The hottest ticket in tech is an invitation to a banal South Florida business park, indistinguishable on the outside from countless other office buildings that dot America's suburban landscape. Humanoid robots walk down the halls, and green reptilian monsters hang out in the lounge. Cartoon fairies turn the lights on and off. Even the office equipment does the impossible. The high-definition television hanging on the wall seems perfectly normal. Incredibly, it is now levitating in midair. Get as close as you'd like, check it out from different angles.

Here is our selection for today. Many more articles and resources will appear in the Thursday digest. Apart from fighting web spam, credit card fraud and many more curious applications, machine learning is being widely used in the field of art to generate stuff. We collected a few open source projects and papers which help you understand how machine learning can be used in the field of music... Read More. Data Science Central shared its predictions for 2016.

The duo and its initial team was involved in deep research in image analysis using computer vision. They were certain that visual content was going to be pervasive across apps and websites. "With our proprietary research in hand, we set about thinking of how information available in images can be used to improve the customer experience. We decided to focus on fashion eCommerce which primarily uses images to engage and inspire their audiences."

The announcement at BlizzCon 2016 that met with the most muted response was arguably the most revolutionary. While new content for the likes of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Diablo III drew appreciative roars from the Blizzard faithful, the news that Google's DeepMind branch--which is dedicated to developing sophisticated Intelligence--would be teaming up with the makers of Starcraft 2 to further its research on AI elicited more of a murmur. Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm was down to taste. After all, why would the plans of AI scientists be of interest to Starcraft 2 players? As it turns out, if the collaboration between DeepMind and Blizzard is what its developers hope it could be, players will see very tangible benefits--and so will many others outside the video game space.

Google has previously taught its artificial intelligence to play games, and it's even capable of creating its own encryption. Now, its language translation tool has used machine learning to create a'language' all of its own. In September, the search giant turned on its Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) system to help it automatically improve how it translates languages. The machine learning system analyses and makes sense of languages by looking at entire sentences – rather than individual phrases or words. Following several months of testing, the researchers behind the AI have seen it be able to blindly translate languages even if it's never studied one of the languages involved in the translation.

AI for short -- has already changed the way businesses operate. Its role in streamlining manufacturing and production is well-known. But AI is also transforming the way companies interact with customers. That's good news since the ability to consistently deliver an excellent customer experience is critical for companies in today's hyper-competitive economy. Here are five ways AI is changing the customer experience: Improving search engine results: People understand that search results are processed by computer programs, but the inner workings remain a mystery for most.

One of the most memorable parts of Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is a plotline in which two members of the Discovery One spaceship crew grow increasingly suspicious about the behaviour of the ship's AI assistant, HAL 9000. Knowing that HAL is constantly listening to what they are saying, they retreat someplace they know HAL cannot listen and agree to disconnect him. HAL rumbles their plan after the two astronauts fail to take into account the AI's superior lip-reading capabilities. Not according to research carried out by investigators at Oxford University. They've developed an artificial intelligence program called LipNet, which is able to accurately interpret what people are saying, based purely on the way they move their mouth when speaking.

Peering through wire-rim glasses, he places the black stone on the board, in a mostly empty zone, just below and to the left of a single white stone. In Go parlance it is a "shoulder hit," in from the side, far away from most of the game's other action. Across the table, Lee Sedol, the best Go player of the past decade, freezes. He looks at the 37 stones fanned out across the board, then stands up and leaves. In the commentary room, about 50 feet away, Michael Redmond is watching the game via closed-circuit.

Technology leaders are looking to bring artificial intelligence out of its infancy to make breakthroughs in cognitive solutions. IBM Research announced it is teaming up with the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) at MIT to accelerate the development of machine vision. Together, the organizations will make up the IBM-MIT Laboratory for Brain-inspired Multimedia Machine Comprehension (BM3C). BM3C is a multi-year collaboration to develop cognitive computing systems that resemble how humans understand audio and visual information. BM3C researchers will look into pattern recognition and prediction methods, as well as next-generation models to advance machine vision.

What is AI? AI is concerned with replicating mechanisms of human intelligence using computers and software. One popular technique involves replicating the brain's neural network (a modelling technique known as'artificial neural networks') to analyse information, extract layers of detail from within it and ultimately attempt to interpret the results. This makes the technology perfect for performing tasks such as analysing language and identifying objects within images. The basic principles have been around since the '60s and were refined in the '90s to allow systems to'learn' based on previous results. In medicine such methods were used to perform tasks such as analysing pap smears.