Nvidia's chief executive says its self-driving system will be installed in all the cars in the Roborace Formula E series, an all-robotic, all-electric variant of Formula One that's to begin by early next year. In a speech on Tuesday at the GPU Technology Conference, in San Jose, Calif., Jen-Hsun Huang said his company's Drive PX 2 system would be standard in all the cars that the 10 Roborace teams will manage. The hardware, which was unveiled in January at CES, can be held in one hand and can perform 24 trillion operations per second while wrangling data from a dozen cameras as well as radar sets and LIDAR. When the original developer's kit was released a year ago, Michael Houston, the technical lead for the project, told IEEE Spectrum that the system could accommodate knowledge gleaned from deep learning, a method that uses reiterative analysis to discover patterns in masses of data. "Deep learning has different applications," he said.

In what they called a milestone achievement for artificial intelligence, scientists said on Wednesday they have created a computer program that beat a professional human player at the complex board game called Go, which originated in ancient China. The feat recalled IBM supercomputer Deep Blue's 1997 match victory over chess world champion Garry Kasparov. But Go, a strategy board game most popular in places like China, South Korea and Japan, is vastly more complicated than chess. "Go is considered to be the pinnacle of game AI research," said artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, the British company that developed the AlphaGo program. "It's been the grand challenge, or holy grail if you like, of AI since Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess."

Earlier this week, Facebook updated its iOS app offering voice descriptions of photographs uploaded by its users. A big step forward for accessibility, but it's far from the only company looking to make the world more inclusive to the visually impaired. In fact, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine vision and image-recognition technology are opening up the digital world to the blind and visually impaired – and helping them to interact with their surroundings. One interesting example is Austrian start-up BLITAB, which has created the first ever tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people, dubbed "the iPad for the blind". As Kristina Tsvetanova, co-founder & CEO at BLITAB Technology, explains, the device looks similar to an ebook but displays small physical bubbles instead of using a screen, which means users can view whole pages of braille text at once, without any mechanical elements.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine vision and image-recognition technology are opening up the digital world to the blind and visually impaired – and helping them to interact with their surroundings. One interesting example is Austrian start-up BLITAB, which has created the first ever tactile tablet for blind and visually impaired people, dubbed "the iPad for the blind". As Kristina Tsvetanova, co-founder & CEO at BLITAB Technology, explains, the device looks similar to an ebook but displays small physical bubbles instead of using a screen, which means users can view whole pages of braille text at once, without any mechanical elements. "It offers a completely new user experience for braille and non-braille readers via touch navigation, text-to-speech output and Perkins-style keyboard application. It also enables the direct conversion of any text file into braille and obtains information via NFC tags. BLITAB is not just a tablet, it is a platform for all existing and future software applications for blind readers," she says.

Text analysis startup Aylien, which uses deep learning and NLP algorithms to parse text and extract intel from documents for its customers, has launched a new tool specifically focused on analyzing written news content. "The idea for the News API is to give access to the news content that is out there enriched and in real-time to developers and data scientists," says co-founder Parsa Ghaffari. The Dublin-based startup says it's utilizing core text analysis tech powering its existing text API product, which launched back in February 2014 -- but this time it's focusing exclusively on news content and also doing a little more of the analytical heavy lifting for its customers. "We decided to simplify the use case a little bit by collecting and analyzing the news documents on our end, rather than giving them the tools to do that themselves. So this was born out of that," says Ghaffari.

If artificial intelligence has its way, discounting could disappear, thanks to software that tells retailers exactly what and how many products to buy, and when to put them on sale to sell them at full price. Online shopping could become a conversation, where the shopper describes the dress of their dreams, and, in seconds, an AI-powered search engine tracks down the closest match. Designers, merchandisers and buyers could all work alongside AI, to predict what customers want to wear, before they even know themselves. In the last few years, a trifecta of cheap, ubiquitous, powerful computing; big data; and the development of deep learning have triggered a revolution in artificial intelligence. The computing devices that now fill our everyday lives generate large data sets, which "deep learning" algorithms analyse to find trends, make predictions and perform specific tasks, such as identifying specific objects in an image.

Deploy and start monitoring in less than an hour. MetaMind, a startup focused on deep learning, this week announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce. The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform.

MetaMind, a startup focused on deep learning, this week announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce. The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes," MetaMind CEO Richard Socher said. The acquisition will see MetaMind, whose backers included Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, embed deep learning within the Salesforce platform. Socher has been named chief scientist at Salesforce.

Deal activity in artificial intelligence has now hit record highs for two quarters straight. Deal count had already leapt to 24 in Q4'15, ten more deals than the previous quarter. The trend continued in Q1'16, with deals reaching a 5-year quarterly high, and passing the 25-deal threshold. However, total funding dropped 18% to 83M from 101M in Q4'15, when over 20 companies raised funds. Our artificial intelligence category covers startups primarily focused on developing AI technologies, across areas including image processing, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and predictive APIs, among other core applications.

Salesforce, creators of the world's leading CRM platform, has acquired MetaMind, a deep learning startup to leverage its expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) to better tailor and automate customer support. Founded in late 2014, by Richard Socher, MetaMind focused on creating recursive neural networks which Socher actively worked on while pursuing his Ph.D. at Stanford University. The terms of the deal are yet to be disclosed, but the acquisition was backed by Marc Benioff, Co-Founder and CEO, Salesforce. Richard Socher, Co-Founder, CEO, MetaMind, wrote in his blog, "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. We'll extend Salesforce's data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform."