suite?