Modern smartphones are essentially pocket-sized mini-computers, capable of dealing with many tasks that not very long ago would have been processed on desktop or laptop computers. The camera module is just one component of many, but more and more consumers are carefully considering camera performance in their buying decision. Manufacturers have been well aware for quite some time and are investing heavily to make sure the cameras on their devices can compete with the best. The device division of mobile communication pioneer Motorola for example, which was taken over by Chinese PC makers Lenovo in 2014, first assembled a dedicated camera and imaging team in 2013 when it was still part of Google. Since then the brand has launched a number of new devices in its Moto range with a clear focus on imaging performance and features.

Last week the BBC looked at artificial intelligence and robotics. You could barely move through any part of the BBC schedule on any of its platforms without encountering an AI mention or feature. A good idea I think – both an innovative way of using'the whole BBC' but also an important topic. That said I failed to come across any piece which adequately addressed what I believe is the real issue of AI and how it is likely to play-out and influence humanity. True to subject form, in the BBC reporting there was a great deal of attention on'the machine' and'the robot' and the idea that intelligence has to be defined in a human way and therefore artificial intelligence can be said to be here, or to pose a threat, when some machine has arrived which is a more intelligent version of a human.

When computers speak, how human should they sound? This was a question that a team of six IBM linguists, engineers and marketers faced in 2009, when they began designing a function that turned text into speech for Watson, the company's "Jeopardy!"-playing Eighteen months later, a carefully crafted voice -- sounding not quite human but also not quite like HAL 9000 from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- expressed Watson's synthetic character in a highly publicized match in which the program defeated two of the best human "Jeopardy!" The challenge of creating a computer "personality" is now one that a growing number of software designers are grappling with as computers become portable and users with busy hands and eyes increasingly use voice interaction. Machines are listening, understanding and speaking, and not just computers and smartphones.

Episode Summary: If you're in the San Francisco Bay area, it's not all that novel to be trained in or working on some form of AI; however, to be doing so in the 1980s and 1990s was a more rare occurrence. Dr. Lorien Pratt has been working with neural nets and AI applications for many decades, and she does lots of consulting work in implementing these technologies with companies in the Bay area. In this episode, Lorien provides her unique perspective on decades of development and adoption in AI as we ask, where is the traction today in places where it wasn't 5 or 10 years ago? We also discuss where Lorien thinks machine learning applications in business and government seem to be headed in the near term. Recognition in Brief: Lorien Pratt, PhD, is co-founder and chief scientist at Quantellia, a consultant firm for machine learning applications in business and industry.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are biologically-inspired variants of MLPs. From Hubel and Wiesel's early work on the cat's visual cortex [Hubel68], we know the visual cortex contains a complex arrangement of cells. These cells are sensitive to small sub-regions of the visual field, called a receptive field. The sub-regions are tiled to cover the entire visual field. These cells act as local filters over the input space and are well-suited to exploit the strong spatially local correlation present in natural images.

DeepMind is an artificial intelligence lab in London that creates what are known as general purpose self-learning algorithms. The company, acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million, is best-known for creating software „agents" that have mastered games like…

Minecraft has gained a tool that lets artificial intelligence experiments be carried out in its virtual worlds. The Malmo platform will be offered free of charge to research institutions as well as the general public.

An artificial intelligence lawyer chatbot has successfully contested 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York for free, showing that chatbots can actually be useful. Dubbed as "the world's first robot lawyer", a title which actually belongs to an AI called "Ross", by its 19 year old creator, London born second year Stanford University student Joshua Browder, DoNotPay helps users contest parking tickets in an easy to use chat like interface. The program first works out whether an appeal is possible through a series of simple questions, such as were there clearly visible parking signs, and then guides users through the appeals process. The results speak for themselves. In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% appealing over 4m of parking tickets.

NEW YORK--When Dallas police detonated a "bomb robot" Thursday night to take down a sniper suspect, it was believed to be the first time a robot was used by law enforcement to kill a human being in the U.S. Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a press conference that "other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger." The action raises ethical questions about the role of robots in warfare, or in this case, police work, especially given continuing breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence. "I think for all of us, the first issue that comes to mind is some degree of relief," says Michael Kalichman, director of the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology. "While it's premature to judge exactly what happened, it certainly seems likely that this ended a tragedy that could have been far worse. However, we also can't help but think about where this will go next."

About a year ago, the author (whom I happen to know personally) sent me a rough draft of this book. And let me say, it was pretty rough. The important part though was that there was a ton of promise in both the characters and the overall plot (Artificial Intelligence and humans.) At the time, there were only a few chapters written, but generally, I liked what I had read. I gave my feedback and then wished my friend good luck and that I looked forward to reading the final product.