Northeastern University professor Mauro Martino is one of the minds behind IBM's Watson News Explorer, a dashboard that allows users to explore the themes surfacing across the news ecosystem. Martino spoke last week at NUVis, Northeastern's Visualization Consortium seminar series, about his work with artificial intelligence -- or machine learning, as he prefers to call it -- and visualization as a path to "accelerate human knowledge." An award-winning design artist and director at the Cognitive Visualization Lab at IBM, Martino shared many insights on how journalists and other professionals can offer more meaningful storytelling by marrying data visualization and artificial intelligence. Martino's research focuses on how information technology relates to exploration and the dissemination of knowledge. Through artificial intelligence and data visualization, he believes people can expand the reality in front of them with complex classification and connections that emerge from computer analysis.

Many bank employees likely fear robots will replace them, but to U.S. Bank's Dominic Venturo, some bots are just there to be their wingman. Much of the talk about artificial intelligence in banking has been about how technology can replace some functions currently performed by humans. But AI could help human bankers do their jobs more effectively by giving them quicker access to relevant information than ever before. "AI won't totally replace, but rather augment, a human's ability to do their job in a lot of ways," said Venturo, the Minneapolis-based bank's chief innovation officer. U.S. Bank is one of a number of financial institutions experimenting with how AI and machine learning can transform the financial industry.

HBO's Westworld features a common plot device--synthetic hosts rising up against their callous human creators. But is it more than just a plot twist? After all, smart people like Bill Gates and Steven Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence may be on a dangerous path and could threaten the survival of the human race. They're not the only ones worried. The Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament recently issued a report calling on the EU to require intelligent robots to be registered, in part so their ethical character can be assessed.

Artificial intelligence is set to take a key role in the design and engineering of new cars, dreaming up lighter, stronger and more complex structures than humans can envision. Just as computing power exceeds the mathematical capability of the human mind, smart software capable of innovation and problem solving is set to push product development into new territory. Hack Rod, a team of designers, engineers, geeks, Hollywood insiders and stunt drivers is working on a way to harness the power of artificial intelligence in tandem with powerful design software produced by Autodesk. Experimenting with connectivity surrounding the emerging "internet of things", the Hack Rod crew built a basic sports car, fitted it with dozens of race car-like sensors, and set about testing, racing and crashing the vehicle. They then fed millions of data points into a computer powered by NVidia processors capable of machine learning, and asked Autodesk's "Dreamcatcher" software to take that information and use it to design a better car.

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I think these new Anonymous guys are better than the last crop. Everything is fine until they get radios -- and an agenda. We already have the introductions thing down with contact and friend lists. Anonymous - Ron, You can publish your comments as Ron if you want. I've never worked directly in robotics, but I've worked in AI before (and in a way, I do again).

"WOULD it not be of great satisfaction to the king to know, at a designated moment every year, the number of his subjects?" A military engineer by the name of Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban posed this question to Louis XIV in 1686, pitching him the idea of a census. All France's resources, the wealth and poverty of its towns and the disposition of its nobles would be counted, so that the king could control them better. These days, such surveys are common. But they involve a lot of shoe-leather, and that makes them expensive.

It seems like everyone wants to invest in artificial intelligence (AI). And it's not just the tech giants: USAA is using AI to protect its users from identity theft and Under Armour has connected its health app, MyFitnessPal, to IBM Watson so users can get a more thorough read of their health. AI is already a $15 billion dollar industry, according to the MIT Technology Review, with more than 2,600 companies developing their own tech, and the value of AI is reported to rise to over $70 billion by 2020. Because of AI's business opportunities, hundreds of designers in digital agencies, people who were taught to create products and services that live on the Internet, are starting to build physical products that interact with us, respond to our moods, and make decisions for us. It's a challenge that requires every skill they've learned, plus many they haven't. Still, designers know the basics: The principles of user-centric design lay the groundwork for building a great AI system.

Machine learning can benefit many different spaces, but the influencer marketing space is the newest to utilize AI in marketing matches. Brands have quickly found that influencer marketing is the fastest way to directly reach customers. Influencer marketing subverts ad blockers and "commercial aversion" that leads consumers to shy away from platforms that are ad-heavy. But it's not always easy to find the influencers who are best for your brand. Former director of FameBit (which has since been acquired by Google) Rob Ilas has been concocting a way to make "Soulmates" out of brands and influencers using deep machine learning, AI, and social listening.

Join us as Dr. Huining (Henry) Cao explores the impact of artificial intelligence on financial markets. Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing driverless car technology, speech recognition, image processing, automatic translation, big data analysis and many other sectors in marketing and finance. One striking example is Google's AlphaGo, a recent algorithm based on AI that has defeated the best human players in Go and Texas Poker, previously thought the last strongholds of human intelligence. Much of the progress comes from the connectionism approach, which models behavior as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units. A major representation of the connectionist approach uses artificial neural networks to simulate human perception, cognition and decision making.

You are overly personifying AI. You asked "what kind of intelligence likes to be enslaved", and you said none. But you are basically defining intelligence to be human in that argument, whether you realize that's what you're doing or not. From there, you conclude that, if machines are to be superintelligent, they have to be humans, but faster, and therefore wouldn't like being enslaved. But there's no justification for thinking that an AI would be like humans in the first place. An AGI can be roughly characterized as an entity which can solve a broad class of problems at the same or greater efficiency flexibility as humans.