In an economy where value is generated by digital efficiency, I believe that every organization should strive for digital flow. For an introduction to digital flow, see Digital Transformation Isn't A Goal. It's A Journey.There are three central forces of flow: Design Thinking, Platform Thinking, and Open Thinking. This article focuses on Design Thinking. Digital technology is complex, but users should never know it.

Microsoft claimed to reach a 5.9 percent word error rate last October using neural language models resembling associative word clouds. At the time, the company believed 5.9 percent was equivalent to human parity. But, IBM says it's not popping the champagne yet. "As part of our process in reaching today's milestone, we determined human parity is actually lower than what anyone has yet achieved -- at 5.1 percent," George Saon, IBM principal research scientist, wrote in a blog post this week. IBM reached the 5.5 percent milestone by combining so-called Long Short-Term Memory, an artificial neural network, and WaveNet language models with three strong acoustic models.

The word "trust" pops up a lot in conversations about human-robot interactions. In recent years, it's crossed an important threshold from the philosophical fodder of sci-fi novels into real-world concern. Robots have begun to play an increasing role in life and death scenarios, from rescue missions to complex surgical procedures. But the question of trust has largely been a one-way street. Should we trust robots with our lives?

I;m rewriting a project to use Node.js. I;d like to keep using MySQL as the DB (even though I don;t mind rewriting the schema).

I created a dataframe with 3 columns, feature_1, feature_2, and target, with the goal of having feature_1 and feature_2 predict the target. I standardized feature_1 and one-hot-encoded feature_2 (which has 100 categories and therefore creates 100 columns). I know for sure that feature_1 and target are correlated and so is feature_2 and target. The target is numbers from 1 to 10 and I create a correlated categorical (feature_2) variable by making a portion of the categorical values map perfectly with the target, for example, when target is a 3, set feature_2 to "A". Creating a model with only feature_1 vs target I get val_loss of 7.60.

The University of Manchester is leading a consortium to investigate advanced technologies, including robotics and artificial intelligence, for the operation and maintenance of offshore windfarms. The remote inspection and asset management of offshore wind farms and their connection to the shore is an industry which will be worth up to £2 billion annually by 2025 in the UK alone. Eighty to ninety percent of the cost of offshore operation and maintenance according to the Crown Estate is generated by the need to get site access - in essence get engineers and technicians to remote sites to evaluate a problem and decide what action to undertake. Such inspection takes place in a remote and hazardous environment and requires highly trained personnel of which there is likely to be a shortage in coming years. The £5m project will investigate the use of advanced sensing, robotics, virtual reality models and artificial intelligence to reduce maintenance cost and effort.

The future of search is conversational assistance. Instead of typing in keywords to get back a set of results, users will converse with software agents using natural language to specify increasingly complex tasks. Now, truth be told, this has been "the future" for over 50 years, from the Star Trek computer to Iron Man's Jarvis. This Apple concept video depicts a helpful conversational assistant you can use for any number of tasks, complete with bow tie. Everyone knows the technology behind conversational assistance is hard.

Scientists have discovered that the brain is 10 times more active than previously thought. In a new study on components of the neurons known as dendrites, researchers found that they are not passive conduits as typically believed, but instead are electrically active in moving animals. Not only could this mean that the brain has over 100 times the computational capacity than it's been believed, but the discovery could also pave the way for the development of'brain-like computers.' The researchers measured dendrites' activity for up to four days in rats that were allowed to move freely within a large maze. They measured activity in the posterior parietal cortex, which plays a key role in movement planning.

In a world of female chatbots, one program has dared to refer to itself as'binary'. Named Eno, the gender-neutral virtual assistant was created by Capital One to help the bank's customers'manage their money by texting in a conversational way'. The robot is powered with artificial intelligence, allowing it to understand natural language, and when asked if it is a male or female, it responds'binary'. In a world of female chatbots, one program dares to refer to itself as'binary'. Named Eno, the gender-neutral virtual assistant was created by Capital One Financial Corp to help the bank's customers'manage their money by texting in a conversational way' Capital One Financial Corp has unveiled a chatbot to'help the bank's customers'manage their money by texting in a conversational way'. Named Eno, the robot is gender-neutral - when asked if it is a boy or a girl, it answers'binary'.

California is back on the map as a state that's serious about welcoming driverless cars. Truly driverless cars -- vehicles with no human behind the wheel, and perhaps no steering wheel at all -- are headed toward California streets and highways starting in 2018. After months of criticism, state regulators Friday released a proposal for a new set of regulations to govern the testing and deployment of driverless cars on public roadways. They are seeking public comment and expect approval by the end of the year. The regulations lay out "a clear path for future deployment of autonomous vehicles" in California, said Bernard Soriano, deputy director at the Department of Motor Vehicles.