In the 1950s, artificial intelligence (AI) became a hot topic of scientific conversation in science fiction novels. The prospect of attacks by intelligent machines became a trend that led the imagination down dark paths of technological domination. AI is no longer science fiction and is on a path of destruction, but not one that could have been predicted 60 years ago. It is playing no small role in the prevention of cybercrime, and leading the fight back in protecting data. Machine learning is providing teams with the capability to thwart APTs (advanced persistent threats) through zero day attacks and with the analytic prowess they need to identify both internal and external threats.

While it's easy to dwell on the potential threats of artificial intelligence, much more often the field promises to make humans' lives better. A.I. algorithms are meant to help us connect with our friends, find information, and even transport us through the physical world. Starting today, Facebook is using artificial intelligence to automatically generate text captions for every photo on Facebook, to provide much-needed accessibility for the blind or visually impaired. Because the developers wanted the text generated by the A.I. to be extremely accurate, they trained it intensively on images of just 100 different types of object, so at present it is limited to identifying human, pizza, baseball and the like, but as research progresses the captions will get increasingly versatile and complex. To surf the internet, the visually impaired often rely on screen readers, which dictate words on the screen. However, screen readers are only as good as the content they can read.

It's all well and good to ask if androids dream of electric sheep, but science fact has evolved to a point where it's beginning to coincide with science fiction. No, we don't have autonomous androids struggling with existential crises -- yet -- but we are getting ever closer to what people tend to call "artificial intelligence." Machine Learning is a sub-set of artificial intelligence where computer algorithms are used to autonomously learn from data and information. In machine learning computers don't have to be explicitly programmed but can change and improve their algorithms by themselves. Today, machine learning algorithms enable computers to communicate with humans, autonomously drive cars, write and publish sport match reports, and find terrorist suspects.

Your electric bills could soar if you kept Nvidia's monster DGX-1 computer running continuously for one month. The DGX-1 supercomputer can deliver the computing power of 250 two-socket servers in a desktop box, claimed Nvidia, which introduced the system Tuesday at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The computer can deliver about 170 teraflops of performance, and multiple boxes on a rack could deliver 2 petaflops of performance. The fastest computer in the world delivers a peak performance of about 10 petaflops. Nvidia says DGX-1 is about 56 times faster than a server with two Intel Xeon-E5 2697 v3 chips, which can deliver about 3 teraflops of performance.

It builds off of paragraph vectors. But paragraph vectors aren't interpretable (or at least as interpretable) as LDA-like vectors; I can't hand my CEO a 512-dimensional paragraph vector to show her what's been trending. But I can hand her an LDA vector, because it's a sparse mixture of interpretable vectors. Because that vector is essentially'on' in three or four categories, those categories sum to 100%, and you don't have to deal with negative coefficients. The whole point here is to gear the internal representations so they're more amenable to humans -- it'd be cute if it scored better, but life isn't a Kaggle contest.

The Cheriton School is part of Waterloo's highly regarded and unique Faculty of Mathematics, which also placed in the top 20 in the 2015 QS rankings With those credentials, it is little wonder that the Faculty has more than 7,500 graduate and undergraduate students. "At the University of Waterloo, we build innovative, high-impact platforms, systems, and applications for tackling the big data challenge," says Prof. Jimmy Lin. To produce globally influential technology leaders, the Cheriton School has formed 16 different research groups of professors and graduate students, who explore innovations in a myriad of areas such as human computer interaction, machine learning and artificial intelligence, algorithms and complexity, bioinformatics, information retrieval and database systems, symbolic computation, and quantum computing. The Cheriton School is a world leader in computer security and privacy, developing and researching tools used by millions of people every day to protect the security, privacy, and integrity of their online communications.

Facebook has launched a new automatic text feature which uses machine learning technology to identify objects in photographs. Users of Facebook who are blind or visually impaired can now benefit from the technology when using the social networking site. The artificial intelligence system uses image recognition technology to caption photographs with keywords to improve the accessibility of the site for disabled users. Writing on the'Research at Facebook' Blog, software engineer Shaomei Wu said: "While visual content provides a fun and expressive way for people to communicate online, it also creates challenges for people with low vision or blindness. The challenges arise in both creating and consuming visual content. As a result, some people can feel isolated and frustrated when they can not fully participate in the interaction around visual content. "To achieve our mission of making the world more open and connected, we have to connect people of all backgrounds and abilities.

Its Computer Science program was ranked among the top 25 in the world in 2015 by QS. The Cheriton School is part of Waterloo's highly regarded and unique Faculty of Mathematics, which also placed in the top 20 in the 2015 QS rankings With those credentials, it is little wonder that the Faculty has more than 7,500 graduate and undergraduate students. The unit's unique blend of computer scientists, mathematicians and statisticians comprise 250 full-time professors. Its researchers lead the scientific community with the depth of their work and the wide spectrum of computer science, mathematics and statistics topics covered. They span the range from theoretical foundations to the immediately practical in all areas.

In recent years, the focus of big data analytics has shifted from simple statistical inference to sophisticated Machine Learning algorithms. Machine Learning (ML) can be understood as a set of analytical tools that collectively derive a model based on a set of observations. Simple data modeling is now deemed insufficient because it is based on examining trends in data, but often ignores subtle features and can cause data analysts to miss the "big picture".

As a pioneer in human-computer dialogue, multimodal interaction, and artificial intelligence, Phil has the charter to aggressively push VoiceBox's development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He recently shared how the company's R&D investments and the formation of the Scientific Advisory Board which he oversees, will lead to groundbreaking AI solutions for Automakers. What recent milestones in AI have leading scientists buzzing? There have been numerous AI milestones over the past decade, including: winning the World Chess, Go, and Jeopardy championships, recognizing items in images, recognizing spoken language, and the translating of languages. Many of these milestones were supported by machine learning technologies, most recently Deep Learning Neural Networks (DNN). The basic ideas of neural networks have been worked on continuously for more than 50 years, starting with Rosenblatt's "perceptron".