Earlier this year I was fortunate to once again participate in one of Arc Fusion's Jeffersonian-style dinner talks, this time with a constellation of tech and design luminaries, such as Ray Kurzweil (Google), Lorie Fiber (IBM Watson), Paul Saffo (Stanford), and Bruce MacGregor (IDEO). Arc Fusion's mission is to convene top scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, artists, and doers to explore the frontiers of health, IT, and biomedicine. This "recipe for dialogue" worked incredibly well, and the overall tone of conversation was very positive, focusing on the potential power and impact of exponential information technologies. Led by insights from Ray Kurzweil, who has exhaustively studied the growth curves of various digital technologies, we discussed how the next two or three "doublings" of computing power are about to unleash completely astonishing breakthroughs--including the possibility of extending the human lifespan indefinitely. Even before these coming leaps in computing power arrive, we're already seeing some of the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted healthcare, as cloud-based systems, such as IBM Watson, turn their vast computing power on fast-moving fields like oncology: It's clear that AI appears poised to increase patient safety, drive early prevention by predictive modeling, and, eventually, maybe even extend human lifespans to unimaginable lengths.

Predictive data is quickly changing the way that we work in a variety of industries, and the automotive world is no exception. From connected car production to inventory management, the collection and study of large amounts of data are quickly shaping how our cars are built. How is predictive data changing the automotive industry and what changes can we expect to see in the future? Connected and autonomous cars are going to benefit most from the inclusion of predictive data because their design centers on data collection and processing. Teslas, for example, are constantly connected.

Automatic emotion recognition from speech is a challenging task which significantly relies on the emotional relevance of specific features extracted from the speech signal. In this study, our goal is to use deep learning to automatically discover emotionally relevant features. It is shown that using a deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), we can learn both the short-time frame-level acoustic features that are emotionally relevant, as well as an appropriate temporal aggregation of those features into a compact sentence-level representation. Moreover, we propose a novel strategy for feature pooling over time using attention mechanism with the RNN, which is able to focus on local regions of a speech signal that are more emotionally salient. The proposed solution was tested on the IEMOCAP emotion corpus, and was shown to provide more accurate predictions compared to existing emotion recognition algorithms.

Computing giant IBM and backend service provider PlayFab have formed a joint initiative to give game developers deeper insights into player behavior. The program will let developers feed data into IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform for analysis, with the system capable of building models from structured and unstructured data, as well as open machine learning libraries. Watson will use that information to deliver lessons and feedback directly to devs through PlayFab, allowing them to make meaningful changes to their games in a bid to boost engagement by better understanding players. "Modern connected games offer immense artistic and commercial potential, but to realize that potential, developers need tools to analyze and act in real-time on the massive amounts of data these games-as-services continuously generate," said PlayFab CEO, James Gwertzman. Atari is one of the first game companies to make use of the fledgling initiative, and has been talking up the practicalities of Watson's data-crunching capabilities in the fast-moving, fluctuating world of mobile games.

Video Recognition of Basketball Movement: Combining the analysis of videos from sporting events with deep learning services, athletes' performance can be profiled to determine their behavior, which provides valuable data analysis for the sports industry Image Processing: Identifying and describing images accurately through image and caption processing to allow machines to "read" images instantaneously Smart Customer Hotline: This speech recognition technology automatically records voice messages of customer service representatives into text format and structures the content and key messages to allow for monitoring of customer service quality, analysis of consumer sentiment and risk control Real-time Broadcast Transliteration: Real-time transcription of audio of live broadcasts into subtitles, which can monitor and edit content during live shows Customized Recommendation: Built on the basis of big data analytics, providing customized service and support based on users' purchasing ...

In a previous post I discussed the promising applications for deep learning in the enterprise. The greatest potential for deep learning is in adding business-relevant structure to less-structured, sense-like data -- such as images, audio and other sensor data. How quickly does the tone and affect of a support call from a frustrated customer change, broken down by support rep? It's that time-to-mollification that matters to your business, not the raw sound data. Generally when training machine learning algorithms (and deep nets are an extreme example of this), the more data the better. There's a persistent danger of "overfitting" your data -- performing very well on the training set, but poorly on new data.

But deciding to build an app in the first place was driven by a broader purpose. As one doctor put it, "If you want to do world-class sociology research, build Facebook."

Today, a digital stethoscope has the ability to record and store heartbeat and respiratory sounds. Tomorrow, the stethoscope could function as an "intelligent thing" by collecting a massive amount of such data, relating the data to diagnostic and treatment information, and building an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered doctor assistance app to provide the physician with diagnostic support in real-time. AI and machine learning increasingly will be embedded into everyday things such as appliances, speakers and hospital equipment. This phenomenon is closely aligned with the emergence of conversational systems, the expansion of the IoT into a digital mesh and the trend toward digital twins. Three themes -- intelligent, digital, and mesh -- form the basis for the Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017, announced by David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow, at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2016 in Orlando, Florida.

Samsung has announced Bixby, its artificial intelligence assistant, ahead of the launch of the Galaxy S8. It's expected to be one of the phone's biggest new features, and Samsung hopes it will trigger an enormous shift in user behaviour. As has been rumoured, the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 will have a dedicated Bixby button, which users can push in order to launch the voice assistant. Bixby is designed to make Samsung's devices more "natural and intuitive" to use, according to the company. It will initially only work with a handful of pre-installed apps, but Samsung says it will support almost every task the app is capable of performing, entirely through spoken commands. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Pope Francis has warned young people about their use of social media, urging them to create their own history and reject "false" depictions of reality. The Argentinian pontiff was recording a video message for World Youth Day, which takes places on 9 April. "Many people say that young people are distracted and superficial," he said. Still, we should acknowledge our need to reflect on our lives and direct them towards the future. "In the social media, we see faces of young people appearing in any number of pictures recounting more or less real events, but we don't know how much of all this is really'history', an experience that can be communicated and endowed with purpose and meaning."