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.

In this article, I present a few modern techniques that have been used in various business contexts, comparing performance with traditional methods. The advanced techniques in question are math-free, innovative, efficiently process large amounts of unstructured data, and are robust and scalable. Implementations in Python, R, Julia and Perl are provided, but here we focus on an Excel version that does not even require any Excel macros, coding, plug-ins, or anything other than the most basic version of Excel. It is actually easily implemented in standard, basic SQL too, and we invite readers to work on an SQL version. In short, we offer here an Excel template for machine learning and statistical computing, and it is quite powerful for an Excel spreadsheet.

While the basic coding for neural network(NN) is ready, we could try to build a simple hypothesis for multi-class classification, a recognizer for classifying hand-written digits is a good topic for practicing. Let's kick off this demo from "Getting Started Project: Digit Recognizer" on the kaggle community. Our goal is clear: giving a grayscale image with 28x28 pixels, identify the digit the picture shows from '0' to '9'. Concretely, our raw features are the grayscale values at every pixel, with those values, NN attempts to figure out the relationship between pixels, and learning the stroke patterns from different digits, via the supervised learning process, NN could find out the most probable digit the pixels formed. These could be summarized in two facts: (1) the size of the feature space(input layer size) is equal to 784 since all grayscale values may vary independently, (2) we need 10 labels(output layer size) to indicate the digits from '0' to '9'.

The answer, and topic of this session, is with the help of Azure IoT and Machine Learning services! To achieve the objective, wearable and mobile devices are used and connected to the Azure IoT Hub for collecting information about location, commuting patterns and weather condition. All this information is then scored and evaluated in Azure Machine Learning to predict the best matching products and services. This session focuses on presenting all the technologies used to build the discussed use case, and how to integrate them in an end-to-end fully functional solution in Dynamics CRM.

The world of data and analytics has been transformed over the last few years, providing a broad range of technologies to hold and analyse data. It has been a challenge to keep up-to-date with new concepts from NoSQL, to machine learning, to Internet of things and blockchain. The Little Bee series of books were created by IBM to provide an easy introduction to these concepts and many more in any easy and fun format. They will not make you into an expert, but they will highlight the key concepts, advantages and application areas. The books are available online and, if you are based in the UK, you can order physical copies to enjoy.

You'll be aware of the recent explosion of interest in AI, and most likely have seen it in action too, in the form of smart assistants on phones, desktops (think Cortana) and elsewhere. Pretty soon, the ability of machines to achieve a greater understanding of the real world in all its messiness will become commonplace, in all aspects of both our personal and professional lives. The question here, however, is how to make use of it in your business. At the heart of the ability of algorithms to create sense out of the world as we humans know it is big data. AI requires large volumes of information to analyse, and has largely garnered its recent traction through the availability of low-cost processing and mass storage.