H2O.ai, a startup that offers commercial support for open-source machine learning software, last week laid off 10 percent of its employees, mainly in sales, VentureBeat has learned. Cofounder and chief executive Sri Ambati confirmed the move -- which affects nine people, including contractors, out of a total of roughly 90 -- in an interview with VentureBeat. Ambati put the layoffs in the context of broad strategic changes at H20. The startup has stopped trying to generate revenue from lots of users of its free open-source software and is instead seeking to work very closely with a few major customers. Then, next year, Ambati said, H20 can introduce new cloud services that can be promoted through more conventional sales and marketing tactics.

Spansion adds a pair of HyperBus capable microcontrollers to their collection. The two new FM4 systems are based on the ARM Cortex-M4. One includes a 2D graphics engine with on-board VRAM while the other includes voice recognition software and hardware support. The graphics family includes support for Spansion's HyperBus, a fast, off-chip memory access system (see "How HyperBus Delivers 330 Mbyte/s Using A Dozen Signals"). Both families support QSPI and SPI memories and peripherals.

For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway. Now, five of the world's largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of AI to humans, researchers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of AI on jobs, transportation and even warfare. Tech companies have for long promised what artificially intelligent machines can do.

Manulife has announced a new Lab of Forward Thinking (LOFT) location in Singapore, its third technology hub. LOFT, with existing operations in Toronto and Boston, explores emerging technologies in efforts to leverage them for its asset management and insurance businesses. "Our goal is to become the most customer-centric organization in our industry," said Roy Gori, president and CEO, Manulife Asia, in a statement. "Through the LOFT, we encourage experimentation, incubation and collaboration to find the answers we need to best serve our customers." Over the last six months, existing LOFTs have announced partnerships with ConsenSys, BlockApps, Nervana Systems and indico data solutions.

Research in artificial intelligence (AI) is known to have impacted medical diagnosis, stock trading, robot control, and several other fields. Perhaps less popular is the contribution of AI in the field of music. Nevertheless, Artificial intelligence and music (AIM) has, for a long time, been a common subject in several conferences and workshops, including the International Computer Music Conference, the Computing Society Conference and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

No one would accuse Google Translate, the favored tool of unscholarly high school language students everywhere, of being an inaccurate interpreter. The 10-year-old internet interpreter can fluently translate more than 100 tongues, recognize foreign restaurant menus and signage, and differentiate between dialects in real time. The project is called Google Neural Machine Translation, or GNMT, and it isn't strictly speaking new. It was first employed to improve the efficiency of single-sentence translations, explained Google engineers Quoc V. Le and Mike Schuster, and did so ingesting individual words and phrases before spitting out a translation. But the team discovered that the algorithm was just as effective at handling entire sentences -- even reducing errors by as much as 60 percent.

Microsoft says it has formed a new 5,000-person engineering and research team to focus on its artificial intelligence products -- a major reshaping of the company's internal structure reminiscent of its massive pivot to pursue the opportunity of the Internet in the mid-1990s. "We are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in computing that is unlike anything we have seen in decades," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an internal email to employees this morning, the text of which was obtained by GeekWire. The company also confirmed internally this morning that eight-year Microsoft veteran Qi Lu, the top executive in charge of Office, Bing and related products, will be leaving the company "to focus all his time on recovering from health conditions caused by a prior injury," according to Nadella's email. Recode reports that Lu was in a bicycle accident several months ago. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group, to be led by Microsoft Research chief Harry Shum, establishes a fourth engineering division inside the company, along with the Office, Windows and cloud groups.

Analysis The invitation for Google's latest cloud sales pitch, dubbed "Horizon" because the company has already had its way with "Atmosphere", on Thursday directed attendees to The Mint. As San Franciscans know, and Google Search advises to those in the area, The Mint is a karaoke bar, not far from the San Francisco Mint, which began churning out legal tender in 1937. The actual location of the affair turned out to be the Old US Mint, a classical edifice that, through the marketing value of its facade, now helps companies advance their efforts to print money. The cloud, for Google, represents something of a climb. As of August, Google trailed Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM in public infrastructure-as-a-service marketshare, by the measure of Synergy Research Group.

No, an intelligent robot isn't ready to take over (most) legal jobs. But machine learning has the potential to transform many legal services.

RAVN Systems, leading experts in Artificial Intelligence, Search and Knowledge Management solutions, announced today the launch of a RAVN ACE powered Robot for LPP (Legal Professional Privilege) review, allowing clients to automate the review of determining if material is subject to LPP. The LPP Robot uses state of the art AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques to automatically read through vast document collections, such as case material in litigation, as well as other document types, to determine whether individual items are subject to LPP. The accuracy levels achieved by the Robot making these determinations now surpass traditional manual efforts and is several orders of magnitude faster. The solution exploits supervised iterative Machine Learning models inside the RAVN ACE (Applied Cognitive Engine) platform, meaning the Robot will become more accurate over time. It is a technological leap from legacy predictive coding methods that sometimes are used today.