Here's What We Can Expect from Deep Learning in 2016 and Beyond

Customer experience is the one area where a business can truly differentiate itself from competitors. We're already seeing some exciting innovations in 2016 as businesses continue to realize the value exceptional customer experiences (CX) yield for their bottom line. With technology driving innovation, consumers can expect to see major brands going to great lengths to ensure expectations are met, and exceeded. Omnichannel service has been developed to solve this. While not a new concept, omnichannel service is still in its infancy.

NEURAL networks, like the ones grabbing headlines for winning boardgames or driving cars, depend on huge amounts of computing hardware. That in turn means a colossal amount of power: the next wave may consume millions of watts each. That's one reason why some suggest we rethink what we want computers to be. Reducing the precision with which they analyse problems, and putting up with the odd "error", can cut zeroes off their energy consumption (see To make computers better, let them get sloppy). And it has precedent in the human brain – an unrivalled piece of hardware using electrical fluctuations and requiring a million times less power than a computer.

Right after its millennial Tay bot turned genocidal might not seem like the best time for Microsoft to pin its future on bots, conversations and artificial intelligence, but that's exactly what Satya Nadella announced at Build 2016 last night. The Redmond CEO claimed that "we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence". Microsoft wants to bring conversation into so many places that it becomes the next stage of the GUI; "we want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all computing interfaces," Nadella said. Conversations as a Platform, as Microsoft calls it, envisions a world where you ask Cortana to block out the week you'll be at a conference in your calendar and she tags in the bot from your favourite hotel to book a room for the right dates. This bot, by the way, already knows what kind of room you prefer, and suggests a message to send to a friend who lives nearby letting them know when you'll be in town.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) today announced it will receive a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a hearing aid battery – a mere 2.5 watts of power. The brain-like, neural network design of the IBM Neuromorphic System is able to infer complex cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing far more efficiently than conventional chips. The new system will be used to explore new computing capabilities important to the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) missions in cybersecurity, stewardship of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile and nonproliferation. NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program will evaluate machine-learning applications, deep-learning algorithms and architectures and conduct general computing feasibility studies.

Microsoft has revealed a future where we will interact with numerous'bots' to do everything from book hotels and manage our diaries, to order pizza. Shown off at the company's annual Build conference in San Francisco, bots will take artificial intelligence - and how humans interact with computers - into a new generation. Explained as simply as possible, bots are like personal assistants with apps who can be given orders. By understanding natural human language, the bots know - and will learn over time - what we want from them, and can be tuned to become smarter and more efficient. An example Microsoft gave was how a bot could be used by Dominos to help automate pizza orders.

On Wednesday March 23, Microsoft unleashed its brand new AI on Twitter. Her name was Tay, and she was programmed to tweet like a teenage girl. Microsoft didn't intend for that to happen, of course. It wanted to test and improve its algorithm for conversational language. According to Microsoft, Tay was built by "mining relevant [anonymous] public data" which was "modeled, cleaned, and filtered" to create her personality.

In the field of robotics, innovations and developments are taking place constantly. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most popular areas and has caught the fancy of not only scientists, but the common man as well. According to computer scientist, John McCarthy, "AI is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs." A robot which has artificial intelligence can behave like a human being and learn from its surroundings, like the robot Baymax, in the movie, Big Hero 6. Here are some popular real-life robots that use AI.

When Apple launched the Apple II in 1977, it was still far from certain that consumers would want or need a home computer. While hobbyists were tinkering with computers they built and programmed themselves, Apple saw a need for something easier, and introduced the Apple II. This article, republished from the May 1, 1978, edition of Computerworld, sets the scene at the time and describes how a young Apple Computer was looking to the future. CUPERTINO, Calif.--As soon as low-cost computers were available in configurations designed for use by consumers, with programming features and language that non-technicians could use, the personal computing market began to grow rapidly, according to Apple Computer, Inc., one of the firms vying for a share of that blossoming market. With more than 100,000 units sold, the personal computer market is finally being recognized as much larger then the original hobby market, a spokesman stated, observing that there have already been forecasts of 2 billion in sales by 1985.