Datorama, a marketing startup that wants to "tame" your business data, announced today that it scored a 32 million investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The New York-based startup aims use the new capital to "accelerate the company's research and development in the artificial intelligence field; which will further elevate its machine learning capabilities." "In this next stage we're going to focus on the further development of our best-in-breed solution, and we're going to continue to push the boundaries of machine learning and how it's applied in the marketing analytics capacity," said Datorama CEO and cofounder Ran Sarig. Marker LLC and Innovation Endeavors also participated. The series C investment brings Datorama to a total of 50 million in funds.

AI-enabled messaging programs that respond to text-based requests -- are the latest innovation that startups and corporations are using to serve existing customers and bring in new ones. Companies across a wide variety of industries are building these tools on popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, and Hipchat, as well as on their own websites and apps. Some are even available by text, to help users do things like fight parking tickets, respond to customer service inquiries, and order tacos. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so if you see we're missing a chatbot that's currently up and running, please share the link with us in the comments section. We'll add new, significant chatbots to the list over time.

Boston, Sep 14: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered bots will become the next interface, shaping our interactions with the applications and devices we rely on and Microsoft's latest solutions are set to change the way HP interacts with its customers and partners, Indian-born Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. "Bots are now learning in human context and the relevant thing for us is to make them intelligent as we learn from customers' experience. Our solutions are going to give HP a 360-degree view of its customer services," Nadella announced at HP's Global Partner Conference (GPC) 2016 at the Boston Conference and Exhibition Centre (BCEC) here. HP announced a six-year agreement to deploy Microsoft Dynamics customer relation management (CRM) online in order to enhance collaboration across marketing, sales and service operations. With Dynamics, as well as Azure, Office 365 and other Microsoft Cloud solutions, HP has invested in the sales and service collaboration platform to deliver a seamless sales experience for customers and partners.

Microsoft researchers have reached a milestone in the quest for computers to understand speech as well as humans. Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist, reports that in a recent benchmark evaluation against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task, Microsoft researchers achieved a word error rate (WER) of 6.3 percent, the lowest in the industry. In a research paper published Tuesday, the scientists said: "Our best single system achieves an error rate of 6.9% on the NIST 2000 Switchboard set. We believe this is the best performance reported to date for a recognition system not based on system combination. This past weekend, at Interspeech, an international conference on speech communication and technology held in San Francisco, IBM said it has achieved a WER of 6.6 percent. Twenty years ago, the error rate of the best published research system had a WER of greater than 43 percent. "This new milestone benefited from a wide range of new technologies ...

You then need to import a training set of data. The training set is a CSV file (the format CSV is chosen so you can export from a spreadsheet). Where each delimited value is a floating-point number (or integer) that corresponds to the respective input and output units. Where path is your data file, the path being relative to the network.rb

Most kids know about artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of gaming and movies. During this week-long bootcamp of five daily workshops, kids ages 10-12 will learn the basics of AI: how machines are being programmed to learn for themselves and solve problems like humans. Kids will discover what AI is: how it works, how it's being used in different industries, and the pros and cons of this technology. They'll explore AI through computer science concepts such as machine learning, algorithms, programming, automation and robots. Should we be afraid of it or can it be used for good?

Deutsche Bahn is about to begin using a new data analytics service provided by T-Systemsto improve their existing real-time system for projecting arrival and departure times on their rail passenger services. The timetable data for more than two million stops per day for essentially the whole of Deutsche Bahn's scheduled passenger services will be compared minute-by-minute against the current real-world transport situation. This comparison is then used as the basis for forecasting probable arrival times and, at the same time, for predicting the impact of the real-time information on subsequent passenger transfer connections. From T-Systems' data centers, the system analyzes geo-positioning reports received for all trains currently running in a matter of seconds, and produces a projection of expected arrival times up to the trains' final destinations. The algorithm used in these calculations is based on machine learning (artificial intelligence).

Artificial Intelligence has always been a hot topic. The problem of creating a machine that can think, make its own decisions and at the same time lacks human limitations, has always aroused controversies. We all remember what the infamous Skynet has done to our planet in Terminator series, right? We can also recall this nasty feeling of a cold shiver running down our spines when Neo has woken up from the Matrix. After watching such films, we can wonder why our scientists want to build intelligent machines in a first place. One would ask: why putting humanity at risk?

Artificial Intelligence produces compelling advances in complex tasks and dramatic improvements in areas such as energy consumption. At the same time, it is already making problematic judgements that have significant impacts on our daily lives, prompting the need for a research field that measures and assesses the effects of current AI systems.

Japan is about to launch a gigantic industry-government-academia project to develop artificial intelligence technology matching the nation's specific needs. The project will include one of the country's biggest research centers, set up in the government-backed Riken research institute, and has a budget of 100 billion yen (around 974 million) over the next 10 years. Some 100 top researchers from participating companies, such as Toyota Motor and NEC, and research institutes will begin studies soon at a laboratory to be opened by the Riken Center for Advanced Integrated Intelligence Research in a high-rise building near Tokyo Station. Positioned as a pillar of the Japanese government's growth strategy, AI simulates the human brain to create "wise" computers. Some experts forecast the technology will surpass human intelligence by 2045.