Microsoft is joining Google and Amazon in the race for your home. This week, at an event in China, the venerable tech giant trumpeted the arrival of Project Evo, a sweeping plan to build hardware devices that work a lot like Google Home or the Amazon Echo. But this race is much bigger than some gadgets that sit on your coffee table. The prize is more than just the best home digital assistant. The biggest spoils go to the company that rides its assistant to artificial brains that are far smarter--and creates a market for using these brains to do just about anything. OpenAI Joins Microsoft on the Cloud's Next Big Front: Chips Intel Looks to a New Chip to Power the Coming Age of AI Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Artificial Intelligence Just Broke Steve Jobs' Wall of Secrecy Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all racing to build systems that recognize and truly understand natural language--how you and I talk.

Connected hospitals with intelligent messaging In today's hospitals, pacemakers, defibrillators and oximeters are all connected to the internet and share vitals immediately with doctors, in turn speeding response times. Hospitals have technicians, nurses, staff, billing departments, insurance providers, patients and patients' families as stakeholders, each with different requirements of information about the care given to patient. Unified Inbox offers an AI-based unified cloud IoT messaging platform for internet of things devices to connect various stakeholders, giving them the freedom to receive different messages at different frequency, with different senses of urgency in different mediums of their choice. Unified Inbox launched this at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore as "CUBE," the IoT-secured messaging gateway for healthcare. The artificial intelligence makes the hospitals connected, giving peace of mind to patients and their loved ones while improving efficiency in the overall hospital management and interaction with all stakeholders.

Nvidia cofounder Chris Malachowsky is eating a sausage omelet and sipping burnt coffee in a Denny's off the Berryessa overpass in San Jose. It was in this same dingy diner in April 1993 that three young electrical engineers--Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and Nvidia's current CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang--started a company devoted to making specialized chips that would generate faster and more realistic graphics for video games. East San Jose was a rough part of town back then--the front of the restaurant was pocked with bullet holes from people shooting at parked cop cars--and no one could have guessed that the three men drinking endless cups of coffee were laying the foundation for a company that would define computing in the early 21st century in the same way that Intel did in the 1990s. "There was no market in 1993, but we saw a wave coming," Malachowsky says. "There's a California surfing competition that happens in a five-month window every year. When they see some type of wave phenomenon or storm in Japan, they tell all the surfers to show up in California, because there's going to be a wave in two days. We were at the beginning."

Within the silos of incumbent financial services, so-called fintech companies are good at picking off one thing only and doing it well. This approach is also taken within data science, where a lot of the properly intelligent work is about understanding the domain (problem) and how best to use the information/data for the problem you have. In doing so, a fintech approach--collaboration, open-sourcing code--is helping to gradually change the culture of finance, even in some hitherto heavily guarded domains. Dr Tristan Fletcher, research director, Thought Machine, said: "Without this specialisation and domain knowledge, it's very hard to rise above the noise. However, the algorithms themselves are often applicable in many areas or problems, and we are probably seeing decreasing specialisation here. "Fintech lends itself particularly to specialisation because there are many well-packaged problems that need to be solved and can be clearly delineated--KYC, AML, credit checking etc.

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In this AI Podcast, Bryan Catanzaro from Nvidia describes how machines with Deep Learning capabilities are now better at recognizing objects in images than humans. Catanzaro has been in AI since the beginning. Or, as Michael says, as "about as long as it has really worked." It's a journey that's taken him from UC Berkeley, where he earned his Ph.D., to NVIDIA, to Baidu -- where he worked on a team that's made a number of deep learning breakthroughs -- and back to NVIDIA. Along the way, he's seen deep learning make incredible advances.

Machine learning is one of the more prominent sub-sets of the AI universe, and has been the main sector for a lot of the breakthrough developments. Part of the machine-learning spectrum is'deep learning' - a method that layers data to create neural networks, not unlike the way the brain learns, sparking excitement within the investment community. This is the technology that allows Google to filter your emails and for Netflix to deliver viewing recommendations that you might actually want to watch. While these might sound rather trivial applications, they are big wins for the consumer engagement and brand loyalty.

When we think about Artificial Intelligence, we tend to imagine this technology being locked away in expensive research facilities as government labs. However, the basic deep learning algorithms that folks like Google and IBM are using to change the technological landscape are actually widely available. Even if you don't know a lick of programming, resources are available that let you start playing around with AI tech right on your home computer. Furthermore, if you are a programmer and you haven't been investing in machine learning, then you might be able to use these tools to drastically increase your efficiency. Also, let's face it: It's only a matter of time before someone makes a critical breakthrough catalyzing the technological singularity and a superintelligent artificial entity arises faster than anyone can prevent it and enslaves the human race.

Artificial intelligence is growing by leaps and bounds, but it won't be replacing humans any time soon, at least if a newly penned-by-AI Christmas jingle is anything to go by. The song starts out like any Christmas jingle, and you may even find yourself tapping your foot along…until the lyrics register and you wonder what kind of dystopian Christmas wonderland you've stumbled upon. The new jingle -- which has been set to music and is sung by a computer itself -- was recently released by the University of Toronto. The work was performed by the university's associate and assistant professors of computer science Raquel Urtasun and Sanja Fidler, as well as graduate student Hang Chu. The team trained the artificial intelligence -- called recurrent neural networks -- to create a "singalong and dance-along" based on a digital image of Christmas-related things.

As Vatican lights Christmas tree, Pope reflects on Nativity scene'A gravely critical moment': Catholic scholars call on Bishops to support the four Cardinals Listen to God for guidance to build a better world Pope's prayer for the Immaculate in Piazza di Spagna Be like Mary – say yes to God, but not halfway, Pope Francis says'A gravely critical moment': Catholic scholars call on Bishops to support the four Cardinals ROME: Artificial intelligence is "an extremely important goal that has not been achieved yet," said Stanislas Dehaene, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the College de France, adding that "we don't want to create a system full of machines that don't share our intuitions of what should be a better world." The Vatican hosted a high-level discussion in the world of science, gathering experts to discuss the progress, benefits and limits of advances in artificial intelligence. A new conference at the Vatican drew experts in various fields of science and technology for a two-day dialogue on the "Power and Limits of Artificial Intelligence," hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Sciences. Among the scheduled speakers were several prestigious scientists, including Stephen Hawkins, a prominent British professor at the University of Cambridge and a self-proclaimed atheist, as well as a number of major tech heads such as Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, and Yann LeCun of Facebook. The event, which ran from Nov. 30-Dec.