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.

Welcome back for another edition of Under the Decision Tree. This week we had everything from machine learning being applied to cucumber farming, to major tech companies joining up to tackle the ethics of machine learning. Please send any suggestions to: Decision Tree We would love to hear from you.

Alphabet Inc's Google has renamed its business-to-business cloud computing brand and enhanced some enterprise applications using artificial intelligence, the company's latest gambit to better compete with Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp. in the lucrative cloud business. Discussing the rebranded Google Cloud, Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google's enterprise business, said the company has made good progress courting customers and improving its technology. Cloud computing uses remote internet servers to store, manage and process data, and Google offers a range of apps like word processing and email, as well as the ability to host data and offer resources for developers. The new name replaces the Google for Work brand. "We are closing the gap incredibly fast" with competitors, Greene, a former CEO of VMware who joined Google last year to ramp up its cloud business, told experts and journalists at an event.

For all their brilliance, our phones still have as much emotional intelligence as glue. Yet, as electronics become ever more important in our lives, it may make sense to start teaching them to be more aware of our feelings. Early glimpses of such efforts were afoot at a gathering of artificial-intelligence software developers, academics and researchers this week in Manhattan, where several talks focused on finding ways to add emotion into our robots, voice assistants and chatbots. "People are building these very intimate relationships with these companions, but right now these companions have no empathy," Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of emotional-recognition tech firm Affectiva, said onstage Tuesday at the inaugural O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. Teaching robots about emotion illustrates both the promise and huge challenges involved in developing AI tools. Artificial intelligence, which lets machines mimic human learning and problem solving, is already used to improve Google searches and scan Facebook photos for faces.