Here's the deal, you've probably never heard of SystemML, but you definitely need to know what it is. Not only will SystemML make you look awesome because machine learning is the hot topic right now, but it will also save you a lot of time and trouble. As a new data scientist I am constantly having to spend my time learning new technologies--most of which don't work very well. Here's the thing: SystemML actually does work very well. Because it only recently became open source, it's difficult to find material on how to get started, but that's quickly changing.

Steam rolled out of the pot, and my kitchen was filled with an intoxicating blend of scents. I'd cooked a turkey ragu before, but as soon as I opened the pot, I knew this would be an entirely different experience. There were the familiar, comforting notes of ground turkey and mushrooms, but there was also earthiness from the beets, the fire of serrano chile, and an unexpected brightness from the coriander seed (coriander seed!). My dinner wouldn't have been out of place at one of San Francisco's trendy food trucks or upscale restaurants, but coming out of my 15 IKEA pot, it was unbelievable. As I mixed in the pasta and ricotta cheese and took the first incredible bite, I realized that A.I. could do a lot more for me than just beating me at Go.

Fingerprints can be stolen, iris scans spoofed, and facial recognition software fooled. It has become increasingly challenging to unassailably authenticate a person's identity, so academic teams have turned to brain waves as the next step in biometric identification. Many of these efforts seek to outdo one another, boasting how accurately and accessibly they can verify a person's identity using electroencephalograph (EEG) data. In April, for example, a team in New York achieved 100 percent accuracy at identifying individuals using a skullcap with 30 electrodes. Last week, we reported on a simple set of earbud sensors that worked with 80 percent accuracy.

By the "end of 2016 more than 80 of the world's 100 largest enterprise software companies by revenues will have integrated cognitive technologies into their products", said Deloitte. On Monday Microsoft announced it had purchased Genee, a smart scheduling app startup. Genee's artificial intelligence technology will be integrated into Microsoft's Office 365. Microsoft has been actively acquiring similar businesses this year in order to make sure it is well placed for the digital revolution, which will see AI at its core. It has already purchased app development platform Xamarin, intelligent smartphone keyboard SwiftKey, and LinkedIn for more than 26 billion.

Jasper Kuria is the founder and editor of Capital & Growth. Q: You've been incredibly successful as a VC--you've had numerous major exits and been named to the Forbes Midas list several times. To what do you attribute your success? I think the most important thing about being successful in the venture business is being able to work with these great entrepreneurs. We try to find them at an early stage then roll up our sleeves and help them be successful.

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge, which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains. The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating achievements of this work and directions for further research.

Google's WaveNet uses neural nets to generate eerily convincing speech and music http://tcrn.ch/2ccjLjY Physicists have discovered what makes neural networks so extraordinarily powerful http://bit.ly/2cikJeB Will This "Neural Lace" Brain Implant Help Us Compete with AI? http://bit.ly/2c75cPH These nightmare videos are generated from still baby photos by a neural network http://gizmo.do/G476Lyi Mathematicians have been searching, but the answer lies in physics.

Facebook continues its efforts to create artificial intelligence capable of outclassing all humans at the ancient Chinese strategy board game Go. The social media company recently published a research paper showcasing the progress it made with the DarkForest bots, which use a synergy of methods to be the best Go players available. Yuandong Tian and Yan Zhu, AI researchers at Facebook, explain how the computer program behaves in the abstract of the paper. "Against human players, [darkfores2 achieves] a stable 3d level on KGS Go Server as a ranked bot," the duo points out [pdf]. This is a visible improvement over the predicted 4k-5k ranks for DCNN that Clark & Storkey (2015) reported after studying matches against other machine players.

Watson APIs are now available for public use, albeit only through IBM's Bluemix cloud services platform. IBM's Watson Developer Cloud now offers eight services for building what IBM describes as cognitive apps, with more services promised later on. The Relationship Extraction system seems less limited by available data than Machine Translation, but it is limited in different ways. When the Relationship Extraction system is fed the sentence "Nick Cave's new film '20,000 Days on Earth' debuted yesterday," it understood that "Nick Cave" was a person and that "yesterday" was a date, but didn't understand that "20,000 Days" referred to the title of a work.

Those who have been chomping at the bit to use IBM's Watson machine-intelligence service with their apps need gnaw no longer. Watson APIs are now available for public use, albeit only through IBM's Bluemix cloud services platform. IBM's Watson Developer Cloud now offers eight services for building what IBM describes as cognitive apps, with more services promised later on. Of the services offered so far, Visualization Rendering seems the most immediately useful and powerful, since it isn't limited by data training many of Watson's other services rely on. Most of the services rely on a "corpus," or cultivated body of data that Watson can use as raw material, so the breadth of several Watson offerings is limited by the size of their existing corpora.