An anonymous reader writes: Jill Watson is an artificial intelligence bot, it is also Ashok Goel's teaching assistant. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, hired Jill Watson to answer questions online for his students so that his teaching staff wasn't so overworked. On average, Goel and his staff receive more than 10,000 questions from students online each semester. So he decided to use IBM Watson, an artificial intelligence system designed to answer questions. After training and tweaking it for months, he was able to spit out good enough answers.

Artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence after 2020, predicts Vernor Vinge, a world-renowned pioneer in AI, who has warned about the risks and opportunities that an electronic super-intelligence would offer to mankind. "It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future," says scifi legend Vernor Vinge, "create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event -- such a singularity -- are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm." There was the psychotic HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the humanoids which attacked their human masters in "I, Robot" and, of course, "The Terminator", where a robot is sent into the past to kill a woman whose son will end the tyranny of the machines. Experts interviewed by AFP were divided.

San Diego, California-based Nervana will help develop Intel's artificial intelligence portfolio and enhance the deep learning performance of Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi processors, the company said in a blog post. Investors in Nervana include Global Playground, CME Ventures, Lux Capital, Allen & Co and AME Cloud Ventures. Allen & Co LLC is the exclusive financial adviser to Nervana in the deal. "Success in this space requires continued innovation to deliver an optimized, scalable platform providing the highest performance at lowest total cost of ownership… I'm excited to announce that Intel signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nervana Systems, a recognized leader in deep learning. Founded in 2014, Nervana has a fully-optimized software and hardware stack for deep learning. Their IP and expertise in accelerating deep learning algorithms will expand Intel's capabilities in the field of AI. We will apply Nervana's software expertise to further optimize the Intel Math Kernel Library and its integration into industry standard frameworks. Nervana's Engine and silicon expertise will advance Intel's AI portfolio and enhance the deep learning performance and TCO of our Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi processors. We will share more about artificial intelligence and the amazing experiences it enables at our Intel Developer Forum next week."

By Amit Nath Cyber security is a crucial challenge in today's world, as government agencies, corporations and even individuals are increasingly becoming victims of cyber-attacks. It is a well-known fact that businesses are turning more and more to the cloud and mobile applications as a way to stay competitive in the market. However, cloud storage, IoT and mobile applications escalate security risks for all enterprises. When smaller organizations invest in security measures they frequently look for the most cost-efficient options. It should be considered that cyber-attacks are not only frequent, but frequently creative and innovative.

Another example of artificial intelligence doing good is IBM's Watson artificial intelligence engine diagnosing an old woman's leukaemia. The said machine took only 10 minutes to diagnose a rare kind of leukaemia that has been misdiagnosed months earlier. Watson achieved this feat by comparing the patient's genetic changes with 20 million other cancer research papers. This enabled the doctors to perform proper treatment for the patient. In addition to this, the machine also diagnosed another rare type of leukaemia in another patient.

TWC NEWS VIDEO: In this Tech Talk report, Time Warner Cable News' Adam Balkin looks at how NYU Tandon School of Engineering is teaming up with ff Venture Capital to create what is believed to be the very first U.S. coupling of a university and a venture fund to help accelerate startups working on artificial intelligence. Inside what'll be called the AI NexusLab, five chosen companies, for four months, will get all sorts of AI support, funding, legal advice, whatever they need in order to accelerate their growth to more quickly enter your life.

Some economists are also worried future economies will consist of low-skilled jobs that are not profitable to automate and high-skilled jobs that complement new technologies. The losers will be a widening swathe of middle-skilled workers. Because the trajectory of future technology is unpredictable, the exact impact on jobs is rather unclear. A much cited study by researchers at Oxford University found that 47pc of jobs in the US could become automated in the next 20 years. Yet a recent OECD paper* found (more plausibly, in this columnist's view) that 9pc of jobs at highrisk of being automated. The figure for Ireland was even lower, at 8pc.

A search program that has a word embedding algorithm plugged into it can bring resumes that contain more of these related words up to the top of the search pile, hopefully helping you to find the most qualified candidates without having to read through every single document. Word embeddings do similar work in computer programs that we interact with every day -- programs that target ads at us, decide what we see on social media, or work to improve Internet search results. But here's the problem: These word embeddings learn the relationships between words by studying human writing -- like the hundreds of thousands of articles on Wikipedia or Google News. For Kalai, the problem is not that people sometimes use word embedding algorithms that differentiate between gender or race, or even algorithms that reflect human bias.

Whether or not it's a realistic or practical or good idea, urban commercial drone delivery is grinding remorselessly toward a thing that is going to happen. For many companies, "grind" is the right word, especially if they're trying to do research and development in the United States, where regulations tend to be overly cumbersome and inflexible. To help move things along a bit, Amazon has decided to take its next phase of delivery drone testing to the United Kingdom. Here's the stuff worth caring about from the press release, which amounts to about a third of the press release. In other words, it's relatively informative, as press releases go: Amazon has today announced a partnership with the UK Government to explore the steps needed to make the delivery of parcels by small drones a reality, allowing Amazon to trial new methods of testing its delivery systems.

After a chatbot pretending to be a 13-year-old named Eugene Goostman "passed" a Turing test a few years ago, experts in artificial intelligence got together and decided that a traditional Turing test might not be all that effective in measuring the intelligence of a computer program after all. Instead, they came up with (among many other things) the Winograd Schema Challenge, which is intended to determine how well an artificial intelligence system handles commonsense reasoning: understanding the basics about how the world works, and implementing that knowledge in useful and accurate ways. A few weeks ago, the very first Winograd Schema Challenge took place at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in New York City. We spoke with Charlie Ortiz, director of the Laboratory for AI and Natural Language Processing at Nuance Communications and one of the organizers of the Winograd Schema Challenge, about how things went, why the challenge is important, and what it means for the future of AI. The Winograd Schema Challenge tasks computer programs with answering a specific type of simple, commonsense question called a pronoun disambiguation problem (PDP).