There weren't many people who had heard of bioterrorism before 9/11. But shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks, a wave of anthrax mailings diverted the attention of the public towards a new weapon in the arsenal of terrorists--bioterrorism. A US federal prosecutor found that an army biological researcher was responsible for mailing the anthrax-laced letters, which killed 5 and sickened 15 people in 2001. The cases generated huge media attention, and the fear of a new kind of terrorist warfare was arising. However, as with every media hype, the one about bioterrorism disappeared quickly.

In Japan's first reported case of artificial intelligence saving someone's life, an AI has succeeded where a team of skilled human doctors did not. A woman with a rare type of leukaemia was correctly diagnosed by the AI. Even more remarkable, it took just ten minutes to compare the woman's genetic information with 20 million clinical oncology studies to arrive at the life-saving diagnosis. Does this mean robots are going to replace our doctors? Not quite, but increasing volumes of medical data, more powerful computers and smarter algorithms could see a future medical science in which human doctors are helped by AI. Data driven medicine taps into the expanding databases of genomic, clinical, imaging (scans and x-rays), and molecular data.

Initiatives such as language translation and image, facial, activity and emotion recognition - are based on predictive analytics that get more accurate as the data behind them gets richer. In particular, the emergence of GPU-based computing can greatly accelerate neural network processing capabilities - and if more processing power is needed there are the vast cloud computing resources of Amazon, Microsoft, Google. "Taken together, deep learning software and parallel processing hardware now provide a powerful [machine intelligence] platform," the report said. Cloud business models: The emergence of machine learning business models based on the use of the cloud is the single biggest reason that the field is so energized today, the report said: "We are essentially seeing the merger of machine intelligence with cloud economics."

Amazon's Spotify-rival arrives in the UK: Music Unlimited runs through AI assistant Alexa and offers ...

Amazon's Spotify-rival arrives in the UK: Music Unlimited runs through AI assistant Alexa and offers ...

Thanks to artificial intelligence, we have autonomous cars, chat bots, and speech recognition. Microsoft's CNTK (Cognitive Toolkit) is one among many platforms that trains computers to learn, and it's getting an upgrade. CNTK drives the Microsoft services Cortana and Skype language translation, and it boasts more than 90 percent accuracy in speech recognition tasks. Microsoft will soon release an upgraded CNTK toolkit, and one hardware maker wants to ensure the toolkit works best on its hardware. Nvidia is partnering with Microsoft to optimize its GPU development tools for CNTK.

Predictive maintenance is one of many appealing use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT). Using sensors to predict the health of a fleet of machines in the field can prevent down time without conducting unnecessary maintenance. Further, predictive maintenance allows for maintenance to be conducted at the most cost effective time. Allowing you to shift your operations from being reactive to proactive. Predictive maintenance has applications for the automotive, aerospace, health, and smart city industries, just to name a few.

Advances in machine learning are making security systems easier to train and more flexible in dealing with changing conditions, but not all use cases are benefitting at the same rate. Machine learning, and artificial intelligence, has been getting a lot of attention lately and there's a lot of justified excitement about the technology. One of the side effects is that pretty much everything is now being relabeled as "machine learning," making the term extremely difficult to pin down. Just as the word "cloud" has come to mean pretty much anything that happens online, so "artificial intelligence" is rapidly moving to the point where almost anything involving a computer is getting that label slapped on it. "There is also a lot of hype," said Anand Rao, innovation lead for US analytics at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC.

Artificial intelligence will'inevitably' destroy millions of jobs and could bring down governments Automation so far dominates automotive, electrical and electronics fields Report warns shift could take two-thirds of jobs in developing countries And, some may put more focus on low-wage jobs that robots can't yet do And, some may put more focus on low-wage jobs that robots can't yet do The poll among 224 venture capitalists attending the Web summit in Lisbon found 53 percent believed AI would destroy millions of jobs and 93 percent saw governments as unprepared for this. Scientists to unleash killer bacteria to try and... Could a folding phone save Samsung? Firm patents radical... Do YOU count on your fingers? Experts say it could actually... Eyes on the prize: Hundreds queue for Snapchat's Spectacles... Scientists to unleash killer bacteria to try and... Could a folding phone save Samsung? Firm patents radical... Do YOU count on your fingers?

On Friday during the BlizzCon 2016 opening keynote, Blizzard revealed that it teamed up with Google to provide an application programming interface (API) for DeepMind to be used in StarCraft II. This will enable artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning researchers from around the world to create intelligent "bots" to play the game. In return, the knowledge gained while playing will be used in real-world applications. "An agent that can play StarCraft will need to demonstrate effective use of memory, an ability to plan over a long time, and the capacity to adapt plans based on new information," said research scientist Oriol Vinyals of the DeepMind team. "Computers are capable of extremely fast control, but that doesn't necessarily demonstrate intelligence, so agents must interact with the game within limits of human dexterity in terms of'Actions Per Minute.'"