Facebook reveals artificial intelligence, which it calls DeepText. The deep-learning A.I. will help Zuck's social network to "improve user experiences" by "solving tricky language challenges." In regular language, that seems to mean Facebook mining even more of your private data, so it can sell even more ads and tell brands even more about you. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers are the product. How good is it, really?

If you ever wondered how Google's self-driving car can tell drivers apart from cyclists and other users of the road, the company's latest report on the project should shed a bit of light on the topic. It turns out that (as with many of the company's products) machine learning algorithms figure heavily into the car's detection technology. By "seeing" many examples of bicycles with its cameras and sensors, the car's computer has effectively been taught what bicycles look like from every angle. "Our software learns from the thousands of variations it has seen -- from multicolored frames, big wheels, bikes with car seats, tandem bikes, conference bikes, and unicycles," Google said in its report, published Tuesday. Haven't heard of some of the bicycle types mentioned on that list?

Jordan is renowned in the scientific community as an expert and leading researcher in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. "Jibo is breaking new ground by bringing a human element to the robot experience -- something I believe the world needs and will benefit from embracing," said Michael I. Jordan, advisory board member of Jibo Inc. "My background and research in AI is uniquely suited to help in advancing Jibo's learning capabilities and developing his role and relationships within the home environment." Currently the Pehong Chen distinguished professor in electrical engineering, computer science and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, Jordan has developed a wide range of novel methods in machine learning, natural language processing and signal processing. Jibo Inc. will apply artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to the field of social rapport and relationships. Jordan joins the advisory board comprised of 10 industry leaders in fields central to Jibo Inc.'s ongoing development including voice and natural language technologies, artificial intelligence, human factors, behavioral science and more.

Up to 40 per cent of current Australian jobs could disappear within the next 10 to 15 years as robots and computers continue their unstoppable advance. They have already replaced humans in workplaces such as factories, supermarkets and airline check-in counters. Hugh Durrant-Whyte, director at the Centre for Translational Data Science at the University of Sydney, said technology was taking on middle-class professions once thought safe from automation -- professions such as law, accountancy and banking. "We always used to think of automation as moving everybody up," he said. "The big difference now is machine learning and artificial intelligence are solving jobs that we thought traditionally were very highly qualified jobs … it's eating out the middle of the job market, rather than the bottom end."

Nervana provides "AI on demand". Businesses use our Nervana Cloud platform to create and deploy solutions that include natural language processing, image recognition, computer vision and other types of artificial intelligence. We specialize in "deep learning", which is the technology that powers Apple's Siri, Facebook face recognition, and Google's self-driving cars and AlphaGo. The space is white hot right now!

As we can see, when the model makes an error, it is much more uncertain in the answer (i.e. the answers provided are more uniform). You might argue, that you get the same effect with a multinomial prediction from a regular ANN, however, this is not so. By bridging Lasagne and PyMC3 and by using mini-batch ADVI to train a Bayesian Neural Network on a decently sized and complex data set (MNIST) we took a big step towards practical Bayesian Deep Learning on real-world problems. Kudos to the Lasagne developers for designing their API to make it trivial to integrate for this unforseen application. They were also very helpful and forthcoming in getting this to work.

Alleged criminals might not be the only ones to benefit from pleading the Fifth. By falling silent during the Turing test, artificial intelligence (AI) systems can fool human judges into believing they're human, according to a study by machine intelligence researchers from Coventry University. Alan Turing, considered the father of theoretical computer science and AI, devised the Turing test in an attempt to outline what it means for a thing to think. In the test, a human judge or interrogator has a conversation with an unseen entity, which might be a human or a machine. The test posits that the machine can be considered to be "thinking" or "intelligent" if the interrogator is unable to tell whether or not the machine is a human.

Despite the tremendous progress we've made in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, building a robot that can convincingly emulate normal human behavior remains merely a fantasy at this stage. Some of them can speak and maybe even hold a conversation, but no robot comes close to being a real life'Ex Machina' yet. For the most part, the humanoid robots we've built so far come across as overly mechanical, unnervingly awkward and threateningly soulless… but somehow all of this creepiness makes them irresistibly fascinating. Tara the Android is perhaps the godmother of the robotic creepfest. While the video of this eerie singing mannequin was first uploaded back in 2009 and has since received over seven million views, little information is available about either Tara or her creator.

Time is the most valuable and finite asset in the world. Our weekly dose of "Monday Morsels" centre's on optimising our time to impact our lives and business. We have no intent on the theme, just purely lessons that can consistently be used. This week we cover quantum computing, how reality is not what it seems, what's on the other side of fear, and which artificial intelligence platforms will reign. Richard Feynman is undoubtedly the most famous physicist since Einstein and the man that first embedded my intrigue for science & technology.

This is the fifth in a series of reports to document development of a generalized method to create artificial neural networks (ANNs) via a genetic algorithm (GA). This report will be divided into several main sections. The goal of this report is to demonstrate the ability of an ANN to detect edges in images and use those edges to recognize letters. Reports #1-3 showed the development of a genetic algorithm that could evolve an artificial neural network given a set of input images. Report #3 focused on training an ANN to recognize patterns, specifically letters in an image.