Amazon lures away eBay's artificial intelligence chief Amazon poaches eBay A.I. chief, continues ramping up machine learning operations See The Eerie Sci-Fi Movie Trailer Made By IBM's Artificial Intelligence Now's the time to submit your talks for the AI Summit at GDC 2017

Call it artificial intelligence with a human touch. This week, two California universities separately announced new centers devoted to studying the ways in which AI can help humanity. USC's Viterbi School of Engineering and its School of Social Work said Wednesday that they had joined forces to launch the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Social Solutions. A day earlier, UC Berkeley unveiled its newly minted Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Then on Thursday, a Stanford-led initiative to study the future of artificial intelligence in the next century released a report detailing the effect artificial intelligence could have on urban life by 2030.

Dmitry Malioutov can't say much about what he built. As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems faced by IBM's corporate clients. One such program was meant for a large insurance corporation. It was a challenging assignment, requiring a sophisticated algorithm. When it came time to describe the results to his client, though, there was a wrinkle. "We couldn't explain the model to them because they didn't have the training in machine learning." In fact, it may not have helped even if they were machine learning experts. That's because the model was an artificial neural network, a program that takes in a given type of data--in this case, the insurance company's customer records--and finds patterns in them. These networks have been in practical use for over half a century, but lately they've seen a resurgence, powering breakthroughs in everything from speech recognition and language translation to Go-playing robots and self-driving cars.

Cancer is a tricky disease to treat. With more than one hundred known types, each responding differently to treatment depending on the person they're growing inside (and dozens of other factors), oncologists certainly have their work cut out for them. Machine learning could soon make their jobs a bit easier. IBM's supercomputer Watson has been applying machine learning to personalized cancer treatment for some time. After pouring over 600,000 medical reports and 1.5 million anonymized patient records and clinical trials, the data should help define the clearest path forward for doctors.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

An exciting new study from the University of Sheffield and published in the journal Swarm Intelligence has demonstrated (free pre-print version) a method of allowing computers to make sense of complex patterns all on their own, an ability that could open the door to some of the most advanced and speculative applications of artificial intelligence. Using an all-new technique called Turing Learning, the team managed to get an artificial intelligence to watch movements within a swarm of simple robots and figure out the rules that govern their behavior. It was not told to look for any particular signifier of swarm behavior, but simply to try to emulate the source more and more accurately and to learn from the results of that process. It's a simple system that the researchers think could be applied everywhere from human and animal behavior to biochemical analysis to personal security. Alan Turing was a multi-talented British mathematician who helped to both win the Second World War and invent the earliest computers, both while leading the Allied code-breaking efforts at Blechley Park.

It seems inevitable that we will soon be sharing the roads with autonomous vehicles, but it's not just other vehicles that our self-driving counterparts need to concern themselves with. Autonomous startup Drive.ai is working on technology that will help everyone communicate, potentially making our roads safer and more efficient. According to The Verge, Drive.ai's She's bringing her background in machine learning to autonomous vehicle development with the goal of creating a system that can learn behaviors rather than being forced to react to millions and millions of different scenarios. In addition to the machine learning, Drive.ai is working on a way for autonomous vehicles to communicate with others on the roads.

Here's How Google Will Use A.I. to Help Fight Cancer How UC Berkeley's New Center Could Prevent a Military A.I. Apocalypse Beauty.AI App the 1st international beauty contest judged by AI A treasure hunter went missing in the Rocky Mountains, and a computer algorithm found him ... Drive.ai wants to give self-driving cars more brainpower, personality

Google's DeepMind's Health initiative will soon work to explore how artificial intelligence could save hours and hours of precious time in the treatment of oral, head and neck cancers, the company announced on Tuesday. Whatever it is Zuckerberg is calling his personal home AI system. Yesterday he updated an audience in Rome about his personal project this year. He had Facebook (FB) engineers work on a computerized domestic assistant as his personal challenge. The AI controls his AC, lighting, opens his security gate, and can even make him toast.

AI is a field of technology where machines mimic human thinking and reasoning in their processing and carry out tasks usually performed by people. Several people have given various definitions for what actually is AI. Ram Sriharsha, senior architect and machine learning expert at Hortonworks, a data collection and data analytics software company, is quoted in Information Week as describing AI as being "very broad" and says "AI is being able to communicate, being able to plan and reason and take actions". The American author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil notes the most durable definition of AI is "the art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people". However, he explains this quote is not a perfect one as it does not always fit "actual usage" and doesn't explain what exactly is meant by "artificial" or "intelligent".