In the 2013 movie Her, Theodore Twombly, a lonely writer, falls in love with a digital assistant designed to meet his every need. She sorts emails, helps get a book published, provides personal advice, and ultimately becomes his girlfriend. The assistant, Samantha, is AI software capable of learning at an astonishing pace. Samantha will remain in the realm of science fiction for at least another decade, but less-functional digital assistants, called bots, are already here. These will be the most amazing technology advances we see in our homes in 2017.

Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante" poker competition nears its halfway point, Carnegie Mellon University's AI program, called Libratus, is opening a lead over its human opponents -- four of the world's best professional poker players. Libratus had amassed a lead of $459,154 in chips in the 49,240 hands played by the end of Day Nine. One of the pros, Jimmy Chou, said he and his colleagues initially underestimated Libratus, but have come to regard it as one tough player. "The bot gets better and better every day," Chou said. AI, which began Jan. 11 at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, pits Chou and three other leading players -- Dong Kim, Jason Les and Daniel McAulay -- against Libratus in a 20-day contest in which they will play 120,000 hands of Heads-Up, No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker. All four pros specialize in this two-player, unlimited bid form of Texas Hold'em and are considered among the world's top players of the game. While the pros are fighting for humanity's pride -- and shares of a $200,000 prize purse -- Carnegie Mellon researchers are hoping their computer program will establish a new benchmark for artificial intelligence by besting some of the world's most talented players. Libratus was developed by Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science, and his Ph.D. student, Noam Brown. Libratus is being used in this contest to play poker, an imperfect information game that requires the AI to bluff and correctly interpret misleading information to win. Ultimately programs like Libratus also could be used to negotiate business deals, set military strategy or plan a course of medical treatment -- all cases that involve complicated decisions based on imperfect information. AI contest in 2015, four leading pros amassed more chips than the AI, called Claudico. But Sandholm said he's feeling good about Libratus' chances as the competition proceeds. "The algorithms are performing great.

In October 2015 we launched the Google Brain Residency, a 12-month program focused on jumpstarting a career for those interested in machine learning and deep learning research. This program is an opportunity to get hands on experience using the state-of-the-art infrastructure available at Google, and offers the chance to work alongside top researchers within the Google Brain team. Our first group of residents arrived in June 2016, working with researchers on problems at the forefront of machine learning. The wide array of topics studied by residents reflects the diversity of the residents themselves -- some come to the program as new graduates with degrees ranging from BAs to Ph.Ds in computer science to physics and mathematics to biology and neuroscience, while other residents come with years of industry experience under their belts. They all have come with a passion for learning how to conduct machine learning research.

"The Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) or Autopilot systems may not function as designed, increasing the risk of a crash." It's a simple sentence, delivered with the calm finality of bureaucratic certainty. It is a literal post-mortem, the bottom-line-up-front from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's investigation into the first fatal crash of an autonomous car--one made by Tesla Motors. The investigation into the crash closed today, and it will likely cast a long shadow over the future of self-driving cars, which have long been heralded as potentially life-saving devices. There was no particularly unique flaw to the Tesla that Joshua Brown, of Canton Ohio, was driving on May 7th, 2016.

The paper outlines the use of neural style transfer in Stewart's directorial debut, Come Swim, which is about to premiere at Sundance Film Festival. Neural style transfer turns normal images into impressionist art, and is used by popular photo app Prisma. The paper, first spotted by Quartz, is co-bylined with Adobe research engineer Bhautik J. Joshi and producer David Shapiro. It was published yesterday on ArXiv, a repository run by Cornell University for scientific papers that are not yet peer-reviewed. Come Swim describes itself as "half realist, half impressionist portraits" of one man's day.

You're young and want to get ahead. You work weekends and message colleagues with inspired trading ideas at all hours. You've just marked yourself as a potential rogue trader. Welcome to the brave new world of trader surveillance, where former Goldman Sachs research analyst Erkin Adylov is building a library of banking villainy based on the behaviors of hundreds of past miscreants such as UBS Group's Tom Hayes and Societe Generale's Jerome Kerviel. Using thousands of inputs, from stress levels in voice recordings to the frequency of visits to the staff canteen, Adylov and his team at startup Behavox grade employees on how likely they are to go bad before they do anything wrong. While that may sound like something out of a Philip K. Dick science-fiction novel, hedge fund Marshall Wace and interdealer broker TP ICAP are already using the software to monitor employees, and some of the biggest investment banks and commodities dealers in the world have begun testing it.

IDC reports that mainframes continue to provide high business value by combining efficient transaction processing with high-volume access to critical enterprise data, adding that organizations are now linking mobile devices to mainframe processing and data. In this scenario, excellent end-user experience becomes critical, IDC says. Read on to learn how CA Mainframe Operations Intelligence can help.

Mr. HUANG talked about the challenges facing the industry in the era of AI and how it could translate those challenges into opportunities. He pointed out that the emergence of neural machine translation, the application of speech interactive technology and the rapid development of the Internet Era had a huge impact on traditional human translation. Though the industry has begun to realize the importance of AI and other technologies, the mechanism and platform to promote their application is still lacking. Mr. HUANG believed that governments, language colleges, language and AI service providers, experts and freelance translators should join hands in exploring this topic and advise the industry on development in the new era. In addition to the guidance of government and industrial organizations, an effective cooperative mechanism shall be established to ensure the maximum synergy between colleges, research institutes and language service providers.

Marketers will need to transform from campaigns to real-time, continuous interaction with customers via intelligent agents. So says Forrester Research VP and Principal Analyst Brian Hopkins, co-author (with Adam Silverman) of a new Forrester Research report, The Top Emerging Technologies to Watch: 2017 to 2021 ($499 for individual purchase). It's about the top 15 developing technologies that will help businesses become more customer-obsessed over the next years. Forrester is obsessed with customer-obsession, which it says is essential to a modern brand and which is characterized by several key principles. According to the research firm, such a customer-focused company is led by insights from and about customers, responds quickly and is thoroughly connected everywhere. The report chose 15 technologies for their impact on companies employing these principles.

Several types of such systems exists • Closed Loop Systems – based on a predefined irrigation scheme the control system takes over and makes detailed decisions on when and how much water to apply • Open Loop Systems – based on the amount of water to be applied and the timing of the irrigation • Volume Based System – The pre-set amount of water can be applied in the field • Time Based System – works with time clock controllers (Adapted from BOMAN et al. 2006)All rights reserved. USE CASE - Face recognition systems for Domestic Cattle • Facial recognition of cows in dairy units can individually monitor all aspects of behavior in a group, as well as body condition score and feeding. Facial recognition of cows EFFECT OF USAGE • With this system it is possible to feed cows a lot less expensively if you know what they will and will not eat. It is meant to be deployed as a group or "swarm".The other three steps involve autonomous robots that tend the crops, harvest them, and finally one robot that can plant, tend, and harvest autonomously transitioning from one phase to another. Swarm Prospero EFFECT OF USAGE • The application of the system increases the productivity of land on a per unit basis. USE CASE – Strawberry Harvesting Robot • Automated harvester recently wheeled through rows of strawberry plants here, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry's most pressing problems: a shortfall of farmhands.