Artificial intelligence is not one thing, but many, spanning several schools of thought. In his book The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos calls them the tribes of AI. As the University of Washington computer scientist explains, each tribe fashions what would seem to be very different technology. Evolutionists, for example, believe they can build AI by recreating natural selection in the digital realm. Symbolists spend their time coding specific knowledge into machines, one rule at a time.

While searching for solutions for libraries for natural language analysis and other comparative learning methods that can access a wider audience instead of the regular academic circles (python, matlab, etc), I ended up with web technologies. Since training data, databases, corpuses and other material are quite huge, these tools are available on the server side, calculations and analysis, data manipulations are happening on the server. This can be done on a local machine, but then we are still in the same situation: it can't be distributed to others. So I ended up deploying apps to Heroku, based on NodeJS and node package manager. There are interesting modules available for natural language processing, advanced sound analysis and general machine learning tasks.

MIT researchers have improved award winning automatic planning software by adding in code that mimics human intuition. The strategies used by high performing human planners were converted into a machine readable form, and then encoded into the automatic planning software. Adding human intuition to the planning software saw an increase in performance between 10 to 15 percent on a challenging set of problems. The research was conducted by scientists at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which is known for a number of cutting edge artificial intelligence breakthroughs. The results from the finding will be presented at an upcoming conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

"Enormous levels of investment are pouring into this technology. The achievements we have seen so far will surely pale against what the coming decades will bring." Artificial intelligence is getting a lot of attention right now. It was one of the key technological themes at the 2016 World Economic Forum and in June of last year, Andrew Ng, chief scientist at the Chinese web services company Baidu called "AI the new Electricity." As recently as Dec 5, 2016, Google and Elon Musk opened their AI platforms to the public, Uber launched Uber AI Lab and Apple announced that for the first time it will publish their AI research.

In this tutorial, we will learn about OpenCV tracking API that was introduced in OpenCV 3.0. We will learn how and when to use the 6 different trackers available in OpenCV 3.2 -- BOOSTING, MIL, KCF, TLD, MEDIANFLOW, and GOTURN. We will also learn the general theory behind modern tracking algorithms. This problem has been perfectly solved by my friend Boris Babenko as shown in this flawless real-time face tracker below! Jokes aside, the animation demonstrates what we want from an ideal object tracker -- speed, accuracy, and robustness to occlusion.

We are at the point where computers and machines are no longer going to be simply tools. Computers are becoming, literally, part of us. "There are a couple of very interesting things happening as we speak facilitating humans and machines working together in a very different way," said Justin Sanchez, director of the Biological Technologies Office at DARPA. Smart exoskeletons help people with paralysis walk again, give soldiers extra strength and endurance, and implanted computer chips help the blind see again or help others feel a sense of touch in a prosthetic foot. It might not be a sci-fi vision of cyborgs, but a near future where soldiers might have implanted chips that help them communicate in the battlefield or receive information from GPS systems or drones.

Ford will invest $1 billion over five years in an artificial intelligence startup with the aim of developing an autonomous vehicle by 2021, the auto giant said. Ford will take a majority stake in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company based in Pittsburgh, started in late 2016 by former Google and Uber employees who had worked on autonomous driving. The venture will employ leading engineers and "roboticists" to develop a "virtual driver" system, described by Ford officials as the "brain" of an autonomous vehicle. The setup is intended to give Ford a head start on competitors in the race to commercialise autonomous vehicles, said Ford executive vice president Raj Nair. "This is really unique in the industry," Nair said on a conference call with analysts.

Siemens has been researching neural networks for about 30 years and has made significant progress in applying this technology to artificial intelligence. For example, the company's Software Environment for Neural Networks (SENN) is being continuously refined and adapted to new and evolving applications, including the optimization of gas turbines and wind turbines. "We hold something like 50 patents for learning processes," notes Sterzing. Siemens Power Generation Services and CT have developed a system that continuously optimizes the operation and control of combustion in gas turbines. Based on AI from CT, the system, which is known as a Gas Turbine Autonomous Control Optimizer (GT-ACO), is currently being installed at a top customer in Asia.

Samurai don't tend to be something you be, but something you see. And that's best done from afar, given the amount of blood and guts that they have spilled in popular culture. But with the release of Nioh, the new but long-awaited action game for PlayStation 4, that's about to change. The game puts you right in the middle of the life of a samurai – with all the mystery, training and beautiful violence that you'd expect. That's done largely through the main character, based on William Adams, an Englishman who was one of the first ever from his country to reach Japan and the first known western Samurai.