For IBM Watson CTO Rob High, the biggest technological challenge in machine learning right now is figuring out how to train models with less data. "It's a challenge, it's a goal and there's certainly reason to believe that it's possible," High told me during an interview at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Google's AI chief John Giannandrea, for example, also recently listed this as one of the main challenges the search giant's machine learning groups are trying to tackle. Typically, machine learning models need to be trained on large amounts of data to ensure that they are accurate, but for many problems, that large data set simply doesn't exist. High, however, believes this is a solvable problem.

IBM yesterday announced it would be providing the AI brain for a robot being built by Airbus to accompany astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). When only the best of the best will do, it looks like Watson has the right stuff. The robot, which looks like a flying volleyball with a low-resolution face, is being deployed with German astronaut Alexander Gerst in June for a six month mission. It's called CIMON, an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, and it's headed to space to do science stuff. It'll help crew members conduct medical experiments, study crystals, and play with a Rubix cube.

IBM and Unity are launching the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store, enabling developers to easily integrate Watson cloud services into their Unity applications such as visual recognition, speech to text, and language classification. The SDK makes it easy for developers to take advantage of modern AI techniques through a set of cloud-based services. Today we are thrilled to announce a partnership with IBM to launch the IBM Watson Unity SDK on the Unity Asset Store. This SDK is the first asset of its kind to bring scalable AI services to Unity, enabling developers to easily integrate Watson services into their Unity applications. Millions of Unity developers globally will now have access to the powerful cloud-based AI services of Watson directly within the Unity environment.

Some say that artificial intelligence (AI) will radically change healthcare in the future. But that prediction overlooks an important detail: AI is already significantly changing healthcare. IBM (NYSE:IBM) Watson Health general manager Deborah DiSanzo spoke at the annual J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on Wednesday. She provided an update on the progress that IBM Watson, the AI system famous for beating Jeopardy! DiSanzo highlighted four areas where AI is making a big difference today.

The roles played by learning and memorization represent an important topic in deep learning research. Recent work on this subject has shown that the optimization behavior of DNNs trained on shuffled labels is qualitatively different from DNNs trained with real labels. Here, we propose a novel permutation approach that can differentiate memorization from learning in deep neural networks (DNNs) trained as usual (i.e., using the real labels to guide the learning, rather than shuffled labels). The evaluation of weather the DNN has learned and/or memorized, happens in a separate step where we compare the predictive performance of a shallow classifier trained with the features learned by the DNN, against multiple instances of the same classifier, trained on the same input, but using shuffled labels as outputs. By evaluating these shallow classifiers in validation sets that share structure with the training set, we are able to tell apart learning from memorization. Application of our permutation approach to multi-layer perceptrons and convolutional neural networks trained on image data corroborated many findings from other groups. Most importantly, our illustrations also uncovered interesting dynamic patterns about how DNNs memorize over increasing numbers of training epochs, and support the surprising result that DNNs are still able to learn, rather than only memorize, when trained with pure Gaussian noise as input.

This weekend's 60th Annual Grammy Awards will feature big names like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Watson. The latter is IBM's famous artificial intelligence platform, which the Grammys are enlisting to curate the videos and photos being released to music fans following along with this year's awards show on social media in real time. IBM is partnering with Grammys organizer the Recording Academy to provide Watson's AI services to populate the event's social media feeds with automatically-generated content during the Grammy Awards ceremony, which airs this Sunday, Jan. 28, on CBS. IBM's Watson will get to work before the ceremony even starts, analyzing and sorting "hours of video and close to 125,000 photographs" taken during the Grammys' hours-long red carpet show ahead of Sunday's event, IBM said in its announcement. The platform will use features such as facial recognition, even analyzing stars' "facial emotion," to pick out the best images and videos to post for fans online.

Traditional analysis methods rely on structured data to provide intelligence - Watson is a breakthrough computing system, reading and analysing unstructured natural human language, to provide answers to complex questions. IBM developed the Watson AI supercomputer to intelligently simplify the rising flood of data and transform how computers and devices help people accomplish tasks in business, communities and their personal lives. Watson first made headlines in 2001 when it won the US quiz show Jeopardy! This was the first time that AI really came into the public consciousness when Watson beat humans in a head-to-head competition on the TV quiz show! Traditional analysis methods rely on structured data to provide intelligence - Watson is a breakthrough computing system, reading and analysing unstructured natural human language, to provide answers to complex questions.

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Cancer is responsible for one in six deaths around the world, and each year there are more than 14 million new cancer cases worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. As healthcare providers seek to enable data-driven, evidence-based cancer care, an explosion of medical information has created both challenges and opportunities to help improve quality of care. Some 50,000 oncology research papers are published each year, according to PubMed, and by 2020 medical information is projected to double every 73 days – outpacing the ability of human beings to keep up with the proliferation of medical knowledge. In this environment, Swedish oncology IT vendor Elekta is collaborating with artificial intelligence kingpin IBM Watson Health to offer Watson for Oncology as part of Elekta's cancer care systems. Elekta will market Watson for Oncology as an AI-based clinical decision support system paired within Elekta's digital cancer care systems, including its MOSAIQ Oncology Information System.

Radiation oncology vendor Elekta has formed a new partnership with IBM Watson Health to offer the Watson for Oncology artificial intelligence (AI) platform along with its offerings for cancer care. Developed by IBM in collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Watson for Oncology is designed to summarize a patient's key medical attributes and provide information to oncologists to help them deliver treatment options based on training from the Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologists, according to Elekta. The software also ranks treatment options, linking to peer-reviewed studies that have been curated by Memorial Sloan Kettering. In addition, Watson for Oncology provides a large corpus of medical literature -- more than 300 medical journals, over 200 textbooks, and nearly 15 million of pages of text -- to offer insight into different treatment options, Elekta said. Beginning in early 2018, Elekta will sell Watson for Oncology as a clinical decision-support application paired within its cancer-care software, including the Mosaiq oncology information system.