You may have heard of artificial intelligence (AI), which is usually defined as the science of making computers do things that would require intelligence if completed by humans. However, for many this seems like a visionary technology, not ready for day-to-day use within your business. So you may be surprised to learn that AI could already be benefitting your business. "Many service providers to small businesses are already leveraging AI's capabilities," reveals Dr. Andy Pardoe, founder of Informed.AI and homeAI.info. "AI has never been more widely used, with many of the largest technology companies providing integrated AI platforms. This democratisation of AI is allowing small businesses to more easily add advanced data analytics and machine learning to their processes."

Jana Eggers is a tech executive focused on products and the messages surrounding them. Jana has started and grown SMBs and led large organizations within enterprises. Jana's software and technology experience includes technology and executive positions at Intuit, Blackbaud, Basis Technology (internationalization technology), Lycos, American Airlines, Los Alamos National Laboratory (computational chemistry and supercomputing), Spreadshirt (customized apparel ecommerce), and acquired startups that you've never heard of. Jana is a frequent speaker, writer and CXO educator on innovation, change and technology.

MIT researchers have developed a way for humans to control robots with their mind. The new system can detect when a person notices a robot making a mistake, and classifies these brain waves almost instantly to provide feedback. In tests with a robot named Baxter, the researchers found that the new technique helped the humanoid to make correct choices during an object-sorting task – and it could one day allow humans to wordlessly communicate with robots. MIT researchers have developed a way for humans to control robots with their mind. As the robot, Baxter, attempts to sort objects between'Paint' or'Wire' bins, the system looks for brain signals from the human observer known as'error-related potentials.' Once an error has been detected, machine-learning algorithms can sort these brain waves in just 10 to 30 milliseconds to provide feedback.

Yahoo Research is pioneering the new sciences underlying the Web. As the center of scientific excellence for Yahoo!, Yahoo Research delivers both fundamental and applied scientific leadership through published research and new technologies powering the company's products. Yahoo Research is looking for exceptional PhD students to work with us in our intern program for the summer of 2016 for 3.5 months. We seek world-class graduate students in pursuit of a PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related area. We are particularly interested in students working on Machine Learning, Data mining, Information Retrieval, Algorithms, Natural Language Processing, HCI, Social media, Recommender systems,Scalable systems.

The ALS algorithm introduced by Hu et al., is a very popular technique used in Recommender System problems, especially when we have implicit datasets (for example clicks, likes etc). It can handle large volumes of data reasonably well and we can find many good implementations in various Machine Learning frameworks. Spark includes the algorithm in the MLlib component which has recently been refactored to improve the readability and the architecture of the code. Spark's implementation requires the Item and User id to be numbers within integer range (either Integer type or Long within integer range), which is reasonable as this can help speed up the operations and reduce memory consumption. One thing I noticed though while reading the code is that those id columns are being casted into Doubles and then into Integers at the beginning of the fit/predict methods.

One of the flagship applications of modern machine learning has been working with images -- training computers to analyze, classify, and alter different types of pictures. Last year, Google's DeepDream software made waves by creating a series of terrifying, nightmare-inducing images: While image and video classification (that is, telling us what is depicted in the chosen media) is not so cutting edge anymore, this is actually good news. A number of cheap services have sprung up to make image classification quite accessible. Here at MuseFind we've been looking for ways to help both brands and social media influencers produce better content -- and part of that effort is figuring out the correlations between the most successful posts and their content. Below are the top three image/video analysis services we considered: Clarifai, Google Cloud Vision, and Amazon Rekognition.

Babak Hodjat believes humans are too emotional for the stock market. So he's started one of the first hedge funds run completely by artificial intelligence. "Humans have bias and sensitivities, conscious and unconscious," says Hodjat, a computer scientist who helped lay the groundwork for Apple's Siri. "It's well documented we humans make mistakes. For me, it's scarier to be relying on those human-based intuitions and justifications than relying on purely what the data and statistics are telling you."

Human Interact is a VR storytelling startup based in Champaign, Illinois, and Starship Commander is one their newest VR games. One of the goals for Alexander Mejia and Adam Nydahl, the storytellers behind Starship Commander, was to use the easiest controller of them all – the human voice. However, the world they were crafting was full of fictional names and phrases which most existing cloud based solutions failed to understand. So they were on the lookout for a more accurate speech recognition platform. That's when Mejia and Nydahl became aware of Microsoft's Cognitive Services, offering developers Artificial Intelligence technologies spanning vision, speech, language, and knowledge, all accessible with just a few lines of code.

At Blackbelt, we're leading the charge on AI marketing, using our cognitive branding approach to combine machine intelligence and human intuition to help our clients put their data to work. If those terms seem nebulous or confusing, you're not alone. In fact, when reading up on AI, the Internet seems to be fraught with conflicting information. To provide some clarity, AdAge recently defined the basic AI terms. Polish your AI knowledge and read more here.

Sports analytics is routinely used to assign values to such things as shots taken or to compare player performance, but a new automated method based on deep learning techniques - developed by researchers at Disney Research, California Institute of Technology and STATS, a supplier of sports data - will provide coaches and teams with a quicker tool to help assess defensive athletic performance in any game situation. The innovative method analyzes detailed game data on player and ball positions to create models, or "ghosts," of how a typical player in a league or on another team would behave when an opponent is on the attack. It is then possible to visually compare what a team's players actually did during a defensive play versus what the ghost players would have done. "With the innovation of data-driven ghosting, we can now, for the first time, scalably quantify, analyze and compare detailed defensive behavior," said Peter Carr, research scientist at Disney Research. "Despite what skeptics might say, you can indeed measure defense."