All chapters are available to download as of Sept 2015.

Artificial Intelligence had already taken over defense targeting decisions on Aegis missile warships of the US Navy, according to US military officials. "Advances in AI will lead us to a new era of human-machine cooperation and combat teaming where tactical acuity of a computer will help man make more informed decisions," Harris stated. The United States would never allow AI systems to have the power to fire nuclear missiles in any offensive capacity, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work told a conference at the Atlantic Council on March 4. But Work also warned that the US armed forces could not allow other countries to develop Artificial Intelligence with that offensive capability without matching them.

HYDERABAD: After being ranked among the best universities in the country, the University of Hyderabad (UoH) here on Wednesday was placed among the most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India by a UK-based journal. According to the study published in Science & Technology Libraries Journal, United Kingdom, UoH has been ranked 7th among 160 organisations, as most-productive organisation involved in artificial intelligence research in India. The top 20 most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India published 53 or more papers each and contributed 2,219 papers. The average citation per paper achieved by the total papers of these 20 organisations was 4.68, and eight organisations achieved a higher average citation per paper ratio than the group average. The institutions listed include Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras (10.21);

Facebook is working to get significantly better at automatically translating updates from friends not written in your native language. The social network plans to roll out a new translation system later this year. It is based on artificial neural networks, an approach to machine learning that has recently caused Facebook and others to invest heavily in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). Alan Packer, director of engineering for Facebook's language technology team, said Monday that neural networks are able to produce more natural-sounding translations than statistical machine translation, the technology that underpins most translation software today. Packer said that neural networks may also be better at learning how to translate idioms and metaphors into their equivalents in other languages.

The latest version of Alpine Data's analytics platform seeks to combine data with machine learning for business users by shifting the focus from algorithms while adding human collaboration and governance capabilities to machine learning projects. San Francisco-based Alpine Data said Wednesday (May 25) its Chorus 6.0 analytics platform targets a wider swathe of the business analytics spectrum by accelerating "the delivery of data into action and to create a clear, repeatable process for continuous business improvement." Among the reasons that heavy enterprise investment in big data projects often does not pan out, the company argues, are the often-fruitless search for the "right" algorithm. Another pain point is enterprise struggles over data infrastructures and governance. Data governance refers to the overall management of data access rights and other security considerations.

As data scientists, we work in concert with other members of an organization with the goal of making better decisions. This often involves finding trends and anomalies in historical data to guide future action. But in some cases, the best aid to decision-making is less about finding "the answer" in the data and more about developing a deeper understanding of the underlying problem. In this post we will focus another tool that is often overlooked: interactive simulations through the means of agent based modeling. Agent based modeling involves the description of individual agents that interact with each other within an environment and seeing how their behaviours combine to produce macro-level system behaviours. Agents can be modeled at whatever level seems natural to our understanding of the system: individual humans, client cohorts, departments, competing firms, computer programs or similar entities can all be agents.

Artificial intelligence has made gigantic leaps in the past few years. Thanks to the advent of technologies like multicore processors, machine learning and neural networking, A.I. is able to mimic known human brain functions more closely than ever before. Facebook's A.I. can recognize a human face and decide who it belongs to. Google's A.I. can beat a world champion at an incredibly complex board game that's been around for centuries. Amazon's A.I. can figure out what products you may want for your home and help you manage your IoT devices.

Alphabet's Google Inc unveiled its answer to Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant along with new messaging and virtual reality products at its annual I/O developer conference on Wednesday, doubling down on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the keys to its future. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai introduced Google Assistant, a virtual personal assistant, along with the tabletop speaker appliance Google Home. He also unveiled Allo, a new messaging service that will compete with Facebook's WhatsApp and Messenger products and feature a chatbot powered by the Google Assistant. Allo, like WhatsApp, will also have end-to-end encryption when it is rolled out this summer. Amazon's Echo, a surprise hit that has other tech giants racing to match it, uses a virtual assistant called Alexa, a cloud-based system that controls the Echo speaker and responds to voice-controlled commands by users.

Researchers from MIT have designed a new ingestible "robot" that could one day be used to patch internal wounds, deliver medicine, or remove accidentally swallowed objects from the stomach. The design consists of a specially folded sheet of dried pig intestine (usually used in sausage casing) and a tiny magnet. Folded up, this capsule can be swallowed by a patient. It then hits the stomach and unfolds in the acidic juices, where it can be guided to complete certain tasks using external magnets. The design is very much a work-in-progress, but its creators think it offers a promising model for the future.

This morning I attended a fascinating lecture at the Club at the Ivy about Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the impact it will have on the digital industries. Jonathan Seal, Director of Strategy at Mando told us that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook are all heavily investing in AI and he thinks this will be the battle ground of the future. If you can use AI to work out the context of a person then you can give them something very relevant and lock out the competition and own that space. The rise of the robot concierge means that consumers will ask a robot to interact with a brand instead of going directly themselves which means that brands will need to start marketing to machines. Devika Thapar, Watson Solutions Leader at IBM talked about the 4th Industrial revolution with an AI-First World. Automation is not new but AI and the Internet of Things are new.