The subtitle of the very first science-fiction novel was "The Modern Prometheus". And for as long as humanity has coveted the Fire of the Gods, we've also worried about our ability to wield our new powers, and control our own creations. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is our latest gift of Promethean Fire. As Chris Dixon explains, it's likely we're entering a new Golden Age of AI. For decades, the foundations of our civilisation have been technologies that have been intentionally programmed by human minds.

I have only just started using it in a tiny experiment, so I really can't really tell more than that. On a side note GSoC rejected a project for implementing a Ruby API for the popular TensorFlow library, but initial steps are being made for privately founding it. You can see discussion here: tensorflow/tensorflow#50 (comment). Maybe it could be helpful to have this listed here too, in order to drag even more people and attention to that, given the importance of that library.

Jeet Raut's mom was told she no longer had breast cancer. But it turned out to be a false diagnosis and she had to undergo further treatment. She's okay now, but that medical mistake could have cost her life and it gave Raut the idea to build a better way to catch medical abnormalities in the body. He and his co-founder Peter Wakahiu Njenga created Behold.ai to speed up the process of finding cancers and minimize human error. "The idea behind Behold.ai is to increase efficiency," Raut told TechCrunch.

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.