When the California Department of Motor Vehicles released its annual autonomous vehicle disengagement report Wednesday, Google's self-driving platform, Waymo, came away looking like the big moves it made this year were well worth the fuss. The company posted significant year-over-year improvements in its self-driving tech's safety and efficiency, even as it ramps up its autonomous efforts. As its name implies, the DMV report tracks the total number of disengagements that occur while the self-driving cars log test miles on the state's roads. Disengagements are instances when a driver takes manual control of a test vehicle in autonomous mode to correct its trajectory. According to the report, which was first noted by The Verge, Waymo's test cars logged 635,868 miles in 2016 and experienced 124 "reportable disengagements."

For people living with Asperger's syndrome, every social interaction can be a battle. While high-functioning in some aspects, those suffering from the form of autism often struggle to engage with other people and topics outside of their own spheres of interest. Keeping up with conversations can be especially challenging then, since difficulty interpreting the meaning of nonverbal communication (like gestures and facial expressions) and modulations in the speech patterns of others is one of the hallmarks of the condition. A pair of MIT researchers have set out to make these interactions less harrowing. Using wearable tech and AI deep-learning systems, they've developed a tool that could someday act as a real-time virtual social coach.

For energy generation, utilities, and oil and gas, IoT security means predictive maintenance, cyber defense, and threat remediation. In this white paper, leading Artificial Intelligence company, SparkCognition, details use cases with Fortune 500 clients addressing the gap between the vast amount of data being collected and the limited resources to analyze this important information.

The idea was to greatly simplify SEO for most publishers and to remind them that the finer points of SEO don't matter if you don't get the basics right. The reason that machine learning is important to this picture is that search engines are investing heavily in improving their understanding of language. Hummingbird was the first algorithm publicly announced by Google that focused largely on addressing an understanding of natural language, and RankBrain was the next such algorithm. We also know that Google (and other engines) are interested in leveraging user satisfaction/user engagement data as well. Though it's less clear exactly what signals they will key in on, it seems likely that this is another place for machine learning to play a role.

Whether you're interested in cognitive computing, artificial intelligence or machine learning, you probably know that the fourth industrial revolution is well underway and accelerating rapidly. The speed of change presents a challenge to developers who want to stay abreast of the latest ideas and approaches. Conferences, workshops and other meetings provide opportunities to learn where the jobs and technology is headed and a chance to learn and practice the skills necessary to keep up. Why you should attend: AI engineers, practitioners, researchers and scientists will discuss the latest developments in the field, while tutorials and workshops will give attendees a chance to hone their skills. Speakers will be drawn from a wide variety of sectors, including Microsoft, MIT, the National Science Foundation and NASA Ames Research Center.

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents what I believe to be the next leap forward in technological development. With AI, we can process data faster, design systems that learn based on their environments and possibly solve problems that to date we've been unable to solve. It's only a matter of time before AI takes over the social media world and starts using machine-learning to better serve us as both consumers and business owners. So, which will be the first to take the plunge, and how can you, as an entrepreneur, prepare? AI and machine-learning have already started to infiltrate the functionality of most -- if not all -- major social media apps in the world today, and in multiple areas.

In December 2016 a new venue opened up in London, UK called the Realities Centre, focused on promoting virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) technology. THe last couple of months have seen several conferences and hackathons taking place and now the venue has revealed its latest events. Taking place in March 2017, the Realities Centre will be hosting another conference and hackathon, this time dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) and VR. Held on 16th March will be the AI VR Conference, featuring an evening of discussions exploring the two fields, namely how AI machine learning and natural language processing can be used in VR. Speaking at the event will be Rob Whitehead, co-founder and CTO of Improbable, whose talk will be on'A high level introduction of the AI and VR industry'.

Air New Zealand has made its first foray into the field of artificial intelligence (AI) unveiling its new chatbot, Bravo Oscar Tango – Oscar for short. Oscar will initially assist customers with commonly asked queries, saving them time and offering a more personalised experience than searching a traditional Frequently Asked Questions section online. As with other AI technology, Oscar will learn based on the conversations people have with him, becoming more user friendly and more helpful the more he interacts. Air New Zealand Chief Digital Officer Avi Golan says Oscar has been launched as a beta product allowing customers to play an active role in training him. "This is a new approach for us, getting Oscar out fast and in the early-development stages so that we can build and co-create with our customers.

Imagine your smartphone being able to negotiate the best price of a new car for you -- that's one of the potential implications of artificial intelligence beating humans in poker for the first time, experts say. Libratus, an AI built by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), racked up over $US1.7 million ($2.2 million) worth of chips against four of the top professional poker players in the world in a 20-day marathon poker tournament that ended in Philadelphia on Tuesday.. While machines have beaten humans over the last two decade in chess, checkers, and most recently in the ancient game of Go, Libratus' victory is significant because poker is an imperfect information game -- similar to the real world where not all problems are laid out. The difficulty in figuring out human behaviour is one of the main reasons why poker was considered immune to machines. "The best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans," said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science at CMU who created Libratus with a PhD student Noam Brown.

Many technological trends come and go; the great ones last forever, and the not so great fade away, barely remembered as a fad. Not all technologies are purposeful, but when they are, they make our lives easier, neater, and smarter. This article presents an honest evaluation on conversational agents (bots) and where (we think) they stand in the future. Whether you are a business owner or simply a customer, you must have encountered bots in your daily life. From online shopping (conversational commerce) to asking Siri a simple question, bots are everywhere.