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.

A video summary of the paper: Nguyen A, Yosinski J, Clune J. Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images. The paper is available here: http://EvolvingAI.org/fooling Special thanks to those who created the music, images, videos and software that were used to create this video.

ROOBO, a fast-growing hardware and AI startup headquartered in Beijing, today unveiled a prototype of its newest product, a "pet robot" called Domgy. For the unfamiliar, ROOBO is the company behind Pudding, a voice-controlled, educational robot for kids. Pudding is used to teach kids vocabulary, geography, jokes and more. The company also makes the Idealens virtual reality headset, Skyseries drone and Runbone earbuds. Since its founding in 2014, ROOBO has grown to 300 employees, with 7 worldwide offices, including one in Seattle.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates recently called artificial intelligence "the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about" during Vox Media's Code Conference. Gates discussed the rapid progress of speech recognition and computer vision technologies over the past five years, and noted that "the dream is finally arriving." If that dream arrives, tech investors should recognize the major trends and players in this market. To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow from 420 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, thanks to the rising adoption of machine learning and natural language processing technologies in the media, advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare industries.

Facebook is getting even closer to a human-level understanding of what people are saying. Facebook has developed DeepText, a new way to parse text using artificial intelligence processes that's quicker at picking up new languages and slang than traditional approaches. In a company blog post published on Wednesday, three members of the company's applied machine learning team -- Ahmad Abdulkader, Aparna Lakshmiratan and Joy Zhang -- announced the technology that's already being used across Facebook and Facebook Messenger. DeepText is able to churn through "several thousands of posts per second" across more than 20 languages and understand what's being communicated with "near-human accuracy," according to the announcement post. Facebook's ability to comprehend what people are saying on its platform isn't new.

Marketing today is a labour intensive task. It requires marketers to dig through large volumes of data – most of which doesn't really help them make impactful business decisions in the long run. According to EMC, the digital universe is all set to grow by a factor of 300, from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes by 2020. But the truth is that the human kind can only retain upto 1m gigabytes of memory. While there are those who believe'data is everything', the truth is that what you learn from the data and what you do with it, is what actually matters.

Mar 11, 2016 AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind in London to play the traditional Chinese board game Go, had five matches against Se-Dol Lee, a professional Go player in Korea from March 8-15, 2016. AlphaGo won four out of the five games, a significant test result showcasing the advancement achieved in the field of general-purpose artificial intelligence (GAI), according to the company. Dr. Demis Hassabis, the Chief Executive Officer of Google DeepMind, visited KAIST on March 11, 2016 and gave an hour-long talk to students and faculty. In the lecture, which was entitled "Artificial Intelligence and the Future," he introduced an overview of GAI and some of its applications in Atari video games and Go.

I've looked previously at the rise of so-called automated leadership, with the scheduling and appraisal of employees largely done via algorithm, with researchers exploring just how people feel working under this kind of leadership. That is but one part of the infusion of automation into leadership, however, with things like forecasting and other forms of data analysis handed over to computers for a while now. A team from the University of York and software company MooD International are teaming up to use a mixture of AI and gaming technology to help management decision making. The work revolves around the so-called Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is a commonly used algorithm for decision-making in video games. The aim is to make a similar algorithm for use in the workplace.