Imagine a future where life's most boring or dangerous tasks are handled by machines. Time otherwise spent commuting, scheduling appointments, sifting through mail, could be devoted to human passions instead. That's the best-case scenario for noted computer scientist Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, also known as "AI2," founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. "An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them," he explains on a new episode of GeekWire's radio show. "Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or where human creativity still shines, in science. They're engaged in those activities because of the interaction. Another one would be, of course, interaction between people and not because they need to make a buck."

According to the United Nations (UN), more than 12 million people--including 5.6 million children--have fled Syria to escape the horrors of the country's ongoing civil war and invasion by ISIS. Worldwide, the UN reports an unprecedented 59.5 million people are displaced by crisis. The flow of refugees toward Europe from Syria and other war-torn nations has caused the continent's greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Finland-based Lucify, which creates interactive data visualizations to help organizations analyze and communicate important data, recently tackled the refugee migration to Europe. Using UN data from 2012 through December 2015, its interactive map offers a time-lapse view of refugee migration and country-by-country statistics.

So he and his business partner, Dan Roth, decided to create a program that would help lawyers manage electronic documents for litigation. Their idea led them to purchase an e-discovery application. By 2000, Leib and his partner launched their own creation, Discovery Cracker. "We saw a gap in the marketplace," Leib says. Lawyers need tools to keep up with it." Instead of wading through piles of paper, lawyers now deal with terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of documents. E-discovery, legal research and document review are more sophisticated due to the abundance of data. So while working as chief strategy officer at kCura in Chicago, Leib saw a need again in the market. "For years, lawyers have been stuck with antiquated tools that focus primarily … on Boolean search. Better tools are needed to truly understand data." "What is the future of the industry?

This post explores the idea that if we can successfully learn multiple levels of representation then we can generalize well. The below flow charts illustrate how the different parts of an AI system relate to each other within different AI disciplines. The shaded boxes indicate components that are able to learn from data. Rule-based systems are hand-designed AI programs. The knowledge required by these programs are provided by experts in the concerned field.

In this week's QuestionTime we hear the views and opinions of Head of Learning & Development, Carrie Remington. In your opinion, what is the biggest anxiety within the world of learning and development at the moment? There's no doubt about it: technology has disrupted, and continues to disrupt, the world of business… and, of course, the learning and development industry. While innovative designers are often keen to maximise the potential of new advancements, in reality, there is often a lack of understanding throughout the wider organisation – which can cause delays in digital transformation. Misconceptions can also lead to poor early-adoption rates of certain technologies, making it difficult for even the most forward-thinking companies to lead in learning.

Investment "robo-advisor" Wealthfront launched a major update Thursday that represents the company's first big step toward becoming an all-in-one financial hub, powered by artificial intelligence. The idea behind "Wealthfront 3.0," as CEO Adam Nash calls it, is to provide personalized financial recommendations for your entire life, many of which are made possible by linking to the APIs of other services. Nash tells Business Insider that integrations with other platforms like payments app Venmo, real-estate platform Redfin, and peer-to-peer lending startup Lending Club, are the backbone of this new push for the company. Wealthfront was started on the premise that an algorithm could construct you a better and more consistent investment portfolio than a traditional investment advisor -- and for lower fees. And that is still what it's most known for.

Like self-driving cars, drones are often misperceived by the American public. The most common concerns with drones relate to safety, privacy, and security, and we have already seen early regulatory responses from state lawmakers as well as the FAA. Despite increased regulation, Lisa Ellman, partner and co-chair of global UAS practice at Hogan Lovells, said, "Drone fever is here and drones are here to stay, whether or not we have the policy to enable their use." The solution she proposes is "polivation," bringing policymakers together with innovators to ensure policy promotes innovation. This is especially important since innovations such as drones are redefining what qualifies as aircraft.

Once the machines came and took the menial jobs. Artificial intelligence has come of age, says Matthew Partridge. Until recently, artificial intelligence (AI) – machines that can think for themselves – was the technology that was long promised but never quite delivered. Even when the Deep Blue computer defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match in 1997, or when a similar machine solved draughts a decade later (ie, could follow a provably optimal strategy), these victories [...]

Rage Frameworks, a provider of knowledge-based automation technology and services, announced new deployments of its traceable "deep learning" technology known as Rage AI across several global financial services, consumer products and manufacturing firms. The challenges these organizations faced required the understanding and interpretation of complex documents and integration of other transaction data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to identify significant cost efficiencies and compliance conformance. RAGE AI incorporates deep linguistic parsing and proprietary linguistics-based innovations to understand the real meaning of documents and interpret them as a human would, and can operate completely unsupervised or with assistance by human experts. With its traceable, deep learning technology, RAGE AI significantly extends the frontier of deep learning and machine intelligence from "natural language processing" to "natural language understanding." The platform reads and interprets documents within its context, and as a totally transparent solution, RAGE AI enables knowledge workers to move forward confidently knowing the reasoning behind the platform's insights is completely auditable.

The automatic extraction of features from images is then called to tag the scene in a manner which is close to the human perception of it. For example, image features might include landscape at dusk or broad day time, human or animal interactions, textured image and so on. To this purpose, computer vision algorithms need first to extract salient features of the image and then cluster them according to semantically meaningful groups. Region-growing techniques are utilize to subdivide the image into non-overlapping regions containing salient features. The edge map of the image (in all color channels) is used to determine stiff boundaries for region growing and peaks of the edge distance-transform are used as initial seeds for the process.