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.

Some of the world's largest tech companies are coming together to form a partnership aimed at educating the public about the advancements of artificial intelligence and ensure they meet ethical standards. "We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people's lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education," the group stated in a series of "tenets." Another nexus of interest will be around ethics, with the group inviting academic experts to work with companies on AI for the best of humanity. But it's not clear whether this means opposing working with government surveillance authorities, or opposing forms of online censorship.

The world's largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data's value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns AI. Right now that means companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft have a ton of power.

SoftBank Group Corp. 9984 -2.80 % Chief Executive Masayoshi Son on Friday said he intends to invest around five trillion won ( 4.5 billion) in South Korea's technology sector over the next decade. A SoftBank spokesman said that during a meeting with South Korean President Park Geun-hye in Seoul, the founder of the Japanese telecommunications and internet conglomerate said he intended to invest in fields including smart robots, the "Internet of Things" and artificial intelligence, areas Mr. Son has said would be a focus for his company over the next 30 years. It isn't the first time Mr. Son has shown interest in the South Korean tech sector. Last year SoftBank invested 1 billion in South Korea's largest mobile-commerce company, Coupang, which the companies said was the largest-ever internet investment in South Korea. Friday's meeting comes after SoftBank closed earlier this month its 32 billion deal to acquire U.K. chip maker ARM Holdings PLC in the largest acquisition of a European technology company.

Artificial intelligence is quickly shaping up to be one of the key defining technology areas of our time. A day after announcing a new artificial intelligence partnership with IBM, Google, Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft is upping the ante within its own walls. The tech giant announced that it is creating a new AI business unit, the Microsoft AI and Research Group, which will be led by Microsoft Research EVP Harry Shum. Shum will oversee 5,000 computer scientists, engineers and others who will all be "focused on the company's AI product efforts," the company said in an announcement. The unit will be working on all aspects of AI and how it will be applied at the company, covering agents, apps, services and infrastructure.

The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, launched in the fall of 2014, is a long-term investigation of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its influences on people, their communities, and society. As its core activity, the Standing Committee that oversees the One Hundred Year Study forms a Study Panel every five years to assess the current state of AI. The first Study Panel report, published in September 2016, focusses on eight domains the panelists considered to be most salient: transportation service robots healthcare education low-resource communities public safety and security employment and workplace and entertainment. In each of these domains, the report both reflects on progress in the past fifteen years and anticipates developments in the coming fifteen years. The report also includes recommendations concerning AI-related policy.