PRINEVILLE, Ore. – In a row of racks deep inside a massive data center sits the engine of Facebook's ambitions in artificial intelligence. Each server chassis is packed with computing horsepower, including graphics processing units (GPUs) that can crunch enormous volumes of data. This is Big Sur, and it is the key to Facebook's bid to create a smarter newsfeed for its 1.6 billion users around the globe. Using Big Sur, Facebook can train its machine learning systems to recognize speech, understand the content of video and images, and translate content from one language to another. Machine learning holds tremendous promise, but requires a lot of horsepower.

The Andhra Pradesh Government and SAP have signed a MoU here on Thursday to set up a start-up accelerator here. The MoU was signed by SAP Director (Start-up Focus Programme) Mayank Mathur and IT Adviser to AP Government J.A. Chowdary. Mathur said that SAP would strive to create the right kind of eco system in Vizag for the flourishing of start-ups and to develop entrepreneurial spirit among the young. "We will launch the operations initially under our experts based at Bengaluru within a month. They will be visiting Vizag periodically," he said.

As the Internet of Things explodes, so do opportunities for machine learning. The machine learning arm of market leaders is getting stronger as they bolster technology to enhance efficiency and the customer experience. For example, look to some of the biggest names in tech --Twitter is acquiring Magic Pony Technology, Google has set up a Machine Learning Centre, and Watson is IBM's sidekick. A Siemens study predicted the global market for smart devices will increase 20 percent annually over the next eight years. The boom is driving a need for tech pros with artificial intelligence and machine learning experience in both startup and established-company spaces.

Virtual marketing assistant Kit CRM today announced the launch of its chatbot on Facebook Messenger. This will be its third platform and comes three months after Kit became one of the first companies to announce an integration with Facebook's conversational platform. Now, any of the more than 900 million monthly app users will be able to have access to a virtual employee right at their fingertips. The idea in bringing this marketing assistant to Facebook Messenger is to enable merchants without marketing support to more easily manage their online marketing promotions on Facebook and Instagram. This assistant offers a more user-friendly interface, instead of asking them to sort through ad-serving networks and interfaces.

Which is why an anonymous individual (or individuals) went to the internet to make a mockery of both. The AIVC describes itself as, "The world's first Venture Capital fund powered entirely by Artificial Intelligence." It might be a damn good laugh, but it also leaves us wondering if a bot could pick VC investments better than a human can. I decided to mess around with it, pitching a fake startup idea and taking in all of amusing shade it had to throw. I went with a service providing on-demand showers.

Microsoft today announced the general availability of the Azure SQL Data Warehouse, an elastic data warehouse as a service with enterprise-class features. It is a fully managed DW as a Service that you can provision in minutes and scale up to 60 times larger in seconds. With Azure SQL Data Warehouse, storage and compute scale independently. You can dynamically deploy, grow, shrink, and even pause compute, taking advantage of best-in-class price/performance. Also, SQL Data Warehouse uses the power and familiarity of T-SQL to let you easily integrate query results across relational data in your data warehouse and non-relational data in Azure blob storage.

In the event of a c-section, if a robot suggested who should perform it, would you listen? Ninety percent of the time, nurses and physicians did. A robot programmed by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) suggests where to move patients and who should perform caesarian sections. The team from CSAIL thinks robots are most effective in helping with one of the most "complex" tasks in the labor ward of the hospital: scheduling. "The aim of the work was to develop artificial intelligence that can learn from people about how the labor and delivery unit works, so that robots can better anticipate how to be helpful or when to stay out of the way--and maybe even help by collaborating in making challenging decisions," says MIT professor Julie Shah, senior author on two papers based on CSAIL's research.

In what is being called the "first beer brewed by artificial intelligence," IntelligentX hopes to create products which are constantly evolving by bringing their entire client base and expert brewers together via its Automated Brewing Intelligence (ABI, pronounced "Abbey") algorithm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks. Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic with an expertise in artificial intelligence, speech synthesis and machine learning, started working on the system, called Vault OS, two years ago in a basement in London's Shoreditch district, known for being a tech start-up hub. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction ever made. The ledger is tamper-proof and transparent, meaning that transactions can be processed without the need for third-party verification. The system also negates the need for costly in-house data centers, as it uses cloud-based systems, which banks can use on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which means that there is no single point of failure.

Diagnosing cancer is about to get more accurate, with the help of artificial intelligence. Pathologists have diagnosed diseases in more or less the same way for the past 100 years, by laboring over a microscope reviewing biopsy samples on little glass slides. Working almost robotically, they sift through millions of normal cells to identify just a few diseased ones. The task is tedious and prone to human error. But now, scientists and engineers have created a technique that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and can differentiate cancer cells from normal cells almost as well as a top-notch pathologist.