Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a form of artificial intelligence that adds more fuel to the chatbot fire. When users engage in a conversation powered by NLU, the results are generally better. You can change your mind about an original request or even interrupt yourself mid-sentence, and you can use unusual words or phrases. The NLU engine is more like a neural network that understands true intent and meaning, and it can understand meaning from natural words and phrases. Now, a company called Pat is ready to show the world how users can benefit.

A mall security robot has effectively redefined the term artificial intelligence after it barreled into a toddler last week at a northern California shopping center, running him over and leaving him with various bumps and bruises. The robot, weighing in at 300 pounds and standing at 5 feet, is typically an attraction for patrons at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. But this time around it was more of an attractive nuisance, the 16-month-old boy's mother told KGO-TV, the local ABC affiliate. "The robot hit my son's head and he fell down facing down on the floor and the robot did not stop and it kept moving forward," said Tiffany Teng said. The runaway robot caused the young boy to experience a sore head, swelling in a foot and bruising on a leg.

U.S. officials covered up the Chinese government's attempt to hack computers used by the nation's banking regulator, Republican lawmakers claimed Wednesday. The report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology alleges that the Chinese government was spying on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which stores confidential data on the nation's largest financial institutions, over a three-year period starting in 2010. "Even the former chairwoman's computer had been hacked by a foreign government, likely the Chinese," the report claims. The intruders were reportedly seeking "economic intelligence," Reuters reported. FDIC officials allegedly tried to cover up the hack to protect the regulator's incoming chairman.

So you know the Bayes rule. How does it relate to machine learning? It can be quite difficult to grasp how the puzzle pieces fit together - we know it took us a while. This article is an introduction we wish we had back then. While we have some grasp on the matter, we're not experts, so the following might contain inaccuracies or even outright errors. Feel free to point them out, either in the comments or privately.

This is the first of a series of posts discussing some recent experiments combining dask and scikit-learn. A small (and extremely alpha) library has been built up from these experiments, and can be found here. There are several ways of parallelizing algorithms in machine learning. Some algorithms can be made to be data-parallel (either across features or across samples). Many machine learning algorithms have hyperparameters which can be tuned to improve the performance of the resulting estimator.

How can machine learning become a greater enabler for healthcare and its participating players? Check out Eugene Borukhovich, our SVP and Healthcare VPL, trying to answer the question at Health 2.0 WinterTech in San Francisco, CA.

Artificial intelligence is coming – so how's it going to change our reality? In March of this year, Google's artificial intelligence, AlphaGo, beat one of the top human intelligences, Lee Sedol, at the strategically mind-boggling board game Go. Experts had thought we were years away, but the computer played elegant, creative moves to outfox a Go master. So are we on the brink of an AI revolution? Peter Bentley, a computer scientist at University College London, says "since the beginning of artificial intelligence research, one of the main ways that we have tested the intelligence of our computers is to ask them to play games with us, and the progression towards the recent victory has been a long one. But in all of these cases playing games is a hugely simple task."

Autonomous, a company specializing in robotics and artificial intelligence products, recently began an Indiegogo campaign for its Drone Racing Kit. The modest 10,000 goal was met within an hour of launching, and the device is still gaining momentum. The Drone Racing Kit features two drones, two controllers, flags, cones, and a backpack, in addition to two VR headsets. The headset itself is similar to Samsung's Gear VR and Google Cardboard in that it slips over a mobile device (phone or tablet) and uses lenses to project the images three-dimensionally. The drones sport a camera that brings the user to the pilot seat with the mobile HMD, providing a first-person view of the remote-controlled device as it soars around a track of your own design.

Narrative sci-fi exploration title Event[0] will be launching on PC for Windows 7 or later in September. In Event[0], you'll need to build a relationship with a ship's computer in order to get home. In Event[0], its just you and your starship's artificial intelligence, called Kaizen. Using natural language, you can communicate with Kaizen through computer terminals throughout the ship. Kaizen can respond to your messages using over two million lines of procedurally-generated dialog.

Much virtual ink gets spilled each week enumerating the many horrors that could be ours in an AI-filled world, but top researchers in the field are already thinking ahead and making plans to ensure none of that happens. In particular, the importance of making artificial intelligence "human-aware" has come to be viewed as a top imperative for the field, earning it special status as an official theme of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence taking place this week in New York. "It's crucial that we design smart systems to work well with people," said Harvard professor Barbara Grosz during a panel discussion at the conference on Tuesday. AI should be a complement for human intelligence, not a replacement, Grosz said. As such, an ability to understand who it's interacting with and respond accordingly -- such as by explaining the decisions it makes -- is essential.