From the sci-fi classic "Bladerunner" to the recent films "Her" and "Ex Machina," pop culture is filled with stories demonstrating our simultaneous fascination with and fear of artificial intelligence (AI). This interest is rooted in questions about where the line between human and artificial intelligence will be, and whether that line might one day disappear. Will robots eventually be able to not only think but also feel and behave like us? Could a robot ever be fully human? It is a relatively new field that started in the 1990s.8 A new multidisciplinary field called developmental robotics is paving the way to some answers.(a) Rather than writing programs that try to mimic specific human behaviors like love, developmental roboticists build machines that learn and develop the way humans do as they grow from newborn infants to adults.

Google has announced plans to open its machine-learning software to developers. The multinational tech company is hoping this will attract more companies to its cloud-computing services, which already includes image identification, voice recognition and AI technology. The market for cloud-computing services is a competitive one, with Microsoft, Amazon and IBM offering similar products. While modern cloud systems are based on "decades-old" technology, Google said, the company's forthcoming products and services are designed for the next wave of cloud computing. And Google is already a leader in AI, using the technology to support its web-based services and apps.

Our site, launched in May 2015 has gained increasing visitors week by week, and our twitter account has a good following now, with many Retweets each day. Advertising on homeAI.info is a great way to get a targeted audience that are specifically interested in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Our targeted ad space on each of the directory pages allows your campaign to align with a category that specifically matches your target sector. If you would like to discuss setting up an advertising campaign with us, please contact us.

Celaton's intelligent automation software, inSTREAM, enables organisations to deliver better customer service, faster. Unique to inSTREAM is its ability to learn through the natural consequence of processing, watching what people do and interacting with them. It applies artificial intelligence to streamline labour intensive clerical tasks and decision making in a way that hasn't been possible before. Despite the ever increasing choice of media channels, customers continue to communicate in an unstructured and descriptive way. While it may be easy for people to understand this, it's not possible for machines because they can only understand structured formats.

When Anne Taylor walks into a room, she wants to know the same things that any person would. Where is there an empty seat? Who is walking up to me, and is that person smiling or frowning? What does that sign say? For Taylor, who is blind, there aren't always easy ways to get this information. Perhaps another person can direct her to her seat, describe her surroundings or make an introduction.

It was one of the strongest fields of development during 2015 and it will also be in 2016. It will certainly be one of the sectors generating most profits for years or decades to come. Imagine an area of hundreds of hectares of arable land, but few planted seeds. Companies like Google, Facebook or Microsoft take time to develop Artificial Intelligence products, generally linked to natural language processing and speech recognition. Some estimates state that the market for Artificial Intelligence-related applications alone will be worth 11.1 billion by 2024.

Google, of course, can't give away all of its secrets. That's why TensorFlow's release into the wild only includes part of the code that allows it to run on a single machine. Despite being shared under what's called an Apache 2 license (meaning anyone is free to use it). These days, the big Internet giants frequently share the software sitting at the heart of their online operations. Open source accelerates the progress of technology.

We've spent many words on this blog talking through new Industrial IoT technologies, hardware and software, and the way that the status quo has shifted to demand better connectivity, smarter infrastructure, and better access to real-time data across the spectrum. Where we haven't spent much time is considering the economic impact these technologies will have on the average person. Without looking too far into the future, we can already see the impact of a more automated workforce. With that in mind, and on top of all our other daily worries, do we need to be worried about robots stealing our paychecks in the future? Eric Brynjolfsson recently presented a TED Talk about this very topic, but unlike the sci-fi fear mongers, Eric had a different approach. Brynjolfsson suggests we stop trying to compete with machines and focus in on how they can complement our work-life.

Facebook today announced the launch of a feature called automatic alternative text. It's a big step forward in accessibility, because it will allow people who use screen readers -- software that provides spoken descriptions of what's onscreen -- to receive summaries of what's contained in photos that people post on Facebook. Until this point, only the name of the person, the person's share text, and the word "photo" was declared by a screen reader's automated voice when a post with a photo appeared in the News Feed. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), certain people with disabilities will be able to get a better understanding of what their friends are trying to communicate. The new captions are short and at times so simple that they're poetic.

Facebook is now using artificial intelligence to automatically generate captions for photos in the News Feed of people who can't see them. The tool is called Automatic Alternative Text, and it dovetails with text-to-speech engines that allow blind people to use Facebook in other ways. Using deep neural networks, the system can identify particular objects in a photo, from cars and boats to ice cream and pizza. It can pick out particular characteristics of the people in the photo, including smiles and beards and eyeglasses. And it can analyze a photo in a more general sense, determining that a photo depicts sun or ocean waves or snow.