Today, right now, is a transformative moment. You are as likely to read this on your phone or tablet as you are on a laptop or in print. Every company wants to remodel itself as a lean, mean digital disruptor. Hotel companies look in awe at Airbnb, whose digital model propelled them from nowhere to a 30-billion valuation. A hotel giant that owns no rooms – groundbreaking.

Some of the biggest names in tech are collaborating on artificial intelligence. The Partnership on AI (inventive name, it is not) has brought together Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, and others to debate best practices and host A.I.-related events. The Partnership on AI isn't the first high-profile collaboration among tech luminaries to tackle the heavy questions surrounding artificial intelligence and machine learning. Earlier this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk joined with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and others to launch OpenAI, a non-profit "artificial intelligence research company" devoted to developing A.I. that's friendly to humanity. While both OpenAI and the Partnership on AI are focused on promoting ethical A.I. research, as well as advancing public understanding of the potential (and pitfalls) of machine learning, OpenAI has pushed ahead in offering materials and toolkits for researchers.

An artificial intelligence agent developed by two Carnegie Mellon University computer science students has proven to be the game's ultimate survivor --, outplaying both the game's built-in AI agents and human players. The students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, used deep-learning techniques to train the AI agent to negotiate the game's 3-D environment, still challenging after more than two decades because players must act based only on the portion of the game visible on the screen. Their work follows the groundbreaking work of Google's DeepMind, which used deep-learning methods to master two-dimensional Atari 2600 videogames and, earlier this year, defeat a world-class professional player in the board game Go. In contrast to the limited information provided in Doom, both Atari and Go give players a view of the entire playing field. "The fact that their bot could actually compete with average human beings is impressive," said Ruslan Salakhutdinov, an associate professor of machine learning who was not involved in the student project.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Here's a taste of what's to come: In contrast to the usual approach to operating self-driving cars, we did not program any explicit object detection, mapping, path planning or control components into this car. Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers.

The worlds of AI, Deep Learning and Machine Intelligence are rapidly evolving and it's hard to keep up! To help you get up-to-date we've rounded up the latest must-see AI news, interviews and videos. RE•WORK Blogs Neural Attention: Machine Learning Meets Neuroscience Neural attention has been applied successfully to a variety of different applications including NLP, vision, and memory. We spoke to Brian Cheung, from UC Berkeley & Google Brain, to learn more about the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning. Machine Intelligence Is Transforming Genomics & Precision Medicine New applications for deep learning are rapidly emerging, with healthcare often touted as the industry to be most disrupted by AI.

The first Microsoft Machine Learning & Data Science Summit concluded earlier this week in Atlanta. Speakers at the Summit included thought leaders, engineers and practitioners from Microsoft and our customers and partners. The Summit featured the very latest in the areas of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and covered a swathe of techniques including several popular Open Source technologies. The Summit gave participants a chance to connect in person with peer engineers, data scientists, ML practitioners, managers and decision makers, and to share tips and tricks. Participants were able to connect with speakers at a specially organized "Meet the Speakers" forum, where they even got answers to questions concerning their specific challenges or work projects.

It was the best of times p His photographs capture the culture of rock and punk music; the beguiling moments with the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, Dead Boys, Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch and many more as they made New York's CBGB club their home in the late 1970s. John Thackwray, a French and South African commercial filmmaker and photographer, has traveled the globe since 2010, and photographed over 1,200 bedrooms of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. More than a decade ago, the European Space Agency launched an orbiter named Rosetta, bound on a circuitous voyage to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In the years since, Rosetta has been drawn in and flung along by multiple gravity assist maneuvers, visiting the Earth three times and making … A few weeks ago we suggested you follow 5 topics that cover the more basic aspects of the business of blogging. Today let's focus on something equally important: the life of a blogger. This week I attended MMA SM2 Innovation Summit in New York, which took place during Advertising Week.

Tech giants Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Google's DeepMind, Facebook have joined forces to create a non-profit alliance called Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society that will work to advance public understanding of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) and formulate best practices on the challenges and opportunities within the field. Academics, non-profits, and specialists in policy and ethics will be invited to join the Board of the organization. The objective of the partnership is to address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society. 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 organization's founding members will each contribute financial and research resources to the partnership and will share leadership with independent third-parties, including academics, user group advocates, and industry domain experts.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled a new GPU-powered cloud computing service for artificial intelligence, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and other applications that need vast amounts of parallel processing power. AWS said its P2 instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) are aimed at applications that require "massive parallel floating point performance" . "These instances were designed to chew through tough, large-scale machine learning, deep learning, computational fluid dynamics, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and computational finance workloads," said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS. While GPUs were first associated with gaming, they're now finding a new life in dealing with huge computing workloads, as they can be scaled out so that banks of GPUs handle tasks in parallel. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of scaling up, where increasingly complex problems were tackled using individual machines with ever faster CPUs, which is becoming increasingly hard to do.

HiringSolved, a technology company that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems for talent acquisition practitioners, has introduced RAI, an artificial intelligence assistant for recruiters. RAI is built upon HiringSolved's TalentFeed search engine, which uses a layered approach to search relevance, combining multiple scoring algorithms to find the best results. Similarly, RAI's flexible Knowledge Engine provides recruiters with detailed insights about companies, skills, title concentrations and specific people that can be sorted based on location, gender and more. Specifically regarding diversity, RAI is able to predict candidates' genders through HiringSolved's Diversity Search tool, which uses proprietary data that HiringSolved has access to, as opposed to relying on published statistics as most companies do. For instance, if a recruiter wants to know Google's male-female ratio, the engine analyzes every employee working for Google, predicting their gender with an error rate of 3%, and computing the ratio.