The brain is often said to be like a computer. Now it turns out that we store memories of famous people in a similar way to Google. Our hippocampi – two small, curved brain structures towards the sides of our head – are crucial for memory. Studies have found that people with damage in these areas can no longer make memories of new events. By studying people who had recording electrodes put into their hippocampi, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga at the University of Leicester, UK, previously found that some neurons in these areas fire only when we see particular celebrities or people we recognise.

GE on Tuesday announced it is acquiring Bit Stew and Wise.io, two companies that will bolster its industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) offerings with new edge capabilities and machine learning -- crucial IIoT competencies. The acquisitions were announced at the Minds Machines conference, where GE also announced updates to Predix, its IIoT platform. They also announced a new collaborative app development program for independent software vendors on the Predix platform, which is launching with partners like Box, Pitney Bowes and Ericsson. Through its acquisitions and partnerships, GE is attempting to build a robust Predix ecosystem that cements its status as a digital industrial leader around the globe. GE says it's quickly building up business in the industrial software market: Its software revenues are on target to increase 20 percent in 2016.

Microsoft isn't the only big-name tech company using AI to fight cancer. NVIDIA is partnering with the US Department of Energy and the National Cancer Institute to develop CANDLE (Cancer Distributed Learning Environment), an AI-based "common discovery platform" that aims for 10 times faster cancer research on modern supercomputers with graphics processors. The hardware promises to rapidly accelerate neural networks that can both spot crucial data and speed up simulations. CANDLE will tackle three core problems. It'll sift through genomic data to find the genetic signatures in cancer DNA and RNA that predict their response to treatments. The AI will also automatically extract and study "millions" of patient records to understand how cancer spreads and reoccurs, and accelerate the simulation of protein interactions to see how they create the conditions for cancer.

Most of the talks will be given by well-known invited speakers. However, we would also like to give students and startups an opportunity to present their work and research. It will be realized in the form of short lightning talks. Each speaker will get a free ticket to the conference. If you are interested in becoming a lightning speaker, please send us a short paper (less than 1000 words) describing your machine learning project.

"Algorithm" might be one of the most popular terms that almost no one understands. Not many people have PhDs in data science, and even those experts don't always know what's happening. "It's not clear even from a technical perspective that every aspect of AI algorithms can be understood by humans," says Guruduth Banavar, IBM's chief science officer for cognitive computing, which is what IBM calls AI. Artificial intelligence is making decisions by reviewing people's medical tests in hospitals, credit histories in banking, job applications in some HR systems, even criminal risk factors in the justice system. Yet it's not always clear how the computers are thinking.

My name is Peter Chen and I am the instructor for this course. I want to introduce you to the wonderful world of Machine Learning through practical examples and code. The course will cover Supervised Learning algorithms and models in machine learning. More importantly, it will get you up and running quickly with a practical and at times funny applications of Supervised Learning algorithms. The course has code & sample data for you to run and learn from.

'Siri, catch market cheats': Wall Street watchdogs turn to A.I. NEW YORK (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence programs have beaten chess masters and TV quiz show champions. Two exchange operators have announced plans to launch artificial intelligence tools for market surveillance in the coming months and officials at a Wall Street regulator tell Reuters they are not far behind. Executives are hoping computers with humanoid wit can help mere mortals catch misbehavior more quickly. The software could, for instance, scrub chat-room messages to detect dubious bragging or back slapping around the time of a big trade. It could also more quickly unravel complex issues, like "layering," where orders are rapidly sent to exchanges and then canceled to artificially move a stock price.

H2O.ai Melds Machine Learning with Spark, Via Sparkling Water 2.0 by - Jul. 01, 2016 The Renaissance Continues for Open Source Artificial Intelligence Baidu Delivers a Hardened Open Source Deep Learning Tool Google Launches a Slew of Open Source Parsers, to Work with 40 Languages IBM's Massive Spark Initiatives Include an Offering for Data Scientists Google's Custom Chip Can Accelerate Machine Learning Jobs In recent interviews here on OStatic, found here and here, we have explored the efforts of H2O.ai, formerly known as Oxdata, which has steadily been carving out a niche with its open source software for big data analysis and machine learning. You can get the main H2O platform and Sparkling Water, a package that works with Apache Spark, by simply downloading them. You can run them on clusters powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others for just a few hundred dollars, putting powerful artificial intelligence muscle in reach of everyone. Now, H2O.ai has announced the availability of Sparkling Water 2.0. Sparkling Water 2.0 builds off the popularity of Sparkling Water, H2O.ai's API for Apache Spark, with additional features and functionality.

Coenraets: "I've been building apps for many, many years using all the different technologies that came and went and looking at the different ways people access information," Coenraets says. "Bots caught my attention as a really new disruptive way that people were going to use to access and apply information. Basically, AI makes the information available to customers in new ways. "The way I started my presentation at TrailheaDX was to ask people, OK, tell me the outside temperature.' And then I asked people, 'What app did you use to get me that information?'

Microsoft Corp. struck a partnership with Elon Musk's artificial intelligence research group, OpenAI, and said the organization will use the company's Azure cloud system for most of its large-scale experiments. OpenAI has been an early customer for Microsoft's Azure N-Series Virtual Machines, a powerful cloud-computing service that relies on Nvidia Corp. graphical processing units. The two will also collaborate on ways to advance AI research and its use, Microsoft and Open AI said Tuesday in blog posts. "In the coming months we will use thousands to tens of thousands of these machines to increase both the number of experiments we run and the size of the models we train," OpenAI said in its post. Everything you need to know about what's moving markets, in your inbox daily.