We've all got bills to pay, fiscal responsibilities to meet, retirements to save for -- and we need help. As tens of thousands of chatbots proliferate across Slack, Facebook, and other platforms, you hear naysayers claim that bots might be useful someday but that today they're little more than a gimmick. It's hard to feel that way after you learn about a handful of chatbots that have saved people more than $10 million. Next time you hear someone make that argument, point them to this list, because perhaps nothing is more useful than putting (or keeping) money in your pocket. After its first month, about 100,000 people have interacted with PennyCat, according to maker Leo Kangin.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., and Eindhoven, Netherlands, Jan. 3, 2017 – Intel has agreed to purchase a 15 percent ownership stake in HERE, a global provider of digital maps and location-based services, from HERE's current indirect shareholders: AUDI AG, BMW AG and Daimler AG. In conjunction with Intel's acquisition of a stake in HERE, the two companies also signed an agreement to collaborate on the research and development of a highly scalable proof-of-concept architecture that supports real-time updates of high definition (HD) maps for highly and fully automated driving. Additionally, the two companies plan to jointly explore strategic opportunities that result from enriching edge-computing devices with location data. "Cars are rapidly becoming some of the world's most intelligent, connected devices," said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. "We look forward to working with HERE and its automotive partners to deliver an important technology foundation for smart and connected cars of the future."

From one direction comes intense competitive pressure to innovate or to at least follow very, very quickly. From the precisely opposite direction comes the potentially existential threat of an app very publicly flopping or - even worse - being very publicly revealed to jeopardize the customer's well-being. Either way, you lose brand value in a social marketplace where brand is your primary currency. Auto-da-fé The car industry offers an excellent case in point. One day, carmakers are climbing all over each other to position themselves as au courant with Apple CarPlay and Google Auto.

Human-robot relationships are a running theme in pop culture, from the cylons of Battlestar Galactica to Spike Jonze's film Her and last year's hit show Westworld. But that kind of scenario might not be science fiction much longer. Romance between humans and machines is already nearing the realm of the possible. This year, the California company Abyss Creations plans to start selling a new generation of high-tech sex robots -- dolls that can actually speak and respond to touch. And according to artificial intelligence expert Dr. David Levy, in a few generations, we won't just be having sex with robots, we'll be marrying them.

It is well known that the global optimum of a MDP with finite state and action sets can be obtained through methods based on dynamic programming. Unfortunately, these techniques are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality, which makes them infeasible for many real-world problems of interest. As a result, most research in the reinforcement learning and control theory literature has focused on obtaining approximate or locally optimal solutions. There exists a broad spectrum of such techniques, including approximate dynamic programming methods, tree search methods, local trajectory-optimization techniques, such as differential dynamic programming and iLQG, and policy search methods. In this talk I shall provide an introduction to policy search methods, which are a family of algorithms that have proven extremely popular in recent years, and which have numerous desirable properties that make them attractive in practice.

Futurewei Technologies Inc. (DBA Huawei R&D) is a U.S. Based branch of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., the leading global information and communications technology solutions provider. Established in 1988, Huawei Technologies is a private high-tech enterprise specializing in research and development, the production and marketing of communications equipment, and providing customized network solutions for telecom carriers in fixed, mobile, and data communications networks. Through our dedication to customer-centric innovation and strong partnerships, we have established end-to-end advantages in telecom networks, devices and cloud computing. We are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers by providing competitive solutions and services. Our products and solutions have been deployed in over 170 countries, serving more than one third of the world's population.

When did electricity take over from steam in the UK? When did football replace cricket as the most popular sport? And what year did women start to become more frequently mentioned in the press? Specifically, a new paper by a team artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Bristol that used AIto analyse the news from 100 different British regional newspapers over the past 150 years. The team of academics, led by professor Nello Cristianini, collaborated closely with the company findmypast, which is digitising historical newspapers from the British Library as part of their British Newspaper Archive project.

What major advances do you foresee in artificial intelligence in 2017? Despite the impressive progress that machine learning made in 2016, AI systems remain specialists: they cannot add new skills to their repertoires without erasing what they already know. This is the problem of catastrophic forgetting. An AI trained to recognise faces in photographs, for example, would not apply well to another visual task, such as recognising street signs. Each system would need to be trained for its own limited task.

Dress location network: locates a dress in an image given a patch of a dress.

In a Harvard Business School classroom in Boston, MA, robots are on the rise. MBA students are trying to crack a case study on the self-driving cars pioneered by Tesla, Google, and Uber. What is the potential for robots to reshape our roads? And what are the challenges and opportunities of entering that business? This is a case that David Yoffie, professor of international business administration, believes is essential reading for tomorrow's business leaders.