When Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and the UN start worrying about Artificial Intelligence in a serious manner it is time for us mortals to realize that it is going to be The Next Big Thing. Machine learning, robotics and VR/AR are already very much here. The applications available for the general public are still somewhat clumsy, but we are just waiting for the disruptive product to come out and change things forever. Even the big players are showing some very interesting signals: Sony just filed to patent new smart contact lenses. Societies and businesses have not yet been transformed in the way they will be.

The graphics processors, or GPUs, that make possible the eye-poppingly realistic graphics of games like "Quantum Break" are also really well-suited to powering artificial intelligence and other high-intensity tasks. It turns out that as video game graphics have gotten better, the hardware used to produce them is increasingly well-suited to powering the AI future envisioned by companies like Google and Facebook. "[After] 2007, all the big advances in FLOPS came from gaming video cards designed for high speed real time 3D rendering, and as an incredibly beneficial side effect, they also turn out to be crazily fast at machine learning tasks," wrote Stack Overflow founder Jeff Atwood in a March 2016 blog entry. In fact, when the Google DeepMind AI won its history-making Go series against Lee Sedol, it was sporting 1,202 CPUs, or traditional processors, and 176 Nvidia GPUs under the hood. Nvidia and Google are actually partners on artificial intelligence, dating back to the Google Brain image recognition system, as detailed in an Nvidia blog entry.

Chinese tech giant Lenovo is investing 500 million in startups after it announced a new fund. Unlike other corporates, Lenovo has a history of making deft investments. Its first fund, created in 2010 and 100 million in size, includes Israeli facial recognition startup Face, publicly listed Chinese firm iDreamsky and biometrics specialist Nok Nok Labs from the U.S. among its 40-plus company portfolio. With its second fund, Lenovo said it is looking to back companies with synergies to its businesses and, in particular, those in the cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, robots and other Internet services spaces. Beyond backing upcoming companies, Lenovo has also launched an incubator program for its own businesses.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) said that it is "at least twelve months ahead" of the competition when it comes to its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for banking customers called Luvo, and will release it to the public in twelve months, according to managing director of digitisation Chris Popple. RBS announced that it was working on an AI assistant back in March and speaking at the inaugural AI Summit in London today Popple talked about how the pilots have been going and where Luvo will eventually live (the answer is everywhere). Luvo is a natural language processing AI bot which will answer RBS, Natwest and Ulster bank customer's questions and perform simple banking tasks like money transfers. If Luvo is unable to find the answer it will pass a customer over to a member of staff. Luvo "talks to you through WhatsApp-type interaction" and what sets it apart from digital assistants like Siri and IKEA's Ask Anna is its ability to understand context and perform tasks.

When tackling with cutting edge science, it's not always easy to know what it is that we, as humans, lack understanding of. It's what Donald Rumsfeld would call the'unknown unknowns'. To try and overcome this, a team from the University of Vienna have developed an algorithm that can propose new quantum physics experiments itself, with the hope being that it suggests ideas that humans would never have thought of themselves. The researchers, after struggling to generate so called Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states themselves, began formulating an algorithm that might do a better job. They developed an application, called MELVIN, that takes the common building blocks of quantum experiments and then arranges these to propose unique configurations.

This summer, a spate of new features are headed to Windows 10 by way of the Anniversary Update, Microsoft's next major revision to the OS. Chief among the additions is Windows Ink, an experience specifically designed for digital pen users. The full Ink experience is still months away--longer, if you wait on the fruits of Microsoft's partnership with Wacom, which will reportedly yield a special Ink pen by the holidays. But thanks to the recent, massive Windows 10 Build 14322 that Microsoft released to its Insider beta testers, we've had a chance to try out several aspects of Windows Ink, including Ink Workspace, Sketchpad, Sticky Notes, and more. Click the new pen icon to launch the Windows Ink Workspace apps. If you haven't actually worked with digital ink before, relax: Windows Ink is an optional way to interact with Windows, in much the same way you can use either voice or keyboard to query Cortana.

In this talk we will introduce artificial neural networks and their similarities to how the brain works. We will provide some history and theoretical foundations to introduce feed-forward multi-layer neural networks, describing their predictive and learning ability, and some of their applications in the real world. This is part one of an introductory pair of talks on deep learning concepts and theory. Valentino Zocca has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland with a thesis in theoretical geometry, though he has since worked on technical applications and first-on-the block VR geo-navigation data tools and data analysis. Currently he lives in Italy and the United States where he works on emerging deep learning protocols and neural network architectures.

SK C&C has continued Korea's efforts to increase the usage and adoption of cloud computing within the region, announcing a new strategic alliance with IBM focused on the Watson cognitive computing platform. As part of the agreement, IBM will train Watson to understand and comprehend Korean, and South Korea-based developers will create a number of localized API's and services to increase adoption rates of such advanced cloud computing technologies in the region. Korean will be Watson's eighth language, lining up with English, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Arabic. "Watson remains at the forefront of cognitive computing: advanced systems that learn at scale, understand with meaning, reason with purpose and interact with humans in natural ways," said David Kenny, GM for IBM Watson. "The South Korean marketplace is moving quickly to embrace the disruptive opportunities from next generation technology.

The latest report on artificial intelligence evolution suggests the possibility that the line separating physical and digital realities might dissolve soon. Did you know that the future of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies could invisibly entwine human and machine intelligence? Well, the latest report on AI evolution suggests the possibility that the line separating physical and digital realities might dissolve soon. Due to the depiction of artificial intelligence in science fiction films and novels, humans have the tendency to see AI where it does not exist, The Guardian notes. But media discovery startup Random cofounder Jarno M. Koponen believes AI is beginning to turn invisible from the outside in and vice versa.

Despite their huge potential, artificial intelligence and biometrics still very much need human input for accurate identification, according to the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Speaking at an Atlantic Council event, Arati Prabhakar said that while the best facial recognition systems out there are statistically better than most humans at image identification, that when they're wrong, "they are wrong in ways that no human would ever be wrong". "I think this is a critically important caution about where and how we will use this generation of artificial intelligence," she said, reported FedScoop. "You want to embrace the power of these new technologies but be completely clear-eyed about what their limitations are so that they don't mislead us," Prabhakar said. That's a stance humans must take with technology writ large, she said, explaining her hesitance to take for granted what many of her friends in Silicon Valley often assume -- that more data is always a good thing.