But rather than consumer vehicles, the focus seems to be on applications for autonomous taxis. The idea is that before a problem happens, the operator will know as soon as there's an aberration in the car's normal operating sounds. "When trained, the 3DSignals deep learning algorithms are able to identify [and] predict specific problems in advance with 98 percent accuracy," IEEE Spectrum reports. The tech is already in place in industrial applications, but 3DSignals' clients have to do some of the heavy lifting in terms of training the detection algorithms. People are still manually labeling specific sound signatures that indicate problems, so it might be a bit before we see widespread adoption of the system.

DEEPMIND'S office is tucked away in a nondescript building next to London's Kings Cross train station. From the outside, it doesn't look like something that two of the world's most powerful technology companies, Facebook and Google, would have fought to acquire. Google won, buying DeepMind for £400m ($660m) in January 2014. But why did it want to own a British artificial-intelligence (AI) company in the first place? Google was already on the cutting edge of machine learning and AI, its newly trendy cousin.

A lot of the most high-profile applications of deep learning technology involve aspects of computer vision, such as cutting-edge facial-recognition technology. However, an innovative artificial intelligence startup from Israel is looking to apply those same neural networks and smart algorithms to another area -- acoustics. Better yet, they are doing so to help users spot early warning signs that machines, such as cars, may be about to fail. "I was on a train about three years ago, going back to my hotel after a business meeting," 3DSignals CEO Amnon Shenfeld told Digital Trends. "The train suddenly started making strange noises. These weren't the usual sounds that trains make, but something out of the ordinary. It was the same week that a train had overturned in Spain, injuring a lot of people. Everyone stopped talking and was getting very worried. I had the thought that maybe if there was a train mechanic or engineer sitting on the train, they could tell us if the noise was normal and, if not, where it was coming from and whether it could be safely ignored."

The following is a guest post by Anupam Rastogi (@anupamr). Rastogi is a growth stage technology investor at NGP, focused on the intersection of IoT, data, and machine learning in the enterprise. The Artificial Intelligence ("AI") vs Intelligence Augmentation ("IA") debate has been around for over half a century. IA or Intelligence Augmentation classically refers to the effective use of information technology in augmenting human capabilities, and the idea has been around since the 1950s. AI is increasingly being used today to broadly describe machines that can mimic human functions such as learning and problem solving, but was originally founded on the premise that human intelligence can be precisely described, and machines made to simulate it.

DeLiang Wang was in college when his mother began to lose her hearing in the 1980s. Today, she struggles to listen to and participate in a conversation, even with her hearing aids. Dinners with her large family are frustrating and, often, exhausting. At 91, she is "essentially deaf," Wang said, because her hearing aids provide so little benefit that she seldom wears them. So Wang, now a professor computer science and engineering at Ohio State University, is building a better hearing aid, with some help from GPUs and deep learning.

Silicon Valley – and Wall Street – have a new king. Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google, looks set to become the world's largest publicly traded company on Tuesday thanks to a spike in its share price, following exceptionally good results and a decision to come clean on how its makes and spends its money. Google's Alphabet set to overtake Apple as world's most valuable company Less than a year after it stormed past Berkshire Hathaway, ExxonMobil and Microsoft on its way to the top, the company's value has passed Apple. Tuesday will see whether it can hold on to those gains but the battle is on. In the past six months alone, since Google restructured to become Alphabet, its cap has risen by $200bn (£139bn), almost doubling its total value.

At the Amazon re:Invent conference, Amazon announced Lex, a deep learning service that is based upon the technology used by Alexa in Amazon's portable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled Echo speaker. Shortly after Amazon's announcement, Google introduced Actions on Google which allow developers to build Google Assistant-based conversational apps, including integration with the Google Home device. You as a developer to integrate your services with the Google Assistant. Conversation actions which enable you to fulfill a user request action through a two-way dialog. When users request an action, the Google Assistant processes this request, determines the best action to invoke, and invokes your Conversation Action if relevant.

Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, aims to gain the upper hand in the budding field of artificial intelligence with a new lineup of chip products in 2017, a senior executive said. Vice President Raejeanne B. Skillern's comments came as Intel's main rival in the AI chip market, Nvidia, is working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on chip products that can handle massive amounts of video, images and voice recognition tasks. "Nvidia has gotten a very tiny piece of the market right now," Skillern told the Nikkei Asian Review in early December. "We take the competition very seriously. While Intel controls 98% of the global market for data center server chips, Nvidia's graphics-oriented products have become the preferred option for internet titans like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, along with researchers striving to train computers to recognize complex patterns and objects.

AI was a major theme in 2016, with tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon all touting their machine-learning chops and virtual-assistant skills. But nothing underscored the coming AI invasion like DeepMind's AlphaGo, which has become so skilled at the strategy board game Go that it trounced world champion Lee Se-dol four games to one. Researchers have long viewed Go--with 361 potential moves on the first turn alone--as the ultimate AI challenge, yet Lee said AlphaGo's decisive victory left him feeling "powerless."

To celebrate the New Year, we are providing a 20% discount on all summit passes. This offer will be valid from 26 December to 6 January. Simply enter the code NEWYEAR at the checkout to receive your 20% discount on ANY summit ticket (including our on-demand video memberships). This offer is also applicable to our already discounted Super Early Bird and Early Bird passes, giving you a massive double saving! At our 2017 summits, we will be exploring Deep Learning in Healthcare; Finance and Retail; Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles; Virtual Assistants; Women in Machine Intelligence; and more.