Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, a major new engineering and research division formed last year inside the Redmond company, is debuting a new technology that lets developers customize Microsoft's speech-to-text engine for use in their own apps and online services. The new Custom Speech Service is set for release today as a public preview. Microsoft says it lets developers upload a unique vocabulary -- such as alien names in Human Interact's VR game Starship Commander -- to produce a sophisticated language model for recognizing voice commands and other speech from users. It's the latest in a series of "cognitive services" from Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, a 5,000-person division led by Microsoft Research chief Harry Shum. The company says it has expanded from four to 25 cognitive services in the last two years, including 19 in preview and six that are generally available.

On any given day, radiologists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) and across the country view thousands of x-rays. These radiologists, with many years of experience in the medical and research world, have become adept at identifying which images require immediate follow-up or intervention. They can determine, for example, whether the lungs of a trauma patient are collapsed or if there is internal bleeding that requires immediate intervention. But with all of the talk about making healthcare more efficient, the ability of clinicians to read the images and know what they're seeing isn't what's holding back further progress. The challenge is that radiologists only have two eyes and so many hours in a day.

Researchers have found that children become better at math if their whole bodies are engaged while learning. They also found that many children improve at math if the way it's taught is individualized to each child. The research could have an impact on new teaching methods and the incorporation of physical activity during the school day. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, investigated whether different types of math learning strategies change the way children solve math problems. The research, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, was conducted over a six-week period and involved testing the mathematical abilities of school children with an average age of seven years old.

Actor, director, model, teen vampire movie star – now Kristen Stewart can add research author to her list of credentials. Stewart, best known for her portrayal of Bella Swan in the Twilight Saga films, has co-written an article published in Cornell University's online library arXiv. It explains the artificial intelligence technique used in her new short film, Come Swim, that enables footage to take on the visual appearance of a painting. Kristen Stewart, best known for her portrayal of Bella Swan in the Twilight Saga films, has co-written an article published in Cornell University's online library arXiv Many popular software programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and GIMP, already provide filters that can make photographs take on the general style of oil paintings, pen sketches, screen-prints or chalk drawings, for example. The algorithms needed to accomplish this first began to produce aesthetically pleasing results in the early 1990s.

Two of the biggest trends in technology right now are machine learning and artificial intelligence. In fact, the two terms are used almost interchangeably. However, there are subtle but important differences between them both. In many ways, machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence. Also, the term AI is older than machine learning.

Things are going insanely well for people in computer science. I mean, our work is everywhere. Nearly every process imaginable is powered by a machine at the middle. The computer has transformed communication, retail, how we access information and how we navigate around the world. Things are even better in A.I. We are at the beginning of a renaissance of interest and utilization of intelligent systems in an ever-widening sphere of influence.

Do you remember the first time you saw a picture of a cat? You were probably a baby, and it's likely that you didn't comprehend that what you were looking at was a cat. But then days and years went by, and during that time you saw many more pictures of cats, and maybe even a few real cats. You saw a lot of things that you were told weren't cats. And one day, without being prompted, you saw a picture of a cat and thought, "That's a cat!"

Many of them are new to this set of technologies, and seeing the topic through my students' eyes has made me realize how overwhelming it can be. There are so many different types of AI, each requiring some technical knowledge to fully grasp, that newcomers to the field often have difficulty figuring out how to jump in. In the simplest case, cognitive technologies can be just more autonomous extensions of traditional analytics -- automatically running every possible combination of predictive variables in a regression analysis, for example. More complex types of cognitive technology -- neural or deep learning networks, natural language processing, and algorithms -- can seem like black boxes even to the data scientists who create them. Though these technologies can seem daunting, the good news is that getting started with cognitive technologies is getting easier all the time.

Skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States. Over five million cases are diagnosed each year, costing the U.S. healthcare system over $8 billion. More than 100,000 of these cases involve melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, which leads to over 9,000 deaths a year, and the numbers continue to grow. Internationally, melanoma also poses a major public health threat. In Australia, there are over 13,000 new instances of melanoma yearly, leading to more than 1,600 deaths.

In our sequel to the 2015 Puerto Rico AI conference, we brought together an amazing group of AI researchers from academia and industry, and thought leaders in economics, law, ethics, and philosophy for five days dedicated to beneficial AI. We hosted a two-day workshop for our grant recipients to give them an opportunity to highlight and discuss the progress with their grants. We followed that with a 2.5-day conference, in which people from various AI-related fields hashed out opportunities and challenges related to the future of AI and steps we can take to ensure that the technology is beneficial. Honoring the FrieNDA for the conference, we are only posting videos and slides below with approval of the speaker. Learn more about the Asilomar AI Principles that resulted from the conference and the process involved in developing them.