The world's first social robot went on show at the South by Southwest (SXSW) function in Austin on Saturday. JIBO has been specifically designed to serve in the home, offering various useful functions which accommodate to a domestic setting, including home security, storytelling and entertainment. Commenting on the robot's qualities, software developer Jonathan Ross said that "JIBO is a social robot for the home he can recognise you by your face by your voice" adding that "he can understand what you are saying and it can talk back to you." He went on to explain that humans "are hard wired to be responsive to social interactions. So by having a piece of hardware that actually acts like a person and can acknowledge you and can have a social presence, we can tap into that."

Bridgwater goes on, "Shaikh is shown on a video linked here explaining how the specific confluence of technologies he uses helps him. The intelligence comes from'Seeing AI', which is a research project that helps people who are visually impaired or blind to understand who and what is around them. The app is built using intelligence APIs from Microsoft Cognitive Services. The glasses are built with a side button that the user touches while wearing to take a snapshot of the world in front of them. The image capture and analysis software that the glasses (or smartphone) uses is able to plug into cloud-based services that will help determine what the user is looking at."

In the summer of 2015, we launched a new funding scheme called the Pioneer Award, to support innovative science. We're encouraging researchers to think big – the sky is the limit – and bring with them new ideas that could be game-changing for cancer research. To quickly recap on how this new scheme works, it's a'Dragon's Den'-like way of funding research: applications are judged anonymously, and short-listed researchers are given five minutes to pitch their ideas to a panel of experts. There's a pot of up to 200,000 to those who succeed. Back in December, we unveiled the first round of successful projects, and now we have the next batch of bright ideas.

For more tech talks and to network with other engineers, check out our site https://www.hakkalabs.co/logs Matthew Zeiler, PhD, Founder and CEO of Clarifai Inc, speaks about large convolutional neural networks. These networks have recently demonstrated impressive object recognition performance making real world applications possible. However, there was no clear understanding of why they perform so well, or how they might be improved. In this talk, Matt covers a novel visualization technique that gives insight into the function of intermediate feature layers and the operation of the overall classifier.

This depends a lot on the background of the software engineer. And it depends on which part of machine learning you want to master. So, for the sake of concreteness, let's assume that we're talking about a junior engineer who has 4 years of university and a year of two in industry. And let's assume that this is someone who wants to work on computational advertising, natural language processing, image analysis, social networks, search and ranking. Let's start with the requirements for doing machine learning (disclaimer to my academic colleagues - this list is very incomplete, apologies in advance if your papers aren't included).

Toyota is forming a new data science company in partnership with Microsoft that's designed to free customers "from the tyranny of technology." The company called Toyota Connected has a goal of simplifying technology so it's easier to use, perhaps even getting rid of distracting and complicated touch screens that now are in most cars and replacing them with heads-up or voice-activated technology, said Zack Hicks, the company's CEO who also is Toyota Motor America's chief information officer. "I think people are really tired of fumbling with multiple devices and having this disjointed experience," Hicks said as Toyota announced the venture on Monday. Like other automakers, Toyota Connected will research connecting cars to each other and to homes, as well as telematics features that learn and anticipate a driver's habits. The company, like other automakers, will explore transmitting a driver's health data to a doctor or driving patterns to an insurance company so people are insured based on where they travel, Toyota said.

You've heard the term, and you probably nod in agreement when someone tells you how important it is. But secretly you may not be sure what it is or how it works. Ask your data scientists to explain, and you may get lost in a sea of specialist talk about forks, leaf nodes, split points, and recursions. The only thing you need to know is that machine learning applies statistical models to the data you have in order to make smart predictions about data you don't have. Those predictions can help you find signals in the noise and extract value from all the data you're collecting.

Brainspace Corporation, makers of Discovery 5, the industry leader in analytics for eDiscovery and investigations, today announced the latest release of Brainspace Discovery 5.4. This version now delivers deeper, native support for foreign languages, including Brainspace's patented phrase detection for Chinese, Japanese, and Farsi. These enhancements ensure litigators, as well as government and enterprise investigators, are able to utilize Brainspace's powerful contextual discovery capabilities on a wide variety of international datasets. "Brainspace's Discovery 5.4 represents a critical leap forward in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The ability to process native files (English, Russian, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese) adds a critical piece of the puzzle that has been missing from collaboration, predictive analysis, and search," said Edward Scott Smith, Founding Owner of Ryswyk, LCC.

LVMH-owned Sephora is bringing live 3D facial recognition to the existing Virtual Artist feature on its application and Web site, a move expected to boost conversion rates through more accurate facial tracking and rendering. The augmented reality feature currently allows users to upload a still selfie to virtually try on various products that can be purchased from Sephora, but the new update will allow users to view themselves moving in real time with the digital makeup, with more effective technology. The update comes from the developer ModiFace after a survey of non-Modiface and non-Sephora apps showed that a 22 percent drop in conversion rates occurred when the virtual products did not line up or appear correctly on the user's face. "We believe the ability to see yourself with products can impact sales online," said Parham Aarabi, CEO of ModiFace. "We now have significant data and test cases to back this up.

Deep neural networks (DNN), like Google's DeepMind or the IBM Watson, are amazing machines. They can be taught to do many mental tasks like a human, and they represent our best shot to actual artificial intelligence. The challenge has always been training and teaching these machines. For most of the tasks they have to do, the machines tie up big-ticket supercomputers or data centers for days at a time. But scientists from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center are poised to change all that.