Without a doubt, cloud computing and Big Data analytics are top of mind for many people when it comes to hot technology categories where open source is making a big difference. However, there is an absolute renaissance goind on right now in the field of artifical intelligence and the closely related field of machine learning. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, recently said on a conference call, "I do think in the long run we will evolve in computing from a mobile-first to an A.I.-first world." Facebook, Google and many other companies have been open sourcing key AI tools as well. Now, Microsoft has released an artificial intelligence system dubbed Project Malmo to the open source community.

With an eye toward taking the healthcare supply chain to new levels, UPMC on July 8 introduced Pensiamo, a new company whose goal is to help hospitals improve supply chain performance, where costs are high and getting higher, second only to labor costs. Pensiamo is an Italian word. We can provide insights that others cannot," UPMC's James Szilagy told Healthcare IT News. Pensiamo starts up with 150 employees, spinning out certain functions of UPMC's supply chain into the new company. For now, UPMC itself is the sole customer, but Szilagy said there has been strong interest from others. "So now that we have the organization stood up, we can take them to the next level," he said. "Many healthcare entities across the country have not invested in their supply chain organizations over the years, so they are not as far down the maturity curve as UPMC is.

Want to know how much you spent on Uber rides last month? A new banking bot called MyKAI can give you some answers. Kasisto's new banking smart bot, which works with messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Slack to make financial transactions and answer questions, is part of a broader trend towards using AI to enrich customers' interactions with companies. You can make payments, ask the bot things like how much money is in your account, and even ask general questions like "What is a CD?" It can even provide an answer if you want to know if you have a gambling problem. Why Dick's Sporting Goods decided to play its own game in e commerce Dick's Sporting Goods has long partnered with eBay Enterprise on its e -commerce platform. Learn the benefits and risks of this multi -million dollar IT bet.

For many years, effective voice-based search technologies have eluded businesses that have tried to bring next-generation input methods to customers. Confined to basic navigation and so-called'magic words', command-based speech systems have been ineffective and hard for consumers to use. The widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, and their minimised keyboards, has led to a renewed interest in this genre of technology however, with Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Now's'OK Google' progressing beyond basic menu navigation functions and striking a chord with consumers and businesses alike. In fact, any device with a microphone has potential for speech based commands, and can become an intelligent discovery system that uses a sophisticated entertainment brain to understand customer desires. This technology is important and under-explored by the TV industry, which often appears to have been left behind in terms of intuitive discovery functionality.

A reporter asked us for annoying buzzwords in the tech sector. Nathan and I had a fun email exchange on this, and naturally, ours are focused on artificial intelligence.

In 2012, Dennis Mortensen had 1,019 meetings, each of which required an average of roughly eight back-and-forth emails to schedule. Every time Mortensen comes across a contact interested in meeting with him, the CEO and founder of New York City-based artificial intelligence firm x.ai simply sends them a return email copying Amy, who takes care of the rest. "In raw numbers, I've saved about an hour every day -- an hour which I would otherwise have to use in really rudimentary work where I add not much value," Mortensen said of Amy's help scheduling meetings. Virtual assistants like Amy are becoming more common. Just as household technology platforms like Apple's "Siri" and Microsoft's "Cortana" has helped consumers navigate their lives more easily, other forms of rudimentary artificial intelligence platforms are starting to proliferate the market, many of them upending traditional business roles.

The technical potential for automation differs dramatically across sectors and activities. As automation technologies such as machine learning and robotics play an increasingly great role in everyday life, their potential effect on the workplace has, unsurprisingly, become a major focus of research and public concern. The discussion tends toward a Manichean guessing game: which jobs will or won't be replaced by machines? In fact, as our research has begun to show, the story is more nuanced. While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail. Automation, now going beyond routine manufacturing activities, has the potential, as least with regard to its technical feasibility, to transform sectors such as healthcare and finance, which involve a substantial share of knowledge work. These conclusions rest on our detailed analysis of 2,000-plus work activities for more than 800 occupations.

Learn how to build a personal chatbot for Facebook Messenger. I have created this step by step guide so you can create your own Facebook Messenger bot without coding. Facebook Messenger has a growing audience of 900 mln. It is an awesome opportunity to showcase your work and promote your services, automate conversations and build out your personal brand. By the end of the course you will be launch and promote your personal bot.

That's what Microsoft's Project Malmo, formerly known as Project AIX, is doing right now. Publicly unveiled today on the official Mojang blog, Project Malmo has just made its open source tools available to everyone today in an effort to help others help strengthen AI in various ways. Mojang notes that Minecraft is the perfect way to educate AI when it comes to offering solutions to problems, sharpening spatial and temporal reasoning, and even collaboration. Project Malmo can offer diverse opportunities at teaching artificial intelligence software and act as a research tool that can test these theories as well. If you're interested in seeing what Project Malmo has to offer in addition to testing it out for yourself, you can download the mod for the PC/Mac edition of Minecraft here.

The code here implements the Dual LSTM Encoder model from The Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus: A Large Dataset for Research in Unstructured Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems. This code uses Python 3 and Tensorflow 0.9. Download the train/dev/test data here and extract the acrhive into ./data.