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When Junichi Hasegawa of Sony first met the two young creators of Preferred Networks, there was something familiar about them. They each possessed, in his view, the spark and talent of Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, the founders of Sony itself. Shortly afterwards, in 2011, Hasegawa, who was in the team developing the PlayStation games console, opted to join the tiny start-up that later became Preferred Networks. Sony was languishing under heavy losses from its once-mighty consumer electronics products and Hasegawa had the opportunity to move on. "Instead of rebuilding Sony, I felt it was faster to build a second Sony," he says.

Many people have built brain-like neural networks that can learn on their own, but they're typically using plain old silicon to do it. Wouldn't it be better if the chips themselves were brain-like? A mix of Italian and Russian researchers might help. They've created a neural network based on plastic memristors, or resistors that remember their previous electrical resistance. Since they effectively work like brain synapses, they're ideal for creating "true" neural networks where signal transfers create long-lasting effects.

Facebook, Twitter and Google have been given a month to make changes to their user agreements in the European Union or face;enforcement action.;

It is so natural for the designer to put himself in the user's place before setting to work. In his mind, there is a conversation going on between the designer and the user – That gets the designer closer to know what the user needs and wants. There is also the real talk with users giving designers a clear understanding of customer needs. Conversation of this sort can help the designer hit it off with the customer when real conversation begins. As computers gain the human touch to converse with users, we are on the threshold of transforming conversation into a user interface.

We all know the frustrations of fighting our way through the options menu when we call "customer support," and the tedium of navigating corporate websites and filling in lengthy online forms. Often we encounter these hassles at work as IT help desks have been replaced by complex support websites. Companies increasingly expect employees and customers to "own" much of the workload, based on the assumption that customers know best what they need and want. However, this kind of self-service often does not make for a happy user experience. We expect customers to find the right part of an app or website, assess the available options, interact with the system, wait for confirmation, and know when a task is done.

It's no joke that Artificial Intelligence is turning the technology industry (and others besides) on its ear. The latest advances in AI are regularly making headlines and either inspiring thoughtful dialogue or dramatic entertainment. This truly is the stuff of science fiction. But there are also a lot of misconceptions, requiring much-needed myth-busting around the topic. We recently spoke with AI aficionado (and author of Disruptive Marketing) Geoff Colon for some clarification on the subject.

Can you name what technologies fall within the realm of artificial intelligence (AI)? According to our research report, "Outlook on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise", 88% of respondents claiming they do not use AI technologies went on to cite using specific solutions that rely on AI techniques. At Narrative Science, we view the AI ecosystem from a data-driven perspective. We think this perspective is important because it ultimately determines which technology is a best-fit for a business problem even if the end-results are similar. In the IIA's "Introduction to the Intelligent Systems Ecosystem", Chief Scientist Kris Hammond, states it well when he says: One of the more difficult issues associated with these emerging intelligent systems is that while each is built on a very different technological foundation, they tend to be bundled together and are often viewed as indistinguishable.

As Quartz reports, a West Virginia teenager has created an artificial intelligence emcee whose style is based entirely on Kanye West's body of work. "All of the sudden I had a week to make a neural network that could rap," Barrat explained to Quartz. A self-taught programmer, Barrat cooked up most of the code for his digital lyricist in the course of one afternoon; it only took him a few extra days to complete the effort. The West Virginia teen's AI rapper takes its cues from 6,000 different Kanye West lines and is able to produce its own bars and flows like a traditional artist would. "Originally it just rearranged existing rap lyrics, but now it can actually write word-by-word," Barrat says.

Scientists from the Oxford University along with Google's DeepMind have developed an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans. The system was trained by thousands of hours of BBC news programs, the media outlet said Friday. The system, called "Watch, Attend and Spell," can correctly lip-read 50 percent of silent speech correctly, while professional…