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 commercialize autonomous vehicles, said Ford executive vice president Raj Nair. "This is really unique in the industry," Nair said on a conference call with analysts. It will have the "speed and nimbleness of a startup, but also integrated into a full production development team."

Billions of workers around the world are paid to perform easy-to-automate or repetitive tasks. Whether it's administrative work, scheduling, decision making, inventory or most, a robot could usually do it better... and faster. Artificial intelligence develops more and more each given year, promising to redefine the way we live, move and work. The AI analytics research industry funding has rising from an $8.2 billion investment in 2013 to a predicted $70 billion by 2020, according to a Bank of America report citing IDC research. A recent Harvard Business Review study found that managers currently spend about 54% of their time handling administrative coordination and control when they could be making higher judgement calls.

By now we have all heard the buzz. Siri has plenty of company. Alexa and Google have invaded the home. Tesla's artificial intelligence is, well, driving itself. Google's Deep Mind is running the company's multi-billion-dollar search business.

New York City-based HealthReveal, which uses remote monitoring and data analytics to help payers and providers make sure patients get the treatments that line up with evidentiary guidelines, has raised $10.8 million in first-round funding. The round was led by GE Ventures with contributions from Greycroft Partners, Flare Capital Partners, and Manatt Ventures. HealthReveal was founded by CEO Dr. Lonny Reisman, who previously founded ActiveHealth Management and sold it to Aetna for $400 million. He then served as Aetna's CMO for nearly a decade. "I think everybody agrees that some 86 percent of medical costs are associated with complications from chronic disease, things like strokes and amputations and end-stage renal disease and end-stage cancer, which is obviously awful for the patient but also very costly," Reisman told MobiHealthNews in an interview.

Ford is investing $1 billion in a secretive artificial intelligence startup headed by former Google and Uber execs to advance its self-driving car efforts. The startup, Argo AI, was founded by Bryan Salesky, the former director of hardware for Google's self-driving-car efforts, and Peter Rander, Uber's engineering lead at its autonomous cars center. Argo AI is based in Pittsburgh, Penn. The $1 billion investment will be spread out over five years as Ford looks to commercialize its self-driving technology by 2021. According to Ford Chief Technical Officer Raj Nair, $1 billion is what it costs to develop advanced autonomous technology, and the investment is consistent with what Ford said its capital allocation in the space would be when it presented information to investors last year.

While Twitter's latest earnings report wasn't too great--it missed its revenue target and the stock declined down more than 12% after the earnings announcement, CEO Jack Dorsey sees a silver lining--machine learning. On the earnings call he said:"As I look into 2017 and we look at what we can do, I just think the superpower we really provide the world is we can break news and get information to people faster than any other service in the world." Dorsey said he's "excited about really making sure that we apply artificial intelligence and machine learning in the right ways and that we really meet that superpower of being that little bird that told you something that you couldn't find anywhere else." Twitter began talking more about machine learning investments last summer when it launched Magic Pony Technology which had developed image-reading technology.

Darktrace co-founder Poppy Gustafsson recently predicted, at TechCrunch Disrupt London, that malicious actors will increasingly use artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated spearphishing attacks. Criminals are just as capable of using artificial intelligence as those trying to thwart them, according to security vendor ESET's 2017 trends report, with "next-gen" security marketers throwing around the buzzwords "machine learning," "behavioral analysis" and more. That's making it more difficult for potential customers to sift through all the hype. It predicts the rise of "jackware" or Internet-of-Things ransomware, such as locking the software in cars until a ransom is paid. UK-based security vendor Darktrace takes the view that determined hackers will get into your network, so a perimeter-based strategy won't work.

This is an advanced course on natural language processing. Automatically processing natural language inputs and producing language outputs is a key component of Artificial General Intelligence. The ambiguities and noise inherent in human communication render traditional symbolic AI techniques ineffective for representing and analysing language data. This will be an applied course focussing on recent advances in analysing and generating speech and text using recurrent neural networks. We will introduce the mathematical definitions of the relevant machine learning models and derive their associated optimisation algorithms.

We are excited to announce that an AWS Deep Learning AMI for Ubuntu is now available in the AWS Marketplace in addition to the Amazon Linux version. The AWS Deep Learning AMI, now available on AWS Marketplace, lets you run deep learning in the Cloud, at any scale. Launch instances of pre-installed, open source deep learning frameworks, including Apache MXNet, to train sophisticated, custom AI models, experiment with new algorithms, and learn new deep learning skills and techniques. The AWS Deep Learning AMI lets you create managed, auto-scaling clusters of GPUs for large-scale training, or run inference on trained models using the latest versions of MXNet, TensorFlow, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and Keras. With the addition of an Ubuntu version, you have the choice to run on the operating system of your choice.

It's no secret that Nvidia (NVDA) was the best performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2016, gaining more than 370%. But while the company's graphics processor unit (GPU) chips are being used in everything from gaming PCs to autonomous cars to virtual reality to data centers, the reinvigoration of Nvidia is built by one thing: artificial intelligence. AI is increasingly being used in everything and everywhere, most notably data centers for machine learning, where Nvidia's GPUs have a tremendous lead over the competition, including anything from AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC). Data center revenue was up 67% year-over-year in the quarter at $296 million and more impressive, up 23% from the impressive fiscal third-quarter 2017 results that helped send the stock soaring more than 30% in November 2016. The technology is touching everything and anyone, be it on your smartphone or when you shop on Amazon (AMZN) or using software.