A judge ruled last week that a US class-action lawsuit arguing that Facebook's use of its facial recognition tech violates Illinois law will go ahead, despite the company's attempts to dismiss it. The company has used this data to develop powerful artificial intelligence that can identify individual's faces in photos with more than 97 per cent accuracy. This lets Facebook automatically tag people in your newly uploaded images. Not everyone is happy with the feature, however. Last year, a group of Facebook users in Illinois filed a civil complaint, claiming that it violated the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act.

New ships, new destinations, unusual activities and some extraordinary bargains are part of the cruising buzz for summer and fall. New thrill attractions: Thrills have become a cruise ship staple, and on the world's newest, largest ship, Royal Caribbean's 5,500-passenger Harmony of the Seas, the rush comes courtesy of the Ultimate Abyss. Beginning later this month, daring riders can zoom on mats from the top of the ship to the Boardwalk neighborhood about 100 feet below. Posh gets posher: Regent Seven Seas Cruises is billing its 750-passenger Seven Seas Explorer, launching in July, as the "world's most luxurious cruise ship." The top digs are a 3,785-square-foot suite, with a first-at-sea private spa (serviced by the ship's Canyon Ranch SpaClub) and a price tag of 5,000 per person per night, based on double occupancy.

International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) to launch its Watson AI in Korea through a partnership with a Korean IT service provider called SK Holdings C&C. The two firms will work together to make Watson available to the locals in Korean before June 2017. The partnership between the two firms also means they have to set up the right infrastructure for the AI together with introducing promotional projects to market the service. The presence of Watson in the country will also allow for the development of solutions for data analysis solutions in Korea through natural language semantic study and machine learning technology. SK revealed that the technology will be made available next year.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., May 9, 2016--Researchers recently demonstrated how an informatics-based adaptive design strategy, tightly coupled to experiments, can accelerate the discovery of new materials with targeted properties, according to a recent paper published in Nature Communications. "What we've done is show that, starting with a relatively small data set of well-controlled experiments, it is possible to iteratively guide subsequent experiments toward finding the material with the desired target," said Turab Lookman, a physicist and materials scientist in the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lookman is the principal investigator of the research project. "Finding new materials has traditionally been guided by intuition and trial and error," said Lookman."But with increasing chemical complexity, the combination possibilities become too large for trial-and-error approaches to be practical." To address this, Lookman, along with his colleagues at Los Alamos and the State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials in China, employed machine learning to speed up the process.

This post was contributed by Rowan Benecke, Chair, Global Technology Practice. Let's think about what we as PR professionals do in a typical day. We read, analyze and answer email. We answer calls and make calls. We write press releases or pitches and we reach out to media.

On the Internet, "nobody knows you're a dog," as the old meme goes, and today, the same can increasingly be said of robots. There are already scheduling robots that are virtually indistinguishable from humans, and recently students at the Georgia Institute of Technology learned that "Jill Watson" -- a teaching assistant they had relied upon all semester -- was in fact artificially intelligent. "The world is full of online classes, and they're plagued with low retention rates," said Ashok Goel, a Georgia Tech professor who teaches a class entitled Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. "One of the main reasons many students drop out is because they don't receive enough teaching support. We created Jill as a way to provide faster answers and feedback."

When it comes to AI and digital assistants, Dag Kittlaus brings a lot of gravitas to the table: he co-created Siri, which Apple later purchased and made the "voice" of iPhone. And now Kittlaus has co-created what may well be the next generation of Siri: Viv, a new AI startup that aims to replace the app world as we know it with natural language commands. Kittlaus provided the first public demo of Viv at New York's TechCrunch Disrupt event, deep within the Brooklyn Cruise terminal in Red Hook earlier today. It was the first glimpse of the tech that he aims to beat Siri, Google Now, Cortana and Amazon Alexa at their own game in a year where bots and artificial intelligence technology is suddenly all the rage. Viv had gathered some headlines over the last year or so, but this was the first chance to see Viv in action.

AI has already made a lasting impact in the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behaviour we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson, HAL, or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms. Empirical evaluation has found that a continuously adaptive machine learning approach can help lawyers keep an eye on ever-changing legal data, according to Jeremy Pickens, senior applied research scientist, Catalyst Repository Systems, which hosts and services document repositories for large-scale discovery and regulatory compliance. "Implementing a continuous protocol involves more than occasionally retraining an existing machine learning classifier, but rather integrating it into the machine learning system at a native level," Pickens says.

Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and integrations with third-party services. This product is called Viv and, in a world-first, Kittlaus just gave us a demo at TechCrunch Disrupt NY that shows off the power of what they've built with Viv. Like with Siri, Viv wants to build a conversational and smart layer that lets you interact with various services. But Viv is taking everything one step further. More importantly, there's a developer platform to add more services.

Many of the experiences and interactions people have on Facebook today are made possible with AI. When you log in to Facebook, we use the power of machine learning to provide you with unique, personalized experiences. Machine learning models are part of ranking and personalizing News Feed stories, filtering out offensive content, highlighting trending topics, ranking search results, and much more. There are numerous other experiences on Facebook that could benefit from machine learning models, but until recently it's been challenging for engineers without a strong machine learning background to take advantage of our ML infrastructure. In late 2014, we set out to redefine machine learning platforms at Facebook from the ground up, and to put state-of-the-art algorithms in AI and ML at the fingertips of every Facebook engineer. In some of our earliest work to leverage AI and ML -- such as delivering the most relevant content to each person -- we noticed that the largest improvements in accuracy often came from quick experiments, feature engineering, and model tuning rather than applying fundamentally different algorithms.