The AI XPRIZE is a 4-year, $5M competition that challenges teams globally to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world's grand challenges. Currently, there are 148 teams in 22 countries competing for the prize, which will be awarded in 2020 on the TED Global stage.

Although it's not a'one size fits all' solution, artificial intelligence can be used to successfully hunt cyberthreats. Giovanni Vigna, CTO and co-founder of Lastline, identifies several of the key areas to address when thinking proactively about AI as a tool in detecting cyberthreats. Artificial intelligence (AI) will not automatically detect and resolve every potential malware or cyberthreat incident, but when it combines both bad and good behavior modeling it becomes a successful and powerful weapon against even the most advanced malware. By their very nature, malware detection tools must constantly evolve to stay up to date with ever-changing crimeware. One of the biggest evolutions in malware detection is the migration from trapping to hunting.

NEW YORK CITY - 15 Jun 2017: LivePerson, Inc. (Nasdaq: LPSN), a leading provider of cloud mobile and online business messaging solutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have announced LiveEngage with Watson, the first global, enterprise-scale, out-of-the-box integration of Watson-powered bots with human agents. The new offering combines IBM's Watson Virtual Agent technology with LivePerson's LiveEngage platform, allowing brands to rapidly and easily deploy conversational bots that get smarter with each interaction, and lets consumers message those brands from their smartphone - via the brand's app, SMS, Facebook Messenger, or even the brand's mobile site - instead of having to call an 800 number. This legacy approach has not kept pace with the consumer move to smartphones and messaging apps, now the dominant way consumers communicate digitally. Forrester's 2017 Customer Service Trends report revealed that "Customers of all ages are moving away from using the phone to using self-service -- web and mobile self-service, communities, virtual agents, automated chat dialogs, or chatbots -- as a first point of contact with a company" and, according to Dimension Data, while there has been a 12 percent decline in phone volume, there has been growth in every digital channel[2]. LiveEngage with Watson helps meet that demand - allowing consumers to message large brands from their smartphones and instantly get answers from AI-powered bots, with human care representatives brought in seamlessly, in real-time, if a bot is not able to resolve an issue satisfactorily.

Equbot, the Fund's sub-advisor, is a technology-based company focused on applying artificial intelligence to investment analyses. It is part of the IBM Global Entrepreneurs start-up roster. IBM already has a Watson effort for financial services more broadly, which includes a Watson analytical tool for wealth advisors and wealth management groups, and Watson applications for financial markets analysis. The filing says Equbot will use IBM's Watson AI to perform a fundamental analysis of U.S.-listed stocks and real estate investment trusts based on up to 10 years of historical data and then apply that analysis to recent economic and news data. "Each day, the Equbot Model ranks each company based on the probability of the company benefiting from current economic conditions, trends and world events and identifies approximately 30 to 70 companies with the greatest potential for appreciation and their corresponding weights, while maintaining volatility comparable to the broader U.S. equity market."

Beginning in fall 2017, some students and educators at the University of Michigan may be getting help on writing assignments from computers. Campus Technology reports that a team of educators developed a writing-to-learn tool called M-Write, which uses automated text analysis (ATA) to identify the strengths of a writing submission. Developed by two professors, the tool was initially meant to help students grow their conceptual learning skills in large courses and to help streamline the grading process, reports a UMich article. ATA works by "using a variety of text analysis techniques, such as vocabulary matching or topic matching, which the algorithm detects." Using M-Write also lets educators identify the students who are going to need help.

Who will be the first to implement the new suite of Watson services? From the newly formed Watson Financial Services division, IBM has released the first suite of services covering regulatory requirements, financial crime insights, and financial risk modelling. These cognitive tools have been made possible following IBM's 2016 acquisition of global consulting operation, Promontory Financial Group. Promontory was originally working to provide support to banks dealing with the growing and tightening regulation and risk management within the financial services. It was the knowledge and expertise accessed in this acquisition that brought life to the new financial services-focussed Watson services, with regulation and risk accounting for two thirds of the suite, and a financial crime tool completing the set.

By eliminating the friction of the traditional translation process, devices like Translate One2One will not only remove one of the biggest challenges for professionals when meeting and collaborating between cultures, but also offers enormous potential for communities around the world,

Listen to The Modern Customer Podcast with Rob High here. Artificial intelligence seems to be popping up everywhere, and it has the potential to change nearly everything we know about data and the customer experience. However, it also brings up new issues regarding ethics and privacy. One of the keys to keeping AI ethical is for it to be transparent, says Rob High, vice president and chief technology officer of IBM Watson. When customers interact with a chatbot, for example, they need to know they are communicating with a machine and not an actual human.

An Australian startup revealed its flagship product, an earpiece that can interpret 8 different languages in real-time, at a United Nations event in Switzerland on Friday. Lingmo International, a startup based in West Gosford north of Sydney, launched its TranslateOne2One earpiece at the UN's Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit in Geneva, revealing that IBM Watson machine learning technology had been used for its algorithms. Traditionally, converting one language to another orally in real-time is called "interpreting" whereas the term "translation" is reserved for processing text across languages with some delay. Lingmo founder Danny May, however, describes his product as performing "translation in real-time". And what I mean by independent is that it doesn't require any connectivity to your phone by Bluetooth or wi-fi.