Change of Plans.... We are going to bump this months OC Deep Learning Meetup to Wed. the 13th as several people requested it and no one objected. Plus this gives us the pleasure of hearing from Manuel Beltran Chief Software Architect, Battle Command Systems at Boeing. Mr. Beltran has over 20 years computer engineering experience and has worked as a Knowledge Engineer on various NASA projects, his Expert Systems and Neural Networks have provided many years of safe and successful Space Shuttle launch pad operations. Mr. Beltran also provided Software Engineering leadership, vision, and technical innovation to the US Army's Brigade Combat Team Modernization, formerly known as the Future Combat System. As the Chief Software Architect of the Battle Command System, he has been responsible for the software development of the largest military modernization effort in the history of the US military.

Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly important sector in today's technology industry, growing by 20% annually. The field includes the design and production of technology that could simulate human intelligence and act autonomously based on its own processing of environmental stimuli, rather than following programmed directions alone. Through our exhaustive research of the sector, we have identified 630 companies across 13 categories, 46 countries, and with 1.87B of raised funding. In the following weeks we will examine the trends, issues, and top companies within three selected categories in the Artificial Intelligence scan (Smart Home Robots, Machine Learning/Deep Learning, and Image Recognition). If you would like to see all the 630 companies across 13 categories or learn more about each category, contact us at [email protected].

Look closely at what many journalists write about artificial intelligence – from AlphaGo's triumph at the ancient Chinese board game Go to Microsoft's accidentally racist Twitter bot – and you might detect some smugness. Research by Oxford University has predicted that journalism is among the jobs least likely to be replaced by a machine in the near future. And yet, as Columbia University prepares to celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer prize, intelligent robots will publish financial reports, sports commentaries, clickbait and myriad other articles formerly the preserve of trained journalists. "A machine will win a Pulitzer one day," predicts Kris Hammond from Narrative Science, a company that specialises in "natural language generation". "We can tell the stories hidden in data."

A new app has emerged claiming it can turn your words into illustration. The first thing that you might think when you see visuals produced by this app named – WordsEye is that you are viewing the work of a talented and creative or graphics artist. Pictures of an elephant standing next to a chocolate cake, shiny spaceships on the lunar surface and rainbow-coloured African safari animals are easily worth 1,000s of words. However, truth be told, these visuals were not created by any human, they were created by a machine running on an intelligent app. WordsEye is a new web application that receives and then translates a few lines of user-input text about a particular scene and then turn it into an artistic illustration using the algorithms of artificial intelligence.

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.

There have been a number of opinions that suggest that survey data isn't useful to the People Analyst, especially when developing predictive models. These opinions go against our experience. In a recent attrition project with a major client we were able to increase the accuracy of our models by around 10% at a relatively early stage by including survey data. Anyone who is doing Machine Learning knows that a 10% improvement isn't easy to achieve. A NY Times article written by two experienced data scientists from Google & Facebook, shows how these firms combine survey and system data to reveal what is really going on.

The idea is ridiculously simple (perhaps why it is effective?): I don't understand the claim "Remember all the narratives we told about how depth learns hierarchical representations, and higher level representations -- those higher level representations don't seem to matter so much after all.". The net has over 100 layers!?! I imagine that this also works reasonably well in the RNN encoder in an encoder/decoder framework. I wonder if it also applies to generative RNNs.

AlphaGo's recent defeat of champion Go player Lee Se-dol has spurred another flurry of articles about AI. Among these was an announcement that Luc Besson will be directing a pilot for a new TV series titled Artificial Intelligence. Bet you can't guess the plot? Well, actually, you probably can: AI escapes the lab, goes AWOL, mayhem ensues. Its creators form a team of special agents to combat the now rogue AI.

As the oracles of Silicon Valley debate whether the latest tech boom is sliding toward bust, there is already talk about what will drive the industry's next growth spurt. The way we use computing is changing, toward a boom (and, if history is any guide, a bubble) in collecting oceans of data in so-called cloud computing centers, then analyzing the information to build new businesses. The terms most often associated with this are "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence," or "A.I." And the creations spawned by this market could affect things ranging from globe-spanning computer systems to how you pay at the cafeteria. "There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there's going to be so much information people have to work through quickly," said Diane B. Greene, the head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an A.I. boom.

The first bot I ever befriended went by the name of GooglyMinotaur. The Minotaur appeared in 2001 to promote Amnesiac, the latest album from Radiohead, which was and still is my favorite band. I happily chatted with the Minotaur about Radiohead history, information about the band's tour, and the MP3s it offered for download. The Minotaur was popular among fans like me: 1 million people added it as a friend, and in its lifetime it sent more than 60 million messages. But the Minotaur died a few months after it appeared, along with the rest of the era's bots. The entire field seemed dormant for more than a decade.