Google acquires another machine learning startup, predictive analytics and wearables are driving the continued adoption of electronic health records (EHR), Millennials are believers in the value of data-driven projects, Alteryx has released a new set of capabilities for its analytics platform, and H2O.ai has released an updated API for Apache Spark. The self-service data analytics company has added a new set of enhancements to the Alteryx Analytics platform. Among them is the ability to create models that progress from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive analytics. Alteryx said that this lets users evaluate possible alternatives and predict outcomes through simulation analysis. Other new capabilities include predictive modeling support for users working inside Teradata data warehouses with in-database analytics.

Is 2016 the year of AI? Big data? The answer, said CB Insights, may lie in media coverage. Whereas traditionally, many predictors relied on tracking investments in different areas or talking to specialists to uncover hot areas in tech, CB Insights' new tool called Trends now analyzes media reporting on different topics to uncover the next big thing. According to CB Insights, "When aggregated and analyzed, news media offers a powerful real-time method to discover, predict and plot the arc of rising expectations and excitement (and potential eventual disappointment) for emerging technologies." Compared to analysts, who may vary widely on predictions (on the drone market, for example, experts have cited market value from 1.27 all the way to 10 billion by 2020) media trends seem to be a more accurate way to gauge enthusiasm in an area.

By: HQAnon / (AnonHQ) The evolution of humanoid robots is well into the concerning stage at this point. DARPA's latest incarnation of its Atlas robot is seen in the following video beginning to walk at a pace with a sense of balance equal to most humans. Strangely, toward the end of the video, it is being "abused" by its human handler, which begs the question if a true artificial intelligence is permitted to flourish in this robot, if it might strike back at some point. At the very least, this robot's demonstration of dexterity in the warehouse is likely to threaten humans economically as humans continue to be outsourced to machine labor at record levels. But it's the latest humanoid robot from Hanson Robotics that might further heighten the level of concern.

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.