China's leading Internet-search company, Baidu, has developed a voice system that can recognize English and Mandarin speech better than people, in some cases. The new system, called Deep Speech 2, is especially significant in how it relies entirely on machine learning for translation. Whereas older voice-recognition systems include many handcrafted components to aid audio processing and transcription, the Baidu system learned to recognize words from scratch, simply by listening to thousands of hours of transcribed audio. The technology relies on a powerful technique known as deep learning, which involves training a very large multilayered virtual network of neurons to recognize patterns in vast quantities of data. The Baidu app for smartphones lets users search by voice, and also includes a voice-controlled personal assistant called Duer (see "Baidu's Duer Joins the Personal Assistant Party").

Most of the people who work in analytics have some experience with random forests, clustering, association analysis, regression, and decision tree techniques. However, many have not begun exploring deep learning techniques. Things change so fast in the data science space, it's no wonder lots of professionals are still scratching their heads and asking, "What is deep learning?" Deep learning is the new hot thing in machine learning research. It is a set of generative machine learning techniques that convert raw data into high-level representations that can be used to perform standard machine learning tasks, such as classification and clustering.

Any questions at all, please email me, I'm here to help. You need a foundation to start your journey in to the field. You need to study and practice the process of applied machine learning using tools and libraries. You need to develop a deeper understanding of algorithms, tools and problems.

Minecraft is to become a testing ground for artificial intelligence experiments. Microsoft, owner of the popular video game, revealed that computer scientists and amateurs will be able to evaluate and develop AI software using its virtual landscapes from July. The company says Minecraft is more "sophisticated" than existing AI research simulations and cheaper to use than building a robot. "This is the state-of-the-art," said Prof Jose Hernandez-Orallo from the Technical University of Valencia, one of a small group of academics given early access to the software. "At this moment there is nothing comparable, and this is just in its beginnings, so I see many possibilities for it."

Join us live at Entrepreneur's Accelerate Your Business event series in Chicago or Denver. If visionaries such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are to be believed, artificial intelligence will create a frightening, dystopian future where mortals are at the mercy of their robot overlords. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who also happens to be Google's director of engineering, is far more optimistic. In a talk with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson held Monday night as part of the 7 Days of Genius Festival, he said that the rise of artificial intelligence won't destroy or enslave us -- instead, it will turbocharge our creative humanity. Computer intelligence is accelerating at an exponential rate: By 2029, computers will reach the level of human intelligence, predicts Kurzweil.

Fighting cyber attacks with artificial intelligence The next frontier of anti-virus software is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to not only predict what threats are out there, but to also actively fight back before they strike. This is according to American-based Cylance's chief marketing officer, Greg Fitzgerald, speaking at the NetEvents Press and Analyst Summit in Rome, Italy.The company says it is "revolutionising cyber security through the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware". Cylance today announced it is expanding into the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) with the establishment of a London-based team led by Evan Davidson, former enterprise sales director at FireEye. It also established a channel partnership with CoreSec Systems, which supplies cyber security and networking solutions in Sweden and Denmark.

The term Artificial Intelligence was originally coined by John McCarthy in 1955, defining it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". Now more than a half a century old, the field of AI and machine learning is finally achieving some of its oldest goals by being used successfully in areas such as data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and search engines. Tech giants have all been investing heavily in AI and Machine Learning. In 2010 Facebook introduced facial recognition technology, and in 2013 Mark Zuckerberg dedicated a lab to AI research. In 2014 Google bought artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for 400 million ( 263 million), making it one of the largest tech acquisitions to date.

Google has a special way to improve the quality of search results: artificial intelligence (AI.) The company uses a type of AI known as machine learning to figure out what its users really want to search for. Machine learning is where a computer gradually teaches itself how to perform a task. One example of that is Google DeepMind, which learned how to play retro arcade games over time. Google's machine learning system for search is called RankBrain, and it tries to figure out what a user is searching for.

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. The number of new malware variations that pop up each day runs somewhere between 390,000 (according to AV-TEST Institute) and one million (according to Symantec Corporation). These are new strains of malware that have not been seen in the wild before. Even if we consider just the low end figure, the situation is still dire. Especially when it comes to advanced persistent threats (APTs), which are the most sophisticated mutations of viruses and malware, which are very effective at going completely undetected by many of the cybersecurity technologies in use today.

What it's about: If you've been looking for the latest indicator that machine learning and AI are about to burst out of the lab and into the mainstream, look no further: Rolling Stone, not exactly a must-read in the tech industry, is serving up a big two-part feature on "the artificial intelligence revolution." Part one went online this week, and it's well worth the read. Author Jeff Goodell dispenses with some of the entertainment and media tropes around AI--bow down before your robot overlords, and so on--in favor of what AI, like so much of modern software, is really all about: Algorithms. "Algorithms are to the 21st Century what coal was to the 19th Century: the engine of our economy and the fuel of our modern lives," Goodell writes. "In the world of AI, the Holy Grail is to discover the single algorithm that will allow machines to understand the world--the digital equivalent of the Standard Model that lets physicists explain the operations of the universe." Of course, no one's found that yet, and true AI isn't actually here yet: "AIs are nowhere near as smart as a rat," Facebook director of AI research Yann LeCun tells Goodell.