Sony Corp. said Wednesday it has invested in U.S. artificial intelligence startup Cogitai, aiming to develop new AI technologies and release products using them within the next three years. Sony is believed to have obtained a roughly 20 percent stake in the company, founded in September by three AI researchers, in a move that could lead to the Japanese electronics giant's return to the robot business. Sony was an AI pioneer, known for producing robotic dog AIBO and humanoid QRIO featuring AI technologies. But it withdrew from the robot business in 2006 to improve profitability and restructure its consumer electronics business. The company has continued AI research itself, however, and its technologies, including face and speech recognitions, have been applied to other Sony products, such as digital cameras and smartphones.

"I didn't expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour," said co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Physics and Engineering in a statement. "A simple computer program would have taken longer than the age of the universe to run through all the combinations and work this out," he added. Scientists wanted to recreate an experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which involved extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. The condensates "are some of the coldest places in the Universe, far colder than outer space, typically less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15 The experiment involved trapping 40 million atoms at the intersection between two laser beams. The team used magnetic fields to cool the atoms down to about five millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Scientists then used the AI algorithm to control the lasers during cooling, carefully tuning the power of the two lasers to allow the most energetic atoms to escape without losing hold of the coldest ones. The AI algorithm was able to do this ten times faster than a regular non-AI program. "It is cheaper than taking a physicist everywhere with you.

Advances in technology continue to change the workplace. Forty years ago, the first cell phone was introduced, enabling a virtual working environment. In 1989, the World Wide Web surfaced, soon followed by Google and other search engines. And more than a decade ago, Facebook launched, connecting users from around the globe in a digital community with a level of detail and dialogue that hadn't been seen before. Today's data-rich work environment continues to change, and successful business leaders understand the role that technology will play in simplifying business processes and increasing employee productivity.

While a huge segment of the planet is still struggling to grasp the various concepts revolving around the rapidly emerging cryptocurrency industry, those that do grasp said concepts are going on a wild shopping frenzy over the currencies. Case in point, Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) recently launched a crowdsale for DAO tokens and nabbed over a hundred million dollars within a few weeks, making them the largest crowdfunded project in history. DAO, a platform developed by German company Slock.it, is a self-governing company built upon an irrefutable mathematical code that is free for everyone to use. It's main mission is "to blaze a new path in business organization for the betterment of its members, existing simultaneously nowhere and everywhere and operating solely with the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code." It runs on the platform Ethereum, which in turn runs on a blockchain, essentially resulting in a system which allows fast and direct trade, and records all transactions for everyone to see in absolute transparency.

If God created his universe in 7 days; what could AI do to ours? The arrival of artificial intelligence promises the Intelligence Explosion - where singularity would lead to an exponential increase in A.I. capabilities. This Super Intelligence could lead to the arrival of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being. How would humanity receive this new entity? This multimedia essay comes is in two parts.

My name is Jonathan Armoza and I am a data science intern at Neustar and a PhD candidate in English Literature at New York University. My work focuses on the development of computational text mining and visualization methods in the emerging field of digital humanities. The era of big data has created the need to develop techniques and mechanisms to not only handle large datasets, but to understand them as well. Much of this influx of information is about people, places, and things. Although some of that data is anonymized, there are a number of reasons we might want to understand how to associate those real world "entities" with their data points.

Secondary use of electronic health records (EHRs) promises to advance clinical research and better inform clinical decision making. Challenges in summarizing and representing patient data prevent widespread practice of predictive modeling using EHRs. Here we present a novel unsupervised deep feature learning method to derive a general-purpose patient representation from EHR data that facilitates clinical predictive modeling. In particular, a three-layer stack of denoising autoencoders was used to capture hierarchical regularities and dependencies in the aggregated EHRs of about 700,000 patients from the Mount Sinai data warehouse. The result is a representation we name "deep patient".

The global population is expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050, which means double agricultural production in order to meet food demands. Farm enterprises require new and innovative technologies to face and overcome these challenges. Artificial intelligence robotics is one of these technologies that promises to provide a solution. An increasing number of farmbots are being developed that are capable of complex tasks that have not been possible with the large-scale agricultural machinery in the past. Here's a list of real use cases of robots that will help agriculture changing.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is creating tools for software developers to build chat bots that run inside messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and Google's own messaging products, according to a published report. The technology giant plans to discuss some of the details at its annual developer conference, which starts Wednesday, The Information reported. "Essentially, Google wants to get into the bot-making business more broadly than people realized, and in a way that's similar to Microsoft's strategy, and relying on its strengths in artificial intelligence to convince developers to use its tools," the report reads. Google, like Microsoft, missed out on the new wave of messaging apps which are some of the world's most popular apps. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Google planned to integrate chat bots, interactive software powered by artificial intelligence that answer questions inside a messaging app, so that users can send queries as text messages.

Lots of people yell things at their televisions. Nowadays, however, it's a lot more likely that your television is going to talk right back. Amazon on Tuesday announced that it is adding new features to its voice-activated app, Alexa, as it works with its Fire TV set-top box, empowering the assistant to start videos and search for movies or television shows. You can even look up local restaurants if you need dinner after your binge-watching session ate up your lunch. The company said that those features and others, such as being able to have Alexa read you your Kindle e-books through your Fire TV, would launch in the "coming weeks."