College of Computing Professor Ashok Goel teaches Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence (KBAI) every semester. And every time he offers it, Goel estimates, his 300 or so students post roughly 10,000 messages in the online forums -- far too many inquiries for him and his eight teaching assistants (TA) to handle. That's why Goel added a ninth TA this semester. Her name is Jill Watson, and she's unlike any other TA in the world. Jill is a computer -- a virtual TA --implemented on IBM's Watson platform.

One of the brains behind Apple's iconic digital assistant Siri, Dag Kittlaus, took to the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC to show off his new project, Viv -- an AI assistant that aims to be "the intelligent interface for everything." "Will it be warmer than 70-degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?" Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. Viv delivered the answer in a matter of seconds, and correctly handled numerous oddly specific questions that followed, as well as ordering flowers, sending money as payment for drinks the previous night and even booking a hotel in under 60 seconds. Throughout the demo, the AI assistant demonstrated a profound understanding of context and intent as Kittlaus rapid-fired commands in natural language.

The concept and implementation of artificial intelligence is nothing new, but with today's computer hardware at our perusal, AI advancement only continues to develop at a rapid pace. Siri and Cortana are both effective AI bots, able to understand a great number of your queries and spit back an answer immediately. As time goes on, AI is only going to become more prevalent, and more important. That's a thought that Dave Coplin, Microsoft UK's Chief Envisioning Officer, agrees with. At an AI conference held late last week, Coplin made the huge statement that AI is the most important technology anyone is working on today.

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and the University of Electro-Communications today announced the development of a high-speed algorithm that uses mathematical game theory as an artificial intelligence technology to aid in the development of security planning. This will work to solve city-scale road network security problems, such as where best to position checkpoints when trying to catch a criminal. For security measures at locations where people gather, it is often not possible to completely seal off all intrusion or escape routes with limited security resources, so it is necessary to effectively deploy security personnel and to minimize anticipated damage. The formulation of security plans has relied on the experience of experts and intuition, but in recent years there has been a focus on game theory, which mathematically describes both offence and defense, as a technology to support expert decision-making. However, it has been difficult to apply game theory to a city-scale security problem of catching criminals at checkpoints in real-world cities because the processing volume expands exponentially with the scale of the road network.

David Siegel is worried, very worried as a matter of fact. The co-founder of Two Sigma, the 35 billion hedge fund said at the Milken Institute Global Conference that he's "very worried" that machines could soon replace a large amount of the workforce. "Most people in the bulk of the job market are not involved in super-high-value jobs. They are doing routine work and tasks and it's precisely these tasks that computers are going to be better at doing" Siegel said. A perfect example of this is on display in many Mcdonald's restaurants now as a result of some states raising the minimum wage.

As part of a recent campaign, we asked our crowd to classify 693802 property parcels in Adelaide, Australia, in parcels that contain a swimming pool ('yes') and parcels that do not ('no'). The campaign was sponsored by a private company that compiles public and private sector data for a variety of markets including education, public safety, government, telecommunications, and insurance. Sounds like a simple task for our crowd, right? A pool is pretty easy to see in our imagery. In order to reduce the average number of user votes required per parcel to classify all the parcels in the data set with sufficient confidence, we decided to deploy a supervised machine learning algorithm to help direct the crowd to the parcels where the presence of the pool was likely, and remove from consideration the parcels which most likely did not contain a pool.

For most of humanity, we've been in the dark about how things "really work", and to a large extent we still are now. That doesn't prevent us from functioning. However, I think Bostrom and Musk are worried about strong AI for other reasons. I do not know whether their concerns are valid or not, but they are not addressed by Domingos when he says that more intelligent machines would just fulfill their original purpose more efficiently. This ignores "Paperclip maximizer" type scenarios: unless both the task and the machine are very limited in their scope, there is potential for the task to interfere with other concerns such as human safety, and this has to be adequately dealt with.

MIT scientists have built a hybrid human/artificial intelligence (AI) machine that they claim can learn how to detect 85% of cyber attacks – that's roughly three times better than previous benchmarks – while reducing false positive rates by a factor of 5. Nitesh Chawla, professor of computer science at Notre Dame University, said in a statement from MIT that the machine "has the potential to become a line of defense against attacks such as fraud, service abuse and account takeover." Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the machine-learning startup PatternEx demonstrated the platform, called AI2, in a paper titled "AI2: Training a big data machine to defend". As the researchers describe the current state of the art, today's security systems are typically driven by either humans – so-called "analyst-driven solutions" – or by machine. The problem with security systems based on fixed rules is that they miss attacks that don't match those rules. Machine-learning approaches, as the name suggests, rely on an adaptive process that can trigger annoying numbers of false positives.

Co-author Paul Leiby, Distinguished Research Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said: "Because automation has the potential to provide convenient, lower cost mobility, we see it could have large implications for transportation demand, energy use and resulting CO2 emissions, by both passengers and freight. For example, low cost automated trucking could shift more freight away from efficient railways to trucks. To make continued progress in reducing carbon emissions from light-duty vehicles and large trucks in the face of expanded mobility, it will be essential to couple vehicle automation with the extensive use of advanced low-carbon vehicles, like electric or hydrogen vehicles."

Abstract: First we cover the background and fundamentals to understand deep learning. No prior knowledge is required. Next, we discuss how understanding and preventing churn is important to both small and large businesses to maintain and grow revenue. Startups, especially those involved with web- and subscription-based services, should be attentive and analytical with their customer base. We will describe both unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods that address customer churn.