Research released late last year suggested that almost two thirds (62%) of a survey of 90 German institutional investors predict greater usage of artificial intelligence (AI) for short-term decision-making, and 17% for medium-term investment decisions. Universal Investments, the asset manager behind the research, said that "the industry's future thus certainly appears to be closely linked with the strategic use of AI". Of course, "greater usage" could be a marginal rise, but I think that an increase in the use of AI is almost inevitable. It's certainly true that the cost of investment management that can be done by a machine has reduced, to the extent that human active managers now need to really deliver value. AI is also not purely the domain of the passive fund; active managers will increasingly deploy these tools to supplement and support their decision support.

Some of the world's fastest computers employ Nvidia's graphics processor for computer vision, deep learning and scientific calculations, and a new GPU will supercharge these applications. The Tesla P100 that plugs into the PCI-Express slots of supercomputers will speed up tasks like economic forecasting and weather modeling. The GPU is also targeted at servers, and will play a big role in helping self-driving cars, robots and drones identify objects. Deep-learning systems with the GPUs in data centers will improve cloud-based image recognition, classification, natural language processing and speech recognition. One system with Tesla P100 chips is Nvidia's DGX-1, which can be purchased for US 129,000.

Earlier this year, a survey from Nuance Communications into consumer preferences and expectations around customer self-service revealed that a significant number (89%) prefer, and even expect, to have conversational interaction. In fact, for 87%, a positive interaction with a company determines whether or not they will continue their relationship. Of particular interest is Nuance's finding that 89% of consumers "want to engage with virtual assistants to quickly find information instead of searching through Web pages or a mobile phone app on their own". Nearly three-quarters (73%) said they want their conversations with customer service to be personalized and 64% want customer service to be proactive and include suggestions and reminders. New research from the Direct Marketing Association (UK) reflects Nuance's findings in terms of brand engagement.

With much current discussion of AI fixating on ethical implications--whether AI may eventually "outsmart" or harm us; how we can ensure that AI acts in our best interests--it's worth considering a new approach to AI that keeps humans in the loop: swarm intelligence. UNU, a software platform run by Unanimous A.I., brings groups of people together online to arrive at all kinds of real-time decisions and predictions, ranging from who will win March Madness to the top four horses at the Kentucky Derby. The system has proven remarkably effective at coming up with accurate answers. In fact, it has outperformed experts in a variety of contests--in the 2015 Oscar predictions, for instance, the swarm had a higher than 70% accuracy--New York Times critics, it should be noted, were right 55% of the time. SEE: How'artificial swarm intelligence' uses people to make better predictions than experts But, beyond accuracy, there is another advantage to using the swarm: according to new research, it makes more ethical decisions.

We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert Simon predicted that within 10 years, a digital computer would be the world's chess champion. That didn't happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky's 1970 prediction that "in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being," we still consider that a feat of science fiction. The pioneers of artificial intelligence were surely off on the timing, but they weren't wrong; AI is coming.

To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry. These devices will likely include many connected appliances, cars, wearables, and other gadgets included in the broader Internet of Things market.

To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry. These devices will likely include many connected appliances, cars, wearables, and other gadgets included in the broader Internet of Things market.

The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning announced on June 19 that Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology professor Choi Jae-shik recently developed an artificial intelligence system and is going to unveil it at an academic seminar this month. According to the professor, the system is capable of predicting the future prices of houses, future stock prices, foreign exchange rate movements and the like after reading newspaper articles, business reports and so on and then automatically drawing up reports in English. "The system will become capable of drawing up the same reports in Korean at some point in time next year and writing news articles in the near future," the professor remarked. Earlier, an AI system capable of stock price prediction has been developed by the MIT and the University of Cambridge. This system, however, is limited in accuracy because it predicts future prices by analyzing correlations between the prices of stocks owned by someone and the others based on numerical data such as past prices.

The latest entrant into the new space race has a wingspan longer than the distance traveled by the Wright Brothers in their earliest flights. Its landing gear has a total of 28 wheels. And the local county had to issue special construction permits for the scaffolding needed to build what would be the world's largest airplane. Only someone like Paul Allen -- the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, owner of the Seattle Seahawks, dreamer and space enthusiast -- might attempt to build something like this: a twin-fuselage behemoth as wide as a football field that, fully loaded, would weigh 1.3 million pounds, be powered by six 737 engines and have 60 miles of wiring coursing through it. Called Stratolaunch, the plane would be bigger than Howard Hughes' famed Spruce Goose, which flew once, in 1947. But Allen's creation comes as the space industry is being disrupted by entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who like him, aim to revolutionize space travel.

The architecture includes maths capabilities that could be used by other software as part of a heterogeneous system architecture. That could include neural network software but ARM executives stressed that Bifrost is first and foremost an architecture for raster, tile-based graphics processing units (GPUs). The previous architecture – Midgard – is the one that underlies ARM's T-series Mali GPUs and has up to 16 unified shader cores and SIMD [single-instruction multiple data] instruction set architecture. Bifrost supports up to 32 unified shader cores with a scalar ISA, full hardware cache coherency and something called clause execution. The primary goal, according to Sean Ellis, GPU architect with ARM, was to achieve more performance per square millimeter of silicon and per line of "real-world" shader code. Whereas Midgard GPUs use SIMD vectorization Bifrost GPUs will use quad vectorization in which four scalar threads from a 2 by 2 pixel are executed in lock step.