Artificial intelligence start-up Octo.ai raises 200000 T'ai chi and mixed martial arts for Karan Singh Grover!

Scheduling meetings can often involve a lot of back and forth over emails, something Genee solved with its solution. A user sends an email to the person they wanted to set up a meeting with and copy in Genee, like a personal assistant. Genee claims to understand the details of the meeting, including the date and location of the meeting. The app then emails the recipient directly with options that fit the user's calendar and preferences. Genee can do this because it uses natural language processing, according to the company.

The blurring of the physical and digital worlds is creating new business opportunities for companies perceptive enough to embrace options including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and smart technologies. "Digital business is about more than technologies. It is about creating new business models and new ways to engage with customers, partners and suppliers in your business ecosystem," explained Betsy Burton, co-author of the report. Gartner defines a hype cycle as "a graphical depiction of a common pattern that arises with each new technology or other innovation." Burton estimates nearly 100 hype cycles will be produced over the course of this year, but noted that four major trends are dominating the technology landscape. Nexus Technologies, notably cloud, data, mobile and social, are all passing through or have already exited the Trough of Disillusionment.

You might think of drones as friendly things, like the DJI Phantom you fly yourself or those Amazon drones that could soon be delivering your groceries. Think again when it comes to military drones. An MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle with a 66-foot wingspan can loiter 50,000 feet above the Earth for a day at a time, poised to hit a target with a devastating 3,800 pounds of Hellfire missile payload. But as with all weapons, the awesome firepower of a drone needs to be aimed accurately. "It's less about technology than about strategy, about the way it's deployed," said Gavin Hood, director of drone drama "Eye in the Sky," out now on DVD and Blu-ray.

Google googl is teaming up with the U.K.'s government health care system to see whether its artificial intelligence tech can help detect and prevent eye diseases and blindness. The tech giant announced the collaboration between subsidiary DeepMind (acquired in 2014) and the National Health Service (NHS) in a blog post on Tuesday. DeepMind uses various algorithms to help machines learn from the data they analyze. Google will use DeepMind to pore over 1 million anonymous eye scans collected by the Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust over the years with the goal of creating a faster, more efficient method for analyzing the data and coming to an earlier diagnosis. Click here to subscribe to our new Brainstorm Health Daily Newsletter.

Cortana to compete with the likes of Google Now and Apple's Siri. Software giant Microsoft has bought a smart scheduling app Genee, as part of its effort to embed artificial intelligence (AI) to compete with the likes of Google Now and Apple. The start-up, which was founded in 2014, will shut down its service on September 1. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by Genee founders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee, who will join Microsoft. Genee specialises in using machine smarts to handle the time-sucking task of scheduling meetings.

Amy is the future of human resources. I met Amy because she works for Abby. I met Abby through HR UndergroundX. Abby told me about a new technology she was using to recruit candidates for her startup clients. "Abby – It was nice meeting you the other night. I'd love to get together and have coffee. "…Amy CC'd has my schedule and will reach out to coordinate with you.

Looking for an artificial intelligence that can write all your email messages so you don't have to? That dream is still years away. But in the meantime, a startup called Boomerang wants to take you at least part of the way there. Boomerang makes a plug-in for Gmail and Outlook that lets you hit the "snooze button" on certain messages. They'll disappear from your inbox but then reappear at later time.

A U.N. working party will adopt guidelines as soon as November for preventing cyberattacks on network systems used in self-driving vehicles, a source involved in the negotiations said. The guidelines will call on automakers to introduce specific measures for alerting drivers when attacks are detected and preventing the loss of control over the vehicles, according to the source. Discussions on the topic at the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations in Geneva has been led by Japan and Germany, while the United States is planning to establish its own safety regulations separate from the U.N. measures. Autonomous driving, which frees drivers from controlling a vehicle, involves artificial intelligence technology and requires use of a network of electronic devices that collect and exchange data known as the internet of things. But such networks have proven vulnerable to hackers trying to take over self-driving vehicles.

It always amazes me how I can hear a statement uttered in the space of a few seconds about some aspect of machine learning that then takes me countless hours to understand. I first heard about Gaussian Processes on an episode of the Talking Machines podcast and thought it sounded like a really neat idea. I promptly procured myself a copy of the classic text on the subject, Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning by Rasmussen and Williams, but my tenuous grasp on the Bayesian approach to machine learning meant I got stumped pretty quickly. That's when I began the journey I described in my last post, From both sides now: the math of linear regression. Gaussian Processes (GPs) are the natural next step in that journey as they provide an alternative approach to regression problems.