This new service brings many of the machine learning smarts Amazon has developed in-house over the years to devs outside the company. For now, the service only makes three different tools available, but the plan is to add more over time. The first of these new services under the Amazon AI umbrella is an image recognition service called "Rekognition." It allows you to recognize objects and scenes, similar to services already available from Google, Microsoft and others. The second is Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech service that uses a lot of machine learning smarts under the hood. The third, and probably most important new service is called "Lex."

Loom.ai is a software designed to transform 2D selfies into 3D avatars Machine learning calculates the details of a person's face And artificial intelligence fills in missing areas of the 2D image The more data it is fed, the better it is at predicting expressions and features Loom.ai is a software designed to transform 2D selfies into 3D avatars Machine learning calculates the details of a person's face Loom.ai Bizarre'Death Star' spotted over Japan: Alien hunters claim... What would REALLY happen if an asteroid struck the ocean:... Revealed: 'Natural thermostat' that cools the air in Earth's... Meet Cameron, the adorable four-year-old who has created 9... Bizarre'Death Star' spotted over Japan: Alien hunters claim... What would REALLY happen if an asteroid struck the ocean:... Revealed: 'Natural thermostat' that cools the air in Earth's... Meet Cameron, the adorable four-year-old who has created 9... The 3D avatar faces are complete with emotions that can be seen in their eyes mouth and the movement of their face. They can appear sad, happy (like Rihanna's avatar), interested or even angry - however, there is only a small set of emotions available at the moment. Users just have to upload a font facing image, such as this image of Elon Musk (left) of themselves or someone else to the Loom.ai

Our annual Innovation Festival--a four-day event this fall with over 200 speakers, and events spanning more than 100 locations across New York City--requires an extreme amount of coordination. The success of the event is contingent on over-communicating with our nearly 6,000 attendees to ensure that they know the where, when, and what of the sessions on their agendas. With all the talk of chatbots and consumer communications moving to messenger platforms, I thought the format could help ensure attendees get answers to logistical questions in real time. To test the idea, we partnered with Work & Co, a digital agency led by designers Joe Stewart and Felipe Memoria, among others, to create the FCNY16 Bot on Facebook Messenger. Marcelo Eduardo, the agency's technology partner, led the charge on our collaboration.

Some of the brightest minds in machine learning and deep learning are gathered this week in Barcelona for the annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. This is the 30th year for the NIPS conference, and the main event was sold out well in advance of the opening. That says a lot about the importance of this event for machine learning researchers and data scientists – and the increasing industry focus on this field. For the first time, Intel is a sponsor of this machine learning and deep learning conference. We are showcasing Intel technologies and initiatives that advance artificial intelligence (AI).

A hedge fund that gives away all of its data to people it doesn't know and still stays private. Smart sales conducted from a smartphone with its own virtual assistant--these are all artificial intelligence projects expanding right now, and these are just the ones that received a new boost of funding this week. Numerai, a double-blind hedge fund that sends out encrypted data to anonymous data scientists it then pays in bitcoin, has just announced $6 million in new funding led by Union Square Ventures. Additionally, Element AI--a platform for corporations to better explore artificial intelligence solutions--and Tact, a CRM startup that turns a smartphone into a virtual sales assistant, have both announced funding rounds with Microsoft Ventures as an investor. What Tact does is apply AI to the user and their workflow, helping them become more productive.

Business analytics software provider FusionOps has launched a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify opportunities to improve supply chain performance for customers such as manufacturers and enterprise corporations, the company said Tuesday. The new "cognitive applications" product is an extension of Mountain View, Calif.-based FusionOps' existing suite of supply chain solutions, which use database analysis and machine-learning tools to help companies improve their forecasts, control costs, and hone inventory levels. The platform uses embedded AI and machine learning to connect the dots between complex signals such as changes in demand, manufacturing, inventory, orders, and external factors. The system then suggests solutions and can even take corrective action in real time, without requiring human input. The new suite comes in three main parts, with a search feature and a cognitive application to be available in Q4 2016 and a supply chain actions tool arriving later in 2017.

Cyberspace is an increasingly hostile environment. In 2015, a PwC study of U.S. organizations found that 79 percent of respondents had detected a security incident during the year. Today, malicious hackers continue to wage on business networks and systems. Their aim - to extract data to sell on the black market. Making use of the latest technology, these criminals exert huge pressure on businesses to defend its assets.

"We are currently working on machine learning to pick up early signals of ill health. My current role is to ensure that this is implemented in line with national recording guidance which does not cover machine learning. This is currently in pilot phase in the A&E in Salford." "We could use machine learning where we currently have manual intervention in aspects of our workflows, and we could even get to the stage where we use a lot of machine learning in our underwriting algorithms," says Rob Harding, Capital One Europe CIO. The company has already implemented some aspects of machine learning into its data science team, but Harding believes there is much more to be explored in the area." "JLL has partnered with Leverton, a Berlin-based'proptech' start-up company, as we are seeking to increase automation in our lease management operations to ensure improved efficiency and swifter delivery of outputs for our clients.

As the tech world pushes forward with the development of artificial intelligence, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is asking everyone to pause and consider the ethical ramifications. It's kicked off that process by publishing the first draft of a document that explores a range of ethical challenges posed by AI. The document, "Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Wellbeing with Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (AI/AS)," was drafted by committees of the IEEE's Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. More than 100 global thought leaders and experts on AI, ethics, and related issues are contributing to the initiative. With the first draft published, the IEEE is inviting public comment on the document. "We need to make sure that these technologies are aligned to humans in terms of our moral values and ethical principles," the report's executive summary says.

It looks like 2017 is shaping up to be an interesting year in the embedded-technology space--for a variety of reasons. We're coming off a year that saw a number of large mergers, and the change in the U.S. political climate is significant. Tom Starnes, analyst with Objective Analysis, notes, "One country's loss is another's gain as corporations try to hold on to as much of their revenues as they can in very complex and competitive markets for sophisticated technology. Meantime, the very-global chip industry has been consolidating at a rate and with a mass not seen before, with all but a few companies struggling for profitability." Jim Handy says, "Objective Analysis expects the memory business to be highly profitable in 2017, followed by a collapse beginning in mid-2018."