For the last year or so, Microsoft has backed artificial intelligence as "the most important technology on the planet" and has released various products that make use of AI. The company's flagship AI product, Cortana, is available to all Windows 10 users - although its capabilities vary depending on which part of the world you're in. Now, the company will be bringing its artificial intelligence research under one umbrella with the formation of the Microsoft AI and Research Group that will include 5000 computer scientists. The AI and Research Group will be headed by Microsoft veteran of 20 years, Harry Shum, who has worked with Microsoft Research and Bing prior to this appointment. The group will bring together various related teams such as Information Platform, Cortana and Bing, and Ambient Computing and Robotics teams.

Second, some companies will simply push back against the idea of bringing in new, possibly complex tech tools. "In the vast majority of those companies, the existing technology infrastructure'does the trick,'" VC Matt Turck writes. "It may not have all the bells and whistles, and many within the organization understand that it will need to be modernized sooner rather than later, but they're not going to rip and replace their mission critical systems overnight."

Called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the group consists of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Executives from four of the five founding members of the Partnership on AI (from left): Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, Francesca Rossi of IBM, Yann LeCun of Facebook and Mustafa Suleyman of Google's DeepMind. Executives from four of the five founding members of the Partnership on AI (from left): Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, Francesca Rossi of IBM, Yann LeCun of Facebook and Mustafa Suleyman of Google's DeepMind. But Banavar hopes the group's work will make its way into educational curricula around the world that will inspire the new generations of AI researchers.

When you perform a Google search for every day queries, you don't typically expect systemic racism to rear its ugly head. Yet, if you're a woman searching for a hairstyle, that's exactly what you might find. A simple Google image search for'women's professional hairstyles' returns the following: Here, you'll find hairstyles, generally done in a professional setting by stylists. It returns what it thinks you're looking for based on contextual clues, citations and link data. In general, and without further context, you could probably pat Google on the back and say'job well done.'

Clarifai, the leading visual recognition AI company that uses sophisticated machine learning to understand images and videos, today announced two new products: Custom Training and Visual Search. Available for developers and businesses of all sizes, these products significantly further Clarifai's mission to empower all developers and businesses to easily build visual recognition solutions into every app and business workflow. Custom Training puts the power to train artificial intelligence into the hands of every developer and business, allowing them to "teach" Clarifai's visual recognition API to understand everything we see in the world around us in a matter of seconds. Users can train concepts as granular as a specific brand of clothing in an image or video, and they can also create "custom models" that recognize specific sub-categories to match their distinct needs (e.g. New concepts can be trained with high accuracy orders of magnitude faster than before, requiring less than ten images per concept as compared to the thousands of images per concept traditional AI training required.

The "opportunities and challenges" of artificial intelligence spurred some of the biggest technology companies in the world to come together Wednesday to announce that they were creating a new organization to ensure that AI ultimately benefits people and society. The Partnership on AI is a non-profit organization bringing together Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, DeepMind/Google and IBM to advance public understanding of AI technologies and formulate best practices. A website for the organization spells out the goals, mission and tenets, and member bios are included for representatives from each of the companies. "Together, the organization's members will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology," the Partnership said in its news release. "It does not intend to lobby government or other policymaking bodies."

If all goes well, American Airlines passengers won't realize that the Fort Worth-based airlines took a key and potentially tricky step on Saturday in its merger with US Airways. The combination of American Airlines and US Airways to create the world's largest carrier was announced in 2013, but the process takes several steps and won't be completed for at least another year or longer. On Saturday, the airplanes and pilots for US Airways will be moved over to the scheduling system of American Airlines. The system is used to determine which planes and which pilots fly each route and to schedules vacations, fill vacancies and arrange pay cycles, among other administrative tasks. To avoid the glitches that plagued previous mergers, American Airlines scheduled the switch for one of the slowest flying times of the year.

When Google-parent Alphabet Inc. reported eye-popping earnings last week its executives couldn't stop talking up the company's investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. For any other company that would be a wonky distraction from its core business. At Google, the two are intertwined. Artificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world. Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and, recently, search.

An unnamed regionally-managed health care provider partnered with ThingWorx's machine learning platform to detect patterns in data that would lead to better patient care and reduce costly readmissions for patients with ischemic heart disease, according to a case study provided by Thingworx. The solution predicts high-risk patients and provides caregivers insight into why flagged patients should receive extra care across their network using health care IoT. The unspecified health care network includes two major hospitals and a network of outpatient and preventative care providers. It has more than 1,000 patient beds, a home health care service, preventive medicine, rehabilitation services, a network of primary care physicians and a range of outpatient services. According to Thingworx, its client is one of the largest health providers in the country.

As the automated, intelligent conversation settles into its role as a major marketing channel, a variety of chatbot authoring platforms have made their entrance. This week, a new one promises to be "the most complete conversational computing platform available." The PullString Platform, based on technology previously employed for Call of Duty's Lt. Reyes chatbot on Facebook Messenger and Mattel's Hello Barbie doll, is now open to the public after five years of development. The company, formerly called ToyTalk, was founded in 2011. About a quarter of the 40-person staff for the San Francisco-based company came from the animation studio Pixar, and the intent is to provide a platform that goes beyond chatbots.