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.

The blockish and slightly dorky computer game Minecraft may turn out to be a great place for humans and AI to learn how to work together. An experimental new version of the game, released by Microsoft researchers this month, can be used to train an AI to perform all sorts of tasks, from crossing bridges to building complex objects. The new platform, called Project Malmo, makes it possible for a learning algorithm to control a Minecraft character that's normally operated by a human player. But it also provides ways for human players and AI agents to work together, and a chat window through which a person can talk with a nascent AI. "In the long run I want to work toward AI that can be taught by any user to help them achieve their goals," says Katja Hoffman, a researcher at Microsoft Cambridge in the U.K. who leads the project. Hoffman, who gave a demo of the software to AI researchers at an academic conference in New York last week, says that human-AI collaboration is a key goal for the project: "We've built in all the capabilities that a researcher would need in order to work toward collaborative AI." Malmo is geared toward testing reinforcement-learning algorithms, a way of training a computer to perform a task by providing simulated rewards.

The 4U4 card design of Inspur NF5568M4 is applicable to present electric power and heat dissipation designs of the data center, and is scalable to multi-machine and multi-card CPU computing clusters via the open-source Inspur Caffe-MPI becoming the mainstream CPU server used presently in the internet industry. Currently, Inspur's deep learning solution is being applied at Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Qihoo, iFLYTEK and JD and is supporting the "super brains" of various types of intelligentized services. As the neural network model grows in complexity, the computing performance necessary for the model training increases dramatically. The cluster-edition Caffe-MPI computing frame launched by Inspur achieves parallel computing of GPU server. It adopts high-performance mature MPI technology in computing -- carrying out parallel data optimization to the Caffe edition -- with the ability to organize multiple NF5568M4 into CPU parallel computing clusters via IB network.

Last month, in collaboration with the folks behind the fantastic Burner app, my company Voxable launched our latest chatbot project, Ghostbot for Burner. Ghostbot runs on top of Burner's "open" phone numbers as an agent inside your text message inbox, allowing you to "ghost" away from fleeting relationships by responding to unwanted or creepy texters on your behalf. Since the launch, Ghostbot has been covered in over one hundred media outlets. Chris Messina was also kind enough to post it to Product Hunt, calling it "the first bot-as-personal-firewall" he had seen. The opportunity to break new ground in the coming era of bot-mediated communication was what initially both excited and terrified us about the project.

Your next refrigerator may know more about diet than your doctor. How many objects do you have that are connected to the Internet? About a decade ago you probably would have said one or maybe two if you were an early adopter of smartphone technology. But today, oh, well I've got a work computer, I've got a personal computer, I've got a tablet, I've got a smartphone, I've got a video game console, I've got a media player, I've got a smart TV, I even have a smart refrigerator. Now extend this trend outward and what do we get?

"Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only'learning about' the subject matter but also'learning to be' a full participant in the field." This quote is a passage from the readings this week that really resonated with me. Social learning is a way to really engage in the subject matter because you are not only passively participating in the subject matter by reading it but also engaging in the subject by discussing it with your peers and in some instances with the instructor. The chapter also discusses surface learning in comparison with deep learning. Surface learning is when you know the basic facts of the material but don't understand it enough to use it out of direct context, or at least that was my understanding.