Artificial intelligence researchers at DeepMind have created some of the most realistic sounding human-like speech, using neural networks. Dubbed WaveNet, the AI promises significant improvements to computer-generated speech, and could eventually be used in digital personal assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Amazon's Alexa. The technology generates voices by sampling real human speech from both English and Mandarin speakers. In tests, the WaveNet generated speech was found to be more realistic than other forms of text-to-speech programs but still falling short of being truly convincing. In 500 blind tests, respondents were asked to judge sample sentences on a scale of one to five (five being most realistic).

In February Amigobulls reported that Alphabet (NSDQ:GOOGL) was using chips from startup Movidius for the development of next-generation Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. Movidius, a company specialized in low-power machine vision for connected devices, has been working with Alphabet to accelerate the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within mobile devices. Now, the machine vision startup is being acquired by Intel (NSDQ:INTC). "I'm excited to announce the planned acquisition of Movidius by Intel," said Movidius CEO Remi El-Ouazzane. "Movidius' mission is to give the power of sight to machines. As part of Intel, we'll remain focused on this mission, but with the technology and resources to innovate faster and execute at scale."

It's been a busy summer in the artificial intelligence (A.I.) space, but the most interesting A.I. opportunities may not come from the biggest names. You may have heard about Tesla's self-driving cars that made headlines twice, for vastly different reasons -- a fatal crash in Florida in which the driver was using the Autopilot software, and claims by a Missouri man that the feature drove him 20 miles to a hospital after he suffered a heart attack, saving his life. Or you might have heard of Apple spending 200 million to acquire machine learning and A.I. startup Turi. A smart drone defeated an experienced Air Force pilot in flight simulation tests. IBM's Watson diagnosed a 60-year-old woman's rare form of leukemia within 10 minutes, after doctors had been stumped for months.

Cops are already using computers to stop crimes before they happen, academics have warned. In a major piece of research called "Artificial Intelligence and life in 2030", researchers from Stanford University said "predictive policing" techniques would become commonplace in the next 15 years. Read more: Terrorists'actively seeking' to build deadly army of intelligent killer robots, UN warns The academics discussed the crime fighting implications of "machine learning", which allows computers to learn for themselves and then solve problems just like a human. This technique will have a major effect on transport, healthcare and education, potentially bringing massive benefits as well as putting millions of jobs at risk. But in the hands of cops, AI has the potential to have a massive impact on society by allowing law enforcement to have an "overbearing or pervasive" presence.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, is wasting no time helping to fund intelligent medical treatments. Just a month after it teamed up with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to pioneer so-called bioelectronic medicines capable of treating chronic disease, another of its umbrella companies, Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences), confirmed today that it has teamed up with French pharmaceutical company Sanofi to form a new joint venture that will help treat diabetes. In a joint press release, the two companies said they will call the new 500 million venture Onduo and will focus on enabling people with diabetes to "live full, healthy lives by developing comprehensive solutions that combine devices, software, medicine, and professional care to enable simple and intelligent disease management." Initially, Onduo will work on type 2 diabetes, helping patients make informed decisions about their health, whether that's managing their medication or suggesting ways to improve their overall quality of life. Reuters reports that the products on sale will include connected insulin pens and will also involve the launch of various online services.

The user interfaces of the future cannot be imagined without an emotion-sensitive modality. More ways other than plain speech are used for communication. Spatial, temporal, visual and vocal cues are often forgotten in computer interfaces. Each cue relates to one or more forms of nonverbal communication that can be divided into chronemics, haptics, kinesics, oculesics, olfactics, paralanguage and proxemics (Tubbs, 2009), relating to certain activities of a human body, voice or gazing. Unfortunately, modern computer-based user interfaces do not take full advantage of nonverbal communicative abilities, often resulting in a much less than natural interaction.

The results are a little different to those obtained using RMSE as the objective function. The focus is still well and truly on the volatility indicators, but in this case the best cross validated performance occurred when selecting only 2 out of the 15 candidate variables. Here's a plot of the cross validated performance of the best feature set for various numbers of features: The model clearly performs better in terms of absolute return for a smaller number of predictors. Performance bottoms at 8 predictors and then improves, but never again achieves the performance obtained with 2-4 predictors. This is consistent with Aronson's assertion that we should stick with at most 3-4 variables otherwise overfitting is almost unavoidable.

March is a reluctant beginning of spring. After suddenly getting warmer, the weather has turned cold again. Yesterday, the friend circle of Wechat was full of a breaking news that the Google's artificial intelligence AlphaGo beat human Go champion Lee Sedol. Or at least it was a temporary lead because there will be several rounds in following days. The news was a headline because it was related to the debate on whether artificial intelligence could defeat human brain.

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