NEW YORK--The first-year anniversary of the Windows 10 launch is still about a month away. But Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi announced today in a blog post that the next major iteration of the company's operating system--dubbed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update--will become available on August 2. Microsoft is encouraging folks to request it in advance. Indeed, ahead of July 29, the one-year anniversary launch date, anyone running Windows 10 on a PC today can request the upgrade for free, after which it will cost is 119. Either way, you'll still have to wait until August 2 to get it. Mehdi says that more than 350 million devices are currently running Windows 10 worldwide, with customer satisfaction levels higher than any previous version of Windows.

Edgar Sarmiento won the Local Motors challenge to design an urban public transportation system. His self-driving electric minibus design eventually become this vehicle called Olli. Edgar Sarmiento won the Local Motors challenge to design an urban public transportation system. His self-driving electric minibus design eventually become this vehicle called Olli. At the recent unveiling of a new self-driving shuttle bus called Olli, its designer sat perched on a stool nearby, his hands cradling a photo camera in his lap.

Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at the Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.

To some people, electricity is like air: There for the taking. For others, circumventing paying a utility bill is a just cause, sticking it to "Big Energy" for their perceived transgressions against customers. In either case, not paying for energy is considered fraud and a crime. In some states, energy fraud is a felony worthy of hard time and steep penalties. The numbers tell the story.

Driverless cars are our future, with nearly every automaker racing to create their own version of autonomous vehicles. But autonomous systems still have a long way to go--and the cues and signals that human drivers know instinctively are not second-nature for our machines. 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. To find solutions for how vehicles with autonomous features can drive safely on the road, professor John Dolan, a principal systems scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, studies how humans communicate and coordinate with these machines, helping them understand how to complete complex tasks on the road.

Customer experience personalization is all about data first. Get the data right and you can shape the overall customer experience by applying data science and machine learning. Recommendation engines are very powerful personalization tools because it's a great way to do "discovery" – showing people items they will like, but are unlikely to discover by themselves. They improve a visitor's experience by offering relevant items at the right time and on the right page. In the immortal words of Steve Jobs - "a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

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Plenty of media attention has been devoted to robots replacing lawyers. Conversely, some industry players claim that artificial intelligence (AI) is simply a buzzword used to sell software to law firms. "Are many AI-badged products just rule-based decision-making tools?" asks Alex Smith, platform innovation lead at LexisNexis UK. "What counts as AI?" AI in business has moved beyond process automation to include natural language processing and machine-learning, whereby computers are trained to interpret information and adjust their processes to user feedback. Rather than searching for keywords or strings of words, the software reads and understands information, so its findings and recommendations are based on contextual elements. Gerard Frith, chief executive of AI consultancy Matter, explains how AI adds value by modelling and reapplying expert knowledge in a fast, scalable way.

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (technically four) have been a stalwart of science fiction for decades. With recent advances in artificial intelligence, though, computer scientists and tech companies are beginning to seriously consider the rules we actually need to protect ourselves from future robots and AI. Last week, researchers from Google published a scientific paper outlining five key challenges for making robots safe to work with, and yesterday, in an article for Slate, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella laid out the six "principles and goals" he believes AI research must follow to keep society safe. The latter are rules that robots must obey, while the Microsoft chief is princiapply speaking to the industry -- to the computer scientists who are building AI systems and working with machine learning. As such, his rules are more about the potential social impact of artificial intelligence, than stopping a robot coming at you.

Taking a page from Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has drawn up six "musts" for the revolution in artificial intelligence that he sees coming, plus four musts for the humans living in the AI age. Nadella's deep dive into the philosophical underpinnings of AI research comes as Microsoft is turning its attention toward AI tools with a vigor reminiscent of billionaire co-founder Bill Gates' pivot to the internet in the mid-1990s. In his own essay, published today online on Slate, Nadella refers not only to Asimov's laws, but also to Gates' 1995 "Internet Tidal Wave" memo. The essay also comes amid a debate over whether AI could pose a "Terminator"-level threat to humanity's long-term future. Just this week, for example, British physicist Stephen Hawking warned about the rise of an "AI arms race" in autonomous weapons.