SoftBank said its robotics unit Cocoro SB, which is researching cloud-based artificial intelligence, will work with Honda on research that seeks to harmonize mobility with people, so that drivers can feel a kind of friendship with their vehicles.

Google Cloud Speech API enables developers to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy to use API. The API recognizes over 80 languages and variants, to support your global user base. You can transcribe the text of users dictating to an application's microphone, enable command-and-control through voice, or transcribe audio files, among many other use cases. Recognize audio uploaded in the request, and integrate with your audio storage on Google Cloud Storage, by using the same technology Google uses to power its own products.

Google is using a powerful new machine-learning approach to save huge amounts of energy (and hundreds of millions of dollars) each year at its vast data centers. It might not be long before the technique, which involves a machine-learning algorithm gradually learning to perfect a task with positive reinforcement, catches on in a range of other areas. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, a subsidiary based in the U.K. that is focused on artificial intelligence, said at a conference recently that Google was using techniques developed by his company to improve the energy efficiency of its data centers. Because Google spends so much on electricity for the buildings that house its massive server farms, a savings of just a few percent equals hundreds of millions of dollars per year. DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 for around 600 million, has shown how large artificial neural networks combined with reinforcement learning can train computers to perform complex tasks incredibly well.

Researchers used a combination of three imaging techniques and a machine learning system to create this new map of the brain, which includes 180 distinct regions in each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex (the brain's outermost region). The different colors relate to how connected an area is to a specific sensory input: Red is hearing, green is touch, and blue is vision. Mixed colors represent areas where two senses overlap. A group of researchers have developed a new map of the cerebral cortex of the human brain, revealing 100 new distinct regions in each hemisphere. Representing the most detailed map of the brain yet, it's an achievement of a longstanding goal, and researchers say it will provide a crucial tool to understand how differences in even extremely small brain regions relate to behavior and disease.

When Amazon Echo with Alexa service came out in November 2014 I was skeptical. A speaker with voice recognition seemed like an unnecessary oddity. When a friend of mine purchased one in 2015, I had a chance to play with it but was unimpressed still. Alexa's SDK has been open to third party developers for a year now. As a software engineer it is important for me to keep up with emerging technologies and learn about them.

The radio frequency spectrum enables almost every wireless transmission, from Pokémon Go location data to phone calls and military radio transmissions. The problem is that spectrum is starting to get crowded. With more and more devices connecting to the Internet of Things, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is concerned "wireless congestion" could not only impact social media posts and Netflix stream, but also critical communications in war zones. The answer, as it so often is these days, is a highly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. DARPA recently announced its next Grand Challenge contest, which will pit several teams against one another in a three-year competition to design a computer system that can micromanage the radio frequency spectrum to keep devices working smoothly.

Google's intelligent cloud developer tools are expanding with the launch of a new Cloud Natural Language API on Wednesday. The service is aimed at helping developers create applications that understand human language. It's an important move for Google, as public cloud providers are racing to host new applications built with intelligent capabilities. Natural language processing allows developers to build apps that can tackle the challenging task of understanding how humans communicate, and it is key for things like building intelligent assistants and chat bots. This API can provide a bunch of information about a block of text back to an application, including the overall sentiment of a passage and an analysis of the structure of a sentence.

Lauren Gillespie, Class of 2019, is a computer science and chemistry double major working alongside Assistant Professor of Math and Computer Science Jacob Schrum to create intelligent agents for video games. "I thought it was really interesting that Professor Schrum's ideas encompassed a lot of what I learned in biology," says Gillespie. Gillespie is one of few sophomores chosen to participate in SCOPE, and brings an interdisciplinary mindset to the research. "That's what made her stand out to me--that she has a broader interest in science in general, and that interdisciplinary thinking is really important in mixing biology and computer science," says Schrum. "So I have a student who isn't just good at programming, but also appreciates the bigger ideas behind this research."

With the push of a button this spring -- Google was instantly using 40% less energy to cool a handful of its data centers. The achievement, which Google hails as a major breakthrough, points to how artificial intelligence can be used to make data centers, power plants, energy grids and manufacturing plants more efficient. As these huge, energy-intensive operations use power more efficiently, fewer greenhouse gases are emitted. "We're really thrilled about the environmental impact," said Mustafa Suleyman, who leads applied AI at Google DeepMind, a group of London researchers behind the project. DeepMind has leapt to prominence by building computer systems capable of mastering everything from Atari games to the board game Go.

The North Face is using Fluid's Expert Personal Shopper platform, which uses artificial intelligence technology from IBM Watson to give online shoppers a similar type of personal attention they get when visiting the store, executives told attendees at Retail's BIG Show. About 50,000 customers used the technology during a 60-day beta test last year, said Cal Bouchard, senior e-commerce director for The North Face.