Imagine you are into the agricultural sector and want to better the prospects of your farming practices. What if an app in your smartphone could predict the future conditions of weather and market, availability of amount of irrigation water, and at the same time suggest which particular variety of crop will give maximum production in a given land or soil condition? Or let's assume the administrative managers of a city want to have an integrated view of the region's overall performance on the priority areas relevant to the city. This could be grievance management (for instance, in a crisis situation like last year's Chennai floods), operational or financial performance. What if an'intelligent operations centre' allowed them to explore key priority areas in depth and take actions from the solutions provided?

As part of my Technology and Innovation MBA program at Ted Rogers School of Management, I took a data and knowledge management course which teaches students the principles and practices of knowledge management. The second part of the course delves on tools used in data management and analytics. Although the theoretical part of the course was a bit dry, the hands-on portion was very interesting and exposed students to several different tools to capture, clean and analyze data. One of the tasks given to students was to capture and analyze twitter data. Although students had access to Netlytics, which is a neat cloud-based text and social network analysis tool that also collects Twitter data, students were encouraged to find other ways to collect Twitter data.

Earlier this month, the internet got in a froth about Apple's decision to drop the 3.5mm analogue audio jack from the new iPhone. Users took to Twitter to vent their outrage, while tech analysts, such as Paul Erickson at IHS Technology, suggested that the removal was money-driven: "It should be noted that wireless models are the highest revenue-generating products within the headphone market," he told the Financial Times. Further disapproval was directed at Apple's replacement for wired earphones, the AirPod, essentially a wireless earphone and microphone – "like a tampon without a string" according to the Guardian – while the writers of US late-night talkshow Conan created a satirical Apple ad featuring the devices plopping from users' ears to floor and being eaten by their pet dogs. Yet, as Chris Saad, head of product at Uber, has pointed out in a post on Medium, Apple did more than launch some earbuds: "They launched a wireless microphone as well." By which he means the day when we converse all day long with a virtual assistant similar to the one voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Her is drawing closer.

DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman once again refused to say who sits on Google's mysterious AI ethics board on Monday despite having previously said he wants to disclose it to the public. The board was quietly created in 2014 when Google acquired the London artificial intelligence lab. It was established in a bid to ensure that the self-thinking software DeepMind and Google is developing remains safe and of benefit to humanity. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Suleyman said: "So look, I've said many times, we want to be as innovative and progressive and open with our governance as we are with our technology. "It's no good for us to just be technologists in a vacuum independently of the social and political consequences, build technologies that we think may or may not be useful, while we throw them over the wall.

Artificial Intelligence Program Writes A Christmas Carol With Moments Of Cheer And Darkness ... Surti flyers to protest against AI's airfares Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

The Audi Q2 'Deep Learning Concept' is no ordinary model car. And if you could, we suspect the cost would be well beyond the means of your average doting parent. This is because it uses something called'machine learning' to autonomously search for and park itself in scale parking spaces. Machine learning is exactly what it sounds like – when a machine learns something without being programmed. The Q2 has two mono cameras plus ten ultrasonic sensors – these send signals to an onboard computer, which then sends signals to the steering and motor.

Artificial intelligence came alive in the 80s with many startups, governments, and large enterprises deploying new systems that executed tasks typically performed by human experts. These were largely rule-based systems that encoded behaviors in rules versus the strict procedural logic of traditional programming languages. Then, as memory became more affordable, systems were able to handle much more computationally-intense tasks such as machine learning, planning and scheduling, and natural language understanding. Now in the age of Big Data, many believe AI has completely changed the tech landscape, but in some ways, as the Talking Heads song goes, it's the "same as it ever was". What remains the same are the core elements of an intelligent application.

An artificial intelligence program has written a Christmas carol. Researchers at the University of Toronto used their "" program to write a Christmas carol based off of a "Christmassy photograph," The Guardian reports. The scientists simply uploaded the photograph into a computer hosting the program and then "let it do its thing." The artificial intelligence program then wrote several lines of lyrics and sang them to music it Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Computer Software Artificial intelligence Google's DeepMind'Lab' opens up source code, joins race to develop artificial general intelligence Following right on its heels came Google's that, its machine learning platform, has created a "lab." The DeepMind Lab offers a 3D training environment, and its entire code library is now available on the open source hosting service GitHub. With Universe, OpenAI aimed to address a primary challenge for AI research, which is a lack of "a large variety of realistic environments [for AI agents to] learn progressively more Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Artificial general intelligence Places: Americas North America United States Microsoft's digital assistant, Cortana, could be getting an upgrade--and Intel may be helping.

Researchers at Georgia Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing spectral imaging and machine learning algorithms to read closed books, according to a recently published research paper. The technology uses terahertz radiation (electromagnetic radiation between infrared light and microwaves) to scan pages in a book and identify the different letters. The camera shoots radiation at the book, producing distinct signals indicating where there's blank page or printed ink. The algorithm then processes the data and to distinguish individual letters. So far, however, the algorithm can detect 20 pages but only read through nine, researcher Barmak Heshmat tells Inverse, because the single from deeper pages is weaker. So how does this technology recognize letters?

Internet of Things, yes; but what does that mean? Internet of Things is a structural definition; it says there are "Things" such as sensors and devices (on machines or people) connected together in a Network. What does a Network of Sensors & Devices allow us to DO? What is the functional description of IoT? Being able to connect things together is "table stakes" at the intelligence augmentation game. What you are able to do with this network is the real story. All three objectives can be met because Network of Sensors & Devices exist and will grow.