First of all it might be useful to explain what OpenAI Gym actually does: OpenAI Gym aims to provide an easy environment to develop and test reinforcement learning algorithms. To be clear, OpenAI Gym doesn't power any algorithms itself, leaving it up to more specialised packages like TensorFlow or Theano. So what makes this the ultimate geek toy for AI-researchers? Well, this is because of the many environments OpenAI Gym provides, one of them being the'atari' environment. That's right, you can test the performance of your reinforcement learning algorithms on a variety of different atari games and what's more, you can automatically upload the performance of your algorithms and compare them to other people's approaches.

Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a Salt Lake City, UT-based drug discovery company, closed an additional $2.15M in Series A funding. The additional funding, which brought the total amount raised in the round to $15.05M, came from several individual investors and Felicis Ventures. They joined Lux Capital, Obvious Ventures, Epic Ventures, Data Collective, AME Cloud Ventures, Wild Basin Investments, and other angel investors. The company intends to use the funds to extend its drug and target discovery technology into new indication areas, such as aging, inflammation, infectious disease, oncology and diagnostics. Led by Chris Gibson, Ph.D., CEO, Recursion uses a novel drug screening platform which combines experimental biology and bioinformatics to identify treatments for multiple rare genetic diseases.

'Data is not about insights, it's about generating money,' says Rubikloud's chief product officer Ever since the financial crash of 2008, businesses around the world have struggled to grow at the same levels they once enjoyed – but big data and machine learning could help turn things around, and help companies reconnect with customers. "The reality now is this plateaued, zero-growth type of world, where you're in the 0.5-1 per cent [range]," Ayoub said, speaking at WIRED Retail 2016. There's a lot of companies that do more small scale retail that are seeing enormous amounts of growth but in general, this is the kind of climate we're living in." Ayoub isn't concerned so much with why this is happening, but rather how retailers are reacting to the change. One way businesses have tried to keep their costs down is by consolidating, then leveraging greater purchasing power to buy stock at lower prices. "Big fish buy big fish, then bigger fish buy them," said Ayoub. "That allows them to pressure vendors to push down prices.

Network Mind facilitates the management of millions of network elements with millisecond response time and automatic adaptation and optimization based on service changes. Network Mind is therefore capable of helping telecom operators and enterprises achieve differentiated, self-adaptive control of complex services in ultra-large networks. The amount of network elements, data traffic, and types of service in communication networks is soaring as new technologies continue to emerge, including 5G, the Internet of Things, Software-Defined Networking, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. This results in a level of network complexity that is impossible to manually control through defined rules. How automatic modeling can be used to realize intelligent network control and management is a major topic of study at many research institutions.

IBM recently announced an experimental new platform called Project Intu, which will allow the Internet of Things (IoT) and other developers to embed IBM Watson functionality into their devices. The experimental release hopes to see developers create new form factors for Watson's speech, language, vision and empathy capabilities. Project Intu is platform-agnostic and can run on many operating systems, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi and more. It aims to provide developers with a ready-made environment to build cognitive experiences, allowing for simplified integration of Watson services such as conversation, language and visual recognition. IBM offers the following example of what a developer can do with Project Intu: "Instead of needing to program each individual movement of a device or avatar, Project Intu makes it easy to combine movements that are appropriate for performing specific tasks, like assisting a customer in a retail setting or greeting a visitor in a hotel in a way that is natural for the end user."

All right, don't panic, but computers have created their own secret language and are probably talking about us right now. Well, that's kind of an oversimplification, and the last part is just plain untrue. But there is a fascinating and existentially challenging development that Google's AI researchers recently happened across. You may remember that back in September, Google announced that its Neural Machine Translation system had gone live. It uses deep learning to produce better, more natural translations between languages. Following on this success, GNMT's creators were curious about something.

It's become clear that the algorithms Facebook and Google designed to deliver news to their users have failed. But while fake news is a headache for those tech giants right now, the underlying research question--whether and how machines tell truth from lies on the internet--is one that will persist as long as the world wide web stays an open forum. Facebook and Google's sizable machine learning divisions have created algorithms that effectively surface information that users want to see. But they've been unable to actually understand or vet that info--and in fact, experts across the tech industry say it's unrealistic to expect any AI or machine learning algorithm to do this task well. All our best efforts so far are built on research in natural language processing, which teaches AI to read a piece of text, understand the concepts within, and provide insight about its meaning. "Modern machine learning for natural language processing is able to do things like translate from one language to another, because everything it needs to know is in the sentence its processing," says Ian Goodfellow, a researcher at OpenAI.

The major advancement on artificial intelligence have made experts predict the future of humanity, where robots could not only ease everyday living but also take away employment opportunities. However, a McKinsey report reveals that despite the fear of robots taking over jobs, CEOs could not be replaced by robots (yet). According to McKinsey, artificial intelligence could indeed eliminate some jobs but only a very few occupations in the next decade. It might affect parts of a certain job, but not the entire position. The report noted that new development on artificial intelligence would enable robots to take over knowledge-driven work (e.g., finance, healthcare) rather than technical, routine manpower. However, despite these, Smithsonian notes that CEOs should not fear for their job yet as their position includes a judgmental function that AIs are not capable of doing just yet.

Many are calling artificial intelligence (AI) technologies' relatively recent boom software's second coming. Yet, despite major developments since the AI winter of the late 21st century, AI technologies are still struggling to break into business processes. Here are a few reasons why artificial intelligence should be adopted into the workplace. Imagine the logistics behind a major international airline like Emirates. Sheer volume makes customer relationship management critical to their business model.