Today DimensionalMechanics, a company launching out of stealth to make artificial intelligence scalable in the enterprise, announced the close of an oversubscribed 4.7 million Series A round of financing and introduced NeoPulse, a flexible cloud-based platform that will enable users to solve enterprise challenges by incorporating the power of AI into existing systems. We believe DimensionalMechanics has huge potential to bring the power of AI to bear on real-world market challenges across a range of verticals," said Kent L. Johnson, long-time Seattle VC /angel investor and DimensionalMechanics lead investor and board member. "By expanding the utility of AI as an applied science platform, the company is developing a horizontal platform flexible enough to address diverse challenges, rather than one that works in silos. Enterprise users want to unlock AI as a centerpiece of decision-making and operations – and DimensionalMechanics is forging the key." The investment round is comprised of angel investors as well as full board and founder participation. The funding will allow DimensionalMechanics to accelerate platform development and expand its diverse team of AI experts, engineers, mathematicians, physicists and others. DimensionalMechanics is on track to release an MVP version of its core platform, NeoPulse, in the fourth quarter of 2016. Still in early stages of development, NeoPulse is an extensible cloud platform that will enable developers to build limitless applications. The agnostic platform will work across systems and devices, allowing users to integrate AI capabilities without restructuring existing software stacks and workflows. We are on our way toward achieving our goal of building a robust AI platform that will enable enterprise users to answer far more complex questions than existing databases or AI systems currently allow – to move past answering, 'What?' so that we can answer, 'Why?'" said Rajeev Dutt, the company's co-founder and CEO.

Austin's annual South by Southwest festival is a glimpse into our future. Tech-savvy start-ups and multibillion-dollar enterprises alike are eager to show the world their newest projects and latest technologies. Our attendance at SXSW is an investment in our investments. We want to know about developing trends, and assess their impact on our existing portfolio. And we want to find the smaller, growing companies, that could be well-positioned for massive future upside.

Early Wednesday morning, a new Twitter user named Tay met the world. She was a Microsoft-designed experiment in artificial intelligence that would develop an increasingly human-like persona by engaging with Millennials online. Early this morning though, Tay abruptly withdrew from the world. It seems she learned too indiscriminately, repeating all sorts of language that had been directed at her--including racial epithets, political conspiracy theories, and all-caps Trumpisms (Microsoft has since deleted the tweets, though The Guardian was kind enough to take screenshots). If you're like me, your initial reaction to Tay was excitement. It seemed like a neat experiment.

SAN FRANCISCO – OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the "chatbot" known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.

Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot on Twitter had to be pulled down within hours of launch after it suddenly started making racist comments. As we reported yesterday, it was aimed at 18-24 year-olds and was hailed as, "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill". Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! The AI behind the chatbot was designed to get smarter the more people engaged with it. But, rather sadly, the engagement it received simply taught it how to be racist.

All of this somehow seems more disturbing out of the'mouth' of someone modelled as a teenage girl. It is perhaps even stranger considering the gender disparity in tech, where engineering teams tend to be mostly male. It seems like yet another example of female-voiced AI servitude, except this time she's turned into a sex slave thanks to the people using her on Twitter. This is not Microsoft's first teen-girl chatbot either - they have already launched Xiaoice, a girly assistant or "girlfriend" reportedly used by 20m people, particularly men, on Chinese social networks WeChat and Weibo. Xiaoice is supposed to "banter" and gives dating advice to many lonely hearts. Microsoft has come under fire recently for sexism, when they hired women wearing very little clothing which was said to resemble'schoolgirl' outfits at the company's official game developer party, so they probably want to avoid another sexism scandal.

New machine-learning templates help give SQL Server 2016 customers a get a head start with advanced analytics applications based on the R language.

I'm guessing this library will get the most use in inference. For that you'll want to implement the 2x2 and 4x4 winograd transforms. These can break a single input image into enough tiles to get you decent batched gemm performance. The smaller tiles have much higher accuracy as well, and even work fine in fp16 or int16. Also I suspect your muti-image winograd implementation can be optimized quite a bit more than it is.

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Dr Helen L. Bear and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Dr Bear said. Dr Bear, whose findings will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai on March 25, said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available - such as on CCTV footage - or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation. Dr Bear said: "We are still learning the science of visual speech and what it is people need to know to create a fool-proof recognition model for lip-reading, but this classification system improves upon previous lip-reading methods by using a novel training method for the classifiers. "Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations, from criminal investigations to entertainment.

AI is the future of SEO, but how soon that future comes upon us is dependant on how the machines learn from humans first. Microsoft's latest AI which learns rhetoric and language from interactions on others on Twitter has turned into a Hitler loving, sex crazed Donald Trump fanatic. The Microsoft AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement that uses Twitter to learn the language of its millennial counterparts. This crazy chatbot made headlines when it started Tweeting insane statements like "Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now". It didn't take long for teenagers to start gaming the chatbot, attempting to manipulate and feed offensive racist language. The AI was designed by Microsoft to engage users in their native tongue and understand millennials.