A group of self-driving Uber vehicles are lined up to take journalists on rides during a media preview at the company's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh earlier this month. A group of self-driving Uber vehicles are lined up to take journalists on rides during a media preview at the company's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh earlier this month. The U.S. government wants to help you take your hands off the wheel. The Department of Transportation on Tuesday issued its Federal Automated Vehicle Policy, which outlines how manufacturers and developers can assure safe design of driverless vehicles, tells states what responsibilities they will have and points out potential new tools for ensuring safety. Regulators say they want to prepare for the transition to self-driving vehicles, which they say will save money, time and lives.

Autonomous robots and other AI systems still don't do a great job of understanding the world around them, but IBM and MIT think they can do better. They've begun a "multi-year" partnership that aims to improve AI's ability to interpret sight and sound as well as humans. IBM will supply the expertise and technology from its Watson cognitive computing platform, while MIT will conduct research. It's still very early, but the two already have a sense of what they can accomplish. One of the biggest challenges will be to advance pattern recognition and prediction.

IBM and MIT announced a joint research partnership with the aim of creating artificial intelligence that understands audio and visual data the way people do. At a high level, IBM Research and MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences are forming the IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension's (BM3C). There, researchers will work to develop cognitive computing systems that can overcome the technical challenges surrounding pattern recognition and predictions methods. As IBM explains, a human can watch a short video of an event and easily describe what is happening during the video and even predict the likelihood of subsequent events. For machines, this ability is currently impossible, IBM says.

Forget PCs and servers: D-Wave Systems is looking into the future with its quantum computer, up to 1,000 times faster than an earlier model. The company will start shipping a quantum computer with 2,000 qubits, twice the size of its current 1,000-qubit D-Wave 2X. The D-Wave 2X is considered one of the most advanced computers in the world today. The 2,000-qubit quantum computer will be 500 to 1000 times faster than its predecessor, said Jeremy Hilton, senior vice president of systems at D-Wave. An even larger quantum computer based on a whole new processor design will come out two to three years after that, Hilton said.

Advanced cancer research is calling on techniques used by NASA scientists who analyze satellite imagery to find commonalities among stars, planets and galaxies in space. Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) use complex machine learning algorithms to identify similarities among galaxies that may otherwise be overlooked, NASA officials said in a statement. Using similar techniques, medical professionals are able to analyze a lung sample for common cancer biomarkers. However, analyzing a biopsy specimen for biomarkers is not the only way in which JPL's complex machine learning algorithms can be used in the medical field. Cancer researchers can also use the space exploration tools to identify common chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers, which could revolutionize strategies for early cancer detection.

With the recent success of depth cameras such as Kinect, gesture and posture recognition has become easier. Using depth sensors, the 3D locations of body-joints can be reliably extracted to used with any machine learning framework, specific gestures or posture can be modelled and inferred. Real world applications in Virtual Reality can be used for Yoga, Ballet training, Golf, anything related to activity recognition and proper postures. I also see application of it in the Architectural, Engineering, Construction and Manufacturing Industry by sending depth sensor data to the cloud to identify correct configurations. This is a proof of concept to detect pose "Y", "M", "C", "A" and stream the result back to the browser. This video explains a littlebit how it's hooked up together.

I am starting doing research on LSTM's. So far, all sources I have found just detail the use of some libraries and just mention that they use BPTT. I want to go into details of learning in LSTM's, an exact implementation with reasoning why they do things would be great.

Microsoft says it aims to help oncologists consider the individual elements of each patient's cancer at the genetic level. Google's UK subsidiary DeepMind isn't the only group using artificial intelligence to fight cancer by helping doctors with clinical decisions. Microsoft today launched a number of key cancer-fighting projects it has under way, showing off its application of machine learning to solve bigger challenges than identifying dog breeds. While privacy and regulation will slow the pace of adoption, AI will bring some profound changes to healthcare. One such application, called Project Hanover, is seeking to make personalized, precision cancer therapy available to all cancer patients by helping oncologists sift through reams of biomedical research papers faster.

Chatbots, are a hot topic and many companies are hoping to develop bots to have natural conversations indistinguishable from human ones, and many are claiming to be using NLP and Deep Learning techniques to make this possible. But with all the hype around AI it's sometimes difficult to tell fact from fiction. In this series I want to go over some of the Deep Learning techniques that are used to build conversational agents, starting off by explaining where we are right now, what's possible, and what will stay nearly impossible for at least a little while. Retrieval-based models (easier) use a repository of predefined responses and some kind of heuristic to pick an appropriate response based on the input and context. The heuristic could be as simple as a rule-based expression match, or as complex as an ensemble of Machine Learning classifiers.

At a recent Further With Ford event their futurist, Sheryl Connelly, talked about the growth of our world's mega-cities. She used Beijing China as an example. Beijing has 20 million people living in its metropolitan area. A typical driving commute is 5 hours! They have one highway with 50 lanes.