Today on In Case You Missed It: The National Basketball Association signed a seven-year agreement to use a computer-vision, artificial intelligence system that analyzes on-court action in ways average viewers couldn't spot as they watch. Meanwhile, you may have caught our story last week on the brain implant helping paralyzed monkeys walk; but the latest in brain implants is even more incredible. A "locked-in" ALS patient who is only able to control the movement of her eyes received a brain implant and can now use the power of thought to spell out words on a screen, communicating with her caretakers. If you're interested in backing the Kickstarter project for Food For All, you can find that here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet -- dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like -- in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing. In recent years, though, our species has created new forms of intelligence, able to outperform us in other ways. One of the most famous of these artificial intelligences (AIs) is AlphaGo, developed by Deepmind. In just a few years, it has learned to play the 4,000-year-old strategy game, Go, beating two of the world's strongest players. Other software developed by Deepmind has learned to play classic eight-bit video games, notably Breakout, in which players must use a bat to hit a ball at a wall, knocking bricks out of it.

SALT LAKE CITY, UT--(Marketwired - Nov 15, 2016) - At SC16, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced that Radeon GPU technology will be available to Google Cloud Platform users worldwide. Starting in 2017, Google will use AMD's fastest available single-precision dual GPU compute accelerators, Radeon-based AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPUs, to help accelerate Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Machine Learning services.(1) AMD FirePro S9300 x2 GPUs can handle highly parallel calculations, including complex medical and financial simulations, seismic and subsurface exploration, machine learning, video rendering and transcoding, and scientific analysis. Google Cloud Platform will make the AMD GPU resources available for all their users around the world. "Graphics processors represent the best combination of performance and programmability for existing and emerging big data applications," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Data science and machine learning have long been interests of mine, but now that I'm working on Fuzzy.io I need to keep on top of all the news in both fields. My preferred way to do this is through listening to podcasts. I've listened to a bunch of machine learning and data science podcasts in the last few months, so I thought I'd share my favorites: Every other week, they release a 10–15 minute episode where hosts, Kyle and Linda Polich give a short primer on topics like k-means clustering, natural language processing and decision tree learning, often using analogies related to their pet parrot, Yoshi. This is the only place where you'll learn about k-means clustering via placement of parrot droppings.

Today, Google Cloud chief Diane Greene announced the company's new push in machine learning and artificial intelligence. There's now a new group in Greene's division that will unify some of the disparate teams that had previously been doing machine learning work across Google's cloud. Two women will take charge of the new team: Fei-Fei Li, who was director of AI at Stanford, and Jia Li, who was previously head of research at Snap, Inc. As Business Insider notes, Jia Li was one of the minds behind the Snapchat feature that lets you attach emoji to real-world objects in your snaps. The news came at the top of a slew of announcements about the product roadmap for Google's cloud services and how they're expanding their use of machine learning, a critical technique for training large-scale AI networks to teach and improve themselves over time. The announcements were all aimed at showing how Google's cloud services include more than just renting time on a server -- that it can provide services to its enterprise customers that are based on its machine learning algorithms.

What happens when you tell two smart computers to talk to each other in secret and task another AI with breaking that conversation? You get one of the coolest experiments in cryptography I've seen in a while. In short, Google Brain researchers have discovered that the AI, when properly tasked, create oddly inhuman cryptographic schemes and that they're better at encrypting than decrypting. The paper, "Learning to protect communications with adversarial neural cryptography," is available here. The rules of the task were simple.

Slack may have unleashed a new demand among the working world to have better tools to chat to each other about their projects and more, but it's also unleashed something else: a torrent of competing products from other tech firms that sell to the enterprise. Today comes the latest in that trend: BroadSoft, a company known for its cloud-based unified communications services, is launching Team-One, a platform for people to chat to each other, bringing in links and data from other projects, and more. Team-One is making its debut today, but it's built on a product that existed before. Earlier this year, BroadSoft acquired a Slack competitor called Intellinote, which it has now integrated with its bigger platform, including its calling and videoconferencing products, adding in new features such as artificial intelligence and bots to help you source data to get your work done. Apart from being a reflection of just how popular collaboration products have become among businesses, the launch of Team-One also another sign of how Slack's early success in this market is getting attacked by competitors from many angles. The startup has seen some of its fast growth slow down, which presents an opportunity for some of those rivals with established customer bases to move in, or for Slack to demonstrate that it definitely is better than the rest.

A month ago, I interview Gary Illyes at Marketing Land and covered this bit at Search Engine Land but it got lost. In short, Gary Illyes from Google said that machine learning and artificial intelligence within the search algorithm can be used to make new ranking signals. He said that Google can use it to say if you combine ranking signal A with ranking signal B, we can make a new ranking signal C that helps improve quality of the search results. Gary Illyes: They are typically used for coming up with new signals and signal aggregations. So basically, let's say that this is a random example and not know if this is real, but let's say that I would want to see if combining PageRank with Panda and whatever else, I don't know, token frequency.

Weather conditions this week will impact the progress of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), said Wednesday. The underwater operation to locate the missing plane had already been pushed to end in January 2017 in accordance with the weather forecast. ATSB, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777-200, said in its operational update that weather conditions are unsuitable for both Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) operations periodically during the week. This week, search vessel Fugro Equator continued underwater search operations in the north of the search area, which is in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, using AUV. During the past week, Fugro Equator has undertaken five missions, each one taking an average of 21 hours.