Google's DeepMind AI unit, which earlier this year achieved a breakthrough in computer intelligence by creating software that beat the world's best human player at the strategy game Go, is turning its attention to the sci-fi video game Starcraft II. The company said it had reached a deal with Blizzard Entertainment Inc., the Irvine, California-based division of Activision Blizzard, which makes the Starcraft game series, to create an interface to let artificial intelligence researchers connect machine-learning software to the game. London-based DeepMind, which Google purchased in 2014, has not said it has created software that can play Starcraft expertly -- at least not yet. "We're still a long way from being able to challenge a professional human player," DeepMind research scientist Oriol Vinyals said in a blog post Friday. But the company's announcement shows it's looking seriously at Starcraft as a candidate for a breakthrough in machine intelligence.

Artificial intelligence ("AI") or cognitive computing involves the use of computer program code to control machines to mimic cognitive functions, such as learning, classification, and problem solving. AI is a technical field of computer science and includes machine learning and natural language processing. Machine learning is the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning uses pattern recognition and computational statistics to process a set of training data. The data can be represented by various graph and network structures.

Google is slowly becoming (if it is not already) the go-to place for everyone who needs "smart" solutions to problems. However, researchers at Google's DeepMind may have found a way to make their AI smarter. This lets their artificial intelligence system recognize objects from a single example. Google DeepMind is the U.K.-based subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. This is Google's not-so-secret lab for AI projects that range from translation and map guidance to machine learning.

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our daily lives in unexpected ways. It is not just transforming online services with innovations such as Apple's Siri voice recognition app, which will send emails when you instruct it to, or Microsoft's Skype translation services, which enable you to communicate online with people whose languages you do not speak. Wider applications of artificial intelligence, such as image and pattern recognition (classifying data or objects based on common features), natural language processing (how computers understand and respond to human speech) and machine learning (when software learns something without being programmed to do so) will soon be featuring in many products and services. Pest control In recent years, pest control company Rentokil Initial has been experimenting with rodent traps equipped with sensors and WiFi. These send data to a command centre, which the company has built with partners Google and PA Consulting.

It's no secret that Elon Musk, the modern day mad scientist behind SpaceX and Tesla, is a bit wary about the future of artificial intelligence. He recently took to Twitter to weigh in on the fairly widespread internet outage that occurred earlier this month, thanks to a hack on Dyn, a company that monitors traffic for a lot of the major websites. Only a matter of time before advanced AI is used to do this. Internet is particularly susceptible to a gradient descent algo. This isn't the first time that Musk has had some dark prognostications about how AI could go awry.

Tesla Motors and SpaceX founder Elon Musk added to his warnings of a dystopic future straight out of a "Terminator" film on Thursday in a Twitter post on the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). Citing an article in The Economist on a recent cyberattack preventing internet users from reaching the sites of Twitter, PayPal, Netflix and hundreds of other companies, Musk tweeted that it's "only a matter of time before advanced AI is used to do this." Musk's aversion to autonomous technologies may come as a surprise--his previous comments on the matter aside--for those following his company's embrace of self-driving auto technology, which it plans to roll out next month. Musk has also founded a non-profit called OpenAI dedicated to "democratizing AI technology." Two years ago, Musk called for more regulatory oversight of the technology area, which he described in an interview with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AeroAstro Department head Jaime Peraire as humanity's "biggest existential threat."

Their model requires groups of sentences in order to train, and so trained on the BookCorpus Dataset. The dataset consists of novels by unpublished authors and is (unsurprisingly) dominated by romance and fantasy novels. This "bias" in the dataset will become apparent later when discussing some of the sentences used to test the skip-thought model; some of the retrieved sentences are quite exciting! Building a model that accounts for the meaning of an entire sentence is tough because language is remarkably flexible. Changing a single word can either completely change the meaning of a sentence or leave it unaltered.

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Natural language processing (NLP) is quickly becoming one of the foundational big data technologies that will allow healthcare to move forward with complex analytics, according to a series of market reports predicting significant growth for NLP products over the next few years. As healthcare organizations seek new strategies for extracting insights from unstructured data from electronic health records, Internet of Things devices, imaging studies, and elsewhere, they will create an NLP marketplace worth $2.65 billion by 2021, says ReportsnReports. "The market is growing rapidly because of the huge surge in clinical data, increasing use of connected devices, and evolving consumer needs," the report says. Natural language processing may play an instrumental role in precision medicine, predictive analytics, population health management, clinical decision support, and EHR documentation improvement. The NLP market is divided into several segments: interactive voice response and speech analytics technologies, optical character recognition (OCR), automatic coding, text analytics, and pattern and image recognition.

Intel began promoting its first commercial drone in the U.S. this week, as it seeks to carve out a place for itself in the fast-expanding market. The Falcon 8 drone, which was announced two weeks ago, was on show at the Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas that opened on Tuesday. Intel has been building its drone expertise throughout the year with a series of acquisitions, and the Falcon 8 has grown out of its January purchase of Germany's Ascend Technologies. The drone has eight rotors arranged in a distinctive V-shape, designed that way so the rotors at the front don't get in the way of a payload, said Natalie Cheung, a drone marketing manager at Intel. "We've really thought about what are some of the issues commercial customers face today and when they want to get that crisp, hi-res image, you don't want any of the rotors in the image," she said. Redundancy is a key feature of the device -- it can continue flying even if up to two rotors on either side stop spinning.