Big data platform vendors are increasingly focusing on churning through unstructured data, especially for text, audio and even security applications like insider threat analysis. Among the companies emerging in this industry segment is Digital Reasoning, a well-connected cognitive computing company that has helped the U.S. military track terrorists online while working with financial markets to spot insider trading. The company, which recently expanded beyond the Capital Beltway to Nashville, rolled out the latest version of its Synthesys cognitive computing platform this week that combines machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision and pattern recognition. The combination is intended to boost the quality of unstructured data analysis while reducing the amount of time needed to get the desired results. Version 4 of the Digital Reasoning platform released on Tuesday (June 21) is based on proprietary analytics tools that apply deep learning neural network techniques across text, audio and images.

Those are some of the well-known goals and accomplishments of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Now, add Rosie to the mix. You do remember Rosie the robot maid from "The Jetsons," right? OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company backed by Musk, has announced that one of its goals is to "enable" a household robot. The robot would be off the shelf and not built by OpenAI, but the goal is to help it perform basic housework, enabled by the technology the company is working on.

Twitter has bought London-based machine learning outfit Magic Pony Technology, as it moves to bolster its video and image-sharing output. The micro-blogging site has reportedly dropped 150 million ( 102 million) on Magic Pony, which offers tech that apparently improves low-quality pictures and videos on the fly by recognising patterns and textures. Twitter's latest buyout represents its third machine-learning acquisition in two years: it scooped up Madbits in 2014, and Whetlab a year later. "Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter," said the firm's chief Jack Dorsey. "Magic Pony's machine learning technology will help us build strength into our deep learning teams with world-class talent, so Twitter can continue to be the best place to see what's happening and why it matters, first, he added.

Baidu Inc. is using its own trove of data to measure China's economy, devising new gauges that may paint a better picture than the government's. The country's leading search engine has begun using location and search information collected from its more than 600 million users to create indicators and indexes it says could shed light on what's happening with the world's second largest economy. Investors and analysts have long questioned the veracity and methodology of China's government-issued statistics. An example is jobless data, with an unemployment rate staying between 4 percent and 4.3 percent in every quarter since the end of 2002, through a domestic boom, the global financial crisis and now an economy growing at its slowest pace in 25 years. "The economy is slowing down but the unemployment rate published by the government remains steady about 4 percent," senior data scientist Wu Haishan said.

A robot capable of thinking for itself is set to be scrapped after it escaped from a high-tech lab for a second time. The Promobot IR77 has been fitted with artificial intelligence meaning that it learns from its experiences and its surroundings, although the programmers had not expected it to yearn for freedom. They say that despite reprogramming it twice, the robot continues to attempt to escape and they are now considering scrapping it. The other robots which have been created from the same series are well-behaved, and have not been escaping, say the team. Promobot IR77 made headlines last week when he escaped but ran out of battery in the middle of the street after 45 minutes in the city of Perm in central Russia's Perm Krai region.

Twitter has moved to beef-up its AI and VR arms with the purchase of Magic Pony Technology - a UK-based company which it has acquired for a reported 150m. Its technology uses'neutral networks' to improve the quality of photos and videos - this means that the technology is trained to think like a human. It works in a way that is similar to how the human eye sees objects from different angles and processes them into one image. This technology is also likely to be used to develop virtual reality and augmented reality features and experiences. It also exploits machine learning - technology that can learn by itself as it gathers data.

The data science team at AdRoll is constantly working to improve our programmatic bidding algorithm, BidIQ. One recent improvement to BidIQ has been the introduction of a novel modeling technique called Factorization Machines (FM). The FM model allows us to consider interactions between all predictive variables, rather than only certain manually selected interactions. Thanks to the FM model, we are able to use the exact same feature information to more accurately value every potential impression that comes our way. As a result, our advertisers are collecting almost 7% more clicks for only 2% more cost.

It seems like everyone wants to invest in artificial intelligence (AI). And it's not just the tech giants: USAA is using AI to protect its users from identity theft and Under Armour has connected its health app, MyFitnessPal, to IBM Watson so users can get a more thorough read of their health. AI is already a 15 billion dollar industry, according to the MIT Technology Review, with more than 2,600 companies developing their own tech, and the value of AI is reported to rise to over 70 billion by 2020. Because of AI's business opportunities, hundreds of designers in digital agencies, people who were taught to create products and services that live on the Internet, are starting to build physical products that interact with us, respond to our moods, and make decisions for us. It's a challenge that requires every skill they've learned, plus many they haven't. Still, designers know the basics: The principles of user-centric design lay the groundwork for building a great AI system.

As a High School student Carlton had been withdrawn and quiet, unsocial and uninvolved. One of his teachers was convinced that he was using drugs because he was so pale and tired. In reality, he had been up late into the night, designing, building and refining his electrically independent computer. He drew his own blood for it, leading to symptoms of anemia. His prototype was, in retrospect, an archaic fossil as soon as it was operational, but he won a National competition with it. He won because his design exemplified the philosophical goals of the contest: energy efficiency.

It may look like a video game, but the new computer simulation developed by a team of researchers in Barcelona could one day train autonomous cars to be better drivers. Called'Synthia,' the program creates a virtual city complete with pedestrians, traffic signs and other components of an urban environment, automatically annotated at the pixel-level.