Twenty years have passed since the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and we all know computers have improved since then. But Deep Blue won through sheer computing power, using its ability to calculate the outcomes of more moves to a deeper level than even a world champion can. Go is played on a far larger board (19 by 19 squares, compared to 8x8 for chess) and has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe, so raw computing power was unlikely to beat a human with a strong intuitive sense of the best moves. Instead, AlphaGo was designed to win by playing a huge number of games against other programs and adopting the strategies that proved successful. You could say that AlphaGo evolved to be the best Go player in the world, achieving in only two years what natural selection took millions of years to accomplish.

GE's electronic work instructions with the Google Glass by Novotek: Novotek combined GE's electronic work instructions with the Google Glass wearable computing device, and was demonstrated to Summit attendees in the Technology Fair. Novotek, is the largest European distributor for GE's Intelligent Platforms business and it has been awarded the Scanautomatic Prize for Innovation at Scanautomatic 2014 in Gothenburg, Sweden in October. Novotek has since 1986 worked with integration of IT and automation systems in the process and production industry. Novotek mainly supplies world-leading products and solutions from GE in the Nordics and Benelux. A work process management solution, GE's Proficy Workflow software provides users with interactive, step-by-step task instructions and captures process, traceability and quality data across systems to reduce errors, waste and delays.

Businesses and developers will be able to make their services available inside Messenger by way of Chat SDK. Powered by artificial intelligence, chatbots are computer software programs that mimic human conversations. Facebook says three times as many messages are sent on its platforms than SMS, with 60 billion messages a day sent and received on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The news comes just weeks after Microsoft devoted a large chunk of its Build developer conference keynote to what its executives called "conversations as a platform". AI is already used in Messenger, and can do things like recognise faces in pictures to suggest potential recipients.

In keeping with its vision of an era of cognitive computing enabled by acceleration technology, IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans for a multi-year collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to create the Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) which will be housed within the College of Engineering on the Urbana campus. IBM has big ambitions for the center: "C3SR will build and optimize integrated systems such as state-of-the-art cognitive computing systems modeled on IBM's Watson technology that can master a subject area by learning from multimedia and multi-modal educational content. Such systems will efficiently ingest vast amounts of data including videos, lecture notes, homework, and textbooks, and reason through this knowledge effectively enough to be able to eventually pass a college level exam." Many details are yet to be worked out. The level of funding and size of installation will be announced this summer when the new center formally opens, said Hillery Hunter, a project driver and the director for systems acceleration and memory at IBM Research.

One of these target audiences is university students(undergraduate or graduate) learning about machine learning, including those who are beginning a career in deep learning and artificial intelligence research. The other target audience is software engineers who do not have a machine learning or statistics background, but want to rapidly acquire one and begin using deep learning in their product or platform. Basically, if you are interested in reading this book and haven't been turned off by the content of this post, the book is likely for you. The book starts off covering the required background for understanding later material, along with historical context and elementary explanations of the technical concepts. In fact, the entire first part of the book is dedicated to building the technical foundation required to study deep learning.

Label-free cell analysis is essential to personalized genomics, cancer diagnostics, and drug development as it avoids adverse effects of staining reagents on cellular viability and cell signaling. However, currently available label-free cell assays mostly rely only on a single feature and lack sufficient differentiation. Also, the sample size analyzed by these assays is limited due to their low throughput. Here, we integrate feature extraction and deep learning with high-throughput quantitative imaging enabled by photonic time stretch, achieving record high accuracy in label-free cell classification. These biophysical measurements form a hyperdimensional feature space in which supervised learning is performed for cell classification.

With a paralyzing spinal cord injury, the biological wiring that hooks up our controlling brains to our useful limbs gets snipped, leading to permanent loss of sensation and control and usually a lifetime of extra health care. Researchers have spent years working to repair those lost connections, allowing paralyzed patients to sip coffee and enjoy a beer with robotic limbs controlled by just their minds. Now, researchers have gone a step further, allowing a paralyzed person to control his own hand with just his mind. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers report using a "neural bypass" that reconnects a patient's mental commands for movement to responsive muscles in his limbs, creating somewhat of a synthetic nervous system. The pioneering patient, Ian Burkhart, a 24-year-old man left with quadriplegia after a diving accident almost six years ago, can once again move his hand.

More than 70 years ago, Isaac Asimov dreamed up his three laws of robotics, which insisted, above all, that "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm". Now, after Stephen Hawking warned that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race", two academics have come up with a way of teaching ethics to computers: telling them stories. Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology have just unveiled Quixote, a prototype system that is able to learn social conventions from simple stories. Or, as they put in their paper Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents, revealed at the AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix, Arizona this week, the stories are used "to generate a value-aligned reward signal for reinforcement learning agents that prevents psychotic-appearing behaviour". A simple version of a story could be about going to get prescription medicine from a chemist, laying out what a human would typically do and encounter in this situation.

Are you skeptical about machines' ability to effectively aid social science decision making? Machines are becoming ever more intelligent, increasingly able to help humans make decisions across the social science spectrum, but cognitive computing is still in its infancy, with much unexplored ground ahead. Accordingly, government leaders who harness the power of cognitive computing are helping usher in a renaissance of simplified operations and enhanced constituent engagement. The secret to effectively using cognitive computing to aid human decision making lies in teaching computers to ask the right questions while taking account context and staying focused on what computers do well. Computers operate at great speed.

Now it's time for us to see how deep learning really works! In case you missed the previous part and is now wondering how deep learning has anything to do with you, go check it out! In this part, we'll show you all the basic concepts you need to get started with deep learning. Machine learning problems are typically where you want a computer to answer some questions without being explicitly programmed. For example, the question can be something like "What's the price of my 1800 sqft apartment in Seattle?", or "Is this news article telling the truth?"