We don't take our economic standing for granted, and it isn't by accident. Our people are the single most important factor in retaining and growing the businesses we have and attracting new businesses and jobs over the next decade. It's why we're investing in a full continuum of education, including STEM and workforce development, and we're the only state in the nation to cut tuition for all college students. As big data and automation play an ever greater role in our lives, so too grows the demand for talent. Whether it's aerospace, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, clean energy, information and communications technology, life sciences, maritime or military, a set of common needs -- ingredients for success -- is clear among these diverse industry sectors.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

You can think of deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence as a set of Russian dolls nested within each other, beginning with the smallest. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, which is a subset of AI. AI is any computer program that does something smart. It can be a pile of if-then statements or a complex statistical model. Usually, when a computer program designed by AI researchers actually succeeds at something – like winning at chess – many people say it's "not really intelligent", because the algorithm's internals are well understood.

The acquisition will help boost eBay's structured data efforts. Ebay announced July 11 that it is acquiring SalesPredict, an Israel-based company that uses advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversions. The SalesPredict team will join eBay's structured data center and support eBay's artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts. Ebay said that the acquisition of SalesPredict builds on a recently completed acquisition of Expertmaker, which offers predictive analytics and personalization powered by artificial intelligence. The addition of SalesPredict, however, will help eBay predict factors that can affect the price of a product and enable its sellers to increase customer sales conversions.

Microsoft has made Project Malmo available for novice to experienced programmers on GitHub via an open-source license. It's a platform that uses the world of Minecraft as a testing ground for advanced artificial intelligence research. The system, which had until now only been open to a small group of computer scientists in private preview, is primarily designed to help researchers develop sophisticated, more general artificial intelligence, or AI, that can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks. That's key to creating systems that can augment human intelligence--and eventually help us with everything from cooking and doing laundry to driving and performing lifesaving tasks in an operating room. Katja Hofmann, a researcher in Microsoft's Cambridge, UK, research lab, who leads the development of Project Malmo, said the system will help researchers develop new techniques and approaches to reinforcement learning.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) has announced a partnership with Gupshup and API.ai with the purpose of creating a fully integrated cloud-based collaborative service. The announcement was made during Cisco Live! 2016. Following this announcement, we expect to see thousands of bots quickly joining Cisco Spark and Cisco Tropo platforms. The collaboration will also turn up the intensity of competition between team communication chat apps, the likes of Slack and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)'s Skype. Before Gupshup became an enterprise messaging service company in 2010, it had created an SMS social network of more than 50 million users, mainly in India.

It is a fascinating experiment that brings together Google's artificial intelligence division and one of the world's leading centres for the treatment of eye conditions. But the research project that has seen Moorfields Hospital hand over retinal scans to DeepMind has already proved controversial - and, for me, it all feels rather close to home. For the past 10 years, I have been a regular visitor to Moorfields, where I receive excellent treatment for a longstanding condition. This includes having pictures taken of the back of my eye, and it seems likely that these photos may be among those handed to DeepMind. This is for a project that aims to work out whether machine-learning technology can give doctors a better understanding of eye disease.

Accelerating the race to autonomous cars, NVIDIA today launched NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 – the world's most powerful engine for in-vehicle artificial intelligence. NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 allows the automotive industry to use artificial intelligence to tackle the complexities inherent in autonomous driving. It utilizes deep learning on NVIDIA's most advanced GPUs for 360-degree situational awareness around the car, to determine precisely where the car is and to compute a safe, comfortable trajectory. "Drivers deal with an infinitely complex world," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO, NVIDIA. "Modern artificial intelligence and GPU breakthroughs enable us to finally tackle the daunting challenges of self-driving cars. "NVIDIA's GPU is central to advances in deep learning and supercomputing.

Virtual marketing assistant Kit CRM announced today the launch of its chatbot on Facebook Messenger, making it the third platform it's available on. The move comes three months since it became one of the first companies to announce an integration with Facebook's conversational platform. 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 to bring this marketing assistant to Facebook Messenger enables merchants without marketing support to manage their online marketing promotions on Facebook and Instagram using an interface they're likely more comfortable with instead of being inundated by ad-serving networks and interfaces. Founded by Michael Perry, Kit is the producer of an artificial intelligent virtual assistant that previously let you run your e-commerce business through SMS text messages or using Telegram.

Is your garage door opening right now? Is your washing machine running? A growing number of products attempt to give consumers data on the sources of their household energy use--crucial data for home efficiency efforts and utility peak-hour conservation programs. But Sense, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the first to offer a consumer product that reads incoming household power levels a million times per second--enough to tease out telltale clues to which specific appliances, even low-wattage ones, are operating in real time. "It's at the cutting edge of what I have seen people attempting in this area," says Michael Baker, a vice president at SBW, an energy efficiency consultancy in Seattle.