We live in a society where human health is increasingly enhanced by artificial augmentation and implantation including hip replacements and hearing aids. French company Carmat have been working for 15 years on the artificial heart, a device that completely replaces the human heart in people with end stage heart disease and a life expectancy of less than two weeks without the surgery. They've recently announced their second trial, commencing in 2017 with the aim to achieve European approval for their device. The Carmat device differs to other robotic heart devices as it is meant to be used in cases of terminal heart failure, instead of being used as a bridge device while the patient awaits a transplant. In Carmat's design, two chambers are each divided by a membrane that holds hydraulic fluid on one side.

A Deutsche Telekom official says artificial intelligence (AI) will be needed to break smart city data out of its silos. As reported by Mobile World Live, thoughts about smart city evolution appeared on the blog of Claudia Nemat, the Deutsche Telekom (DT) board member who oversees Technology & Innovation Europe. In her piece, Nemat described current smart city practices as trapping data from sensors in an isolated "landlocked lake." But as sensors proliferate at blinding speed in global smart cities, the rivers of data being produced will turn into oceans. This will be complicated by the multiple digital platforms running simultaneously in each city.

To gain intuition and reasoning of a model is to have understanding and trust--transparency. When you strike a nail with a hammer, it's pretty predictable what might happen: the nail could get hit, the hammer could miss, or very rarely, the hammer's head may fly off of the handle. When you replace the hammer with a black box that works correctly 99.999% of the time, but for 0.001%, something completely unpredictable happens, then there's a problem with volatility because that unpredictable event may have unacceptable consequences. I think explainable AI could help with intuitive and more fine-grained risk analysis, and that's certainly a good thing in high-stakes applications such as defense.

Generating speech from a piece of text is a common and important task undertaken by computers, but it's pretty rare that the result could be mistaken for ordinary speech. A new technique from researchers at Alphabet's DeepMind takes a completely different approach, producing speech and even music that sounds eerily like the real thing. Early systems used a large library of the parts of speech (phonemes and morphemes) and a large ruleset that described all the ways letters combined to produce those sounds. The pieces were joined, or concatenated, creating functional speech synthesis that can handle most words, albeit with unconvincing cadence and tone. WaveNet, as the system is called, takes things deeper.

"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." When it comes to political speeches, great ones are few and far between. But ordinary political speeches, those given in U.S. congressional floor debates, for example, are numerous. They are also remarkably similar. These speeches tend to follow a standard format, repeat similar arguments, and even use the same phrases to indicate a particular political affiliation or opinion. It's almost as if there is some kind of algorithm that determines their content.

The internet has transformed the way of obtaining information. Search engines play a crucial role in the process of collecting information. The present innovations and technological advancements have brought a new face to the internet. Jerry Yue has designed a new search engine Brain, which uses artificial intelligence. Jerry Yue has become famous for his earlier startup, Benlai.com.

The deal is expected to close in the later third or early fourth quarter this year. The two companies have not disclosed the transaction cost. Just four months ago, EE Times posted a blog entitled "Will Intel's Drone Chips Fly?" In that blog, referring to Intel's depth sensing technology called RealSense, Remi El-Ouazzane, Movidius CEO called the technology "a world-class, quality depth solution." At that time, El-Ouazzane also told us: "Practically all the chip companies currently in the drone market --Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia and Movidius included--are going after the same target: Autonomous drones."

MIT has created a system that generates video based on still photos. MIT has used machine learning to create video from still images, and the results are pretty impressive. As you can see from the above image, there's a lot of natural form to the movement in the videos. The system "learns" types of videos (beach, baby, golf swing...) and, starting from still images, replicates the movements that are most commonly seen in those videos. So the beach video looks like it has crashing waves, for instance. But like other machine-generated images, these have limitations.

Update: This post has been translated to Japanese and Chinese. Recently I came across a video of a simulation that demonstrates the use of evolutionary techniques to train agents to avoid moving obstacles. The methodology used seems to employ a variation of the NEAT algorithm used to evolve the topology of neural networks so that it can perform certain tasks correctly. It was written to be used in the Unity 5 game engine to be incorporated to general game AIs which interested me. The results are really cool and the dynamics seemed quite elegant, so I wanted to try to implement a similar demo in javascript that can run inside a browser session.

Concerned about potential regulatory fines and skyrocketing costs, the world's largest banks are turning to artificial intelligence to improve their compliance with know-your-customer and anti-money laundering regulations. "The value proposition for AI solutions is highest for large banks with significant volumes, complexity, multiple lines of business and geographical reach as these banks are affected most by the current challenges and stand to benefit the most by adopting new and innovative solutions," write Arin Ray and Neil Katkov, analysts with Celent in a new research report entitled "Artificial Intelligence in KYC-AML: Enabling the Next Level of Operational Efficiency." The analysts predict that global tier-one and large regional banks will be early adopters of AI over the next three years. Ray and Katkov's conclusions match the findings of a survey of 424 executives from financial services and fintech companies released in March by Chicago-based law firm Baker McKenzie. The firm found that 29 percent are thinking about using AI in know-your customer and anti-money laundering monitoring.