Artificial intelligence, once relegated to the realm of science fiction, is now found in everything from translation services to virtual assistants to video games. And as companies race to develop self-driving cars and offer increasingly personalized online experiences, they're building on research that was largely pioneered by a group of Canadian researchers who are still attracting plenty of attention and investment dollars. Montreal, in particular, has developed a concentration of expertise in the area of AI, largely thanks to the efforts of University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). "(AI) will affect pretty much every economic sector; right now is just the tip of the iceberg,'' Bengio told The Canadian Press. "One of the things we are going to see more of is how these technologies affect how we interact with computers.''

The saying goes: 'Never judge a book by its cover,' but that's exactly what new AI technology has been designed to do. A controversial paper has been released, which investigates whether a computer can detect if a human could be a criminal, by analysing their facial features. The results suggest that it is bad news for people with smaller mouths, curvier upper lips and closer-set eyes, as apparently these features suggest you could be a crook. The paper investigates whether a computer can detect if a human could be a criminal, by analysing their facial features. The researchers singled out three features that they suggest can tell whether someone will be a criminal or not – lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the angle from the tip of the nose to the corners of the mouth.

Lately, tech companies have gone absolutely crazy for machine learning. They say it solves the problems only people could crack before. Machine learning is of special interest in IT security, where the threat landscape is rapidly shifting and we need to come up with adequate solutions. Some go as far as calling machine learning'artificial intelligence' just for the sake of it. Technology comes down to speed and consistency, not tricks.

With the development and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into our daily lives, ethics and bias quickly become main concerns. Both ethics and bias also make implementing artificial intelligence in a practical sense that more complicated. Whose definition of what is ethical are corporations programming their AI systems to default to? It's highly unlikely that there will be a standard answer to this question across companies, industries and countries; especially considering the lack of diversity in the AI design world. The question of ethics, security and privacy is relevant enough, that IEEE (the world's largest organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity) has formed an initiative to examine ethics in the design of artificial intelligence systems.

When encountering novel object, humans and other animals are able to infer a wide range of physical properties such as mass, friction and deformability by interacting with themin a goal driven way. This process of active interaction is in the same spirit of a scientist performing an experiment to discover hidden facts. The study, entitled Learning to perform physics experiments via deep reinforcement learning, explained that while recent advances in AI have achieved'superhuman performance' in complex control problems and other processing tasks, the machines still lack a common sense understanding of our physical world – 'it is not clear that these systems can rival the scientific intuition of even a young child.' "We found," the team concluded, "that state of art deep reinforcement learning methods can learn to perform the experiments necessary to discover these hidden properties of the physical world. By systematically manipulating the problem difficulty and the cost incurred by the AI agent for performing experiments, we found that agents learn different strategies that balance the cost of gathering information against the cost of making mistakes in different situations."

Take your business to the next level.

FRANKFURT German chip equipment maker Aixtron said on Monday it had factual arguments to overcome U.S. and German concerns about its being bought by a Chinese consortium, which appear to hinge on the defense applications of its technology.

Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence may pave way to AI that can create new drugs by learning how to mix and match molecules in effective patterns. This project may hold new applications for deep learning models as this may prove just how well they work in identifying patterns in complex natural structures. Harvard chemistry professor Alan Aspuru-Guzik said humans could be better chemists if they have AI assistants. The system aims to allow a deep neural network to "explore intuitively" using chemical knowledge, like how chemists would. The system has a database with thousands of drug molecules and, using deep learning, will try to work out and see what fits with patterns.

We have updated our privacy policy. In the latest update it explains what cookies are and how we use them on our site. To learn more about cookies and their benefits, please view our privacy policy. Please be aware that parts of this site will not function correctly if you disable cookies. By continuing to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy unless you have disabled them.

Artificial Intelligence is the buzzword of the year with immense anticipation and excitement attached to it, but also often a fear of the unknown. So much so, that tech behemoths Facebook, IBM, Google's parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft recently announced a partnership to discuss AI best practices. While there are the science fiction-driven angles of AI, like robots, self-driving cars, Internet of Things, and augmented reality, there are also more practical applications that affect business owners every day, especially those working in the virtual customer service world of online retail. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of interaction between customers and retailers will be through artificial intelligence customer service programs. Brands are rushing to build out their customer service approaches leveraging AI to create accurate product catalogs, fine-tuned search capabilities, and truly personalized online experiences.