Do humans make computers smarter? Could machine learning save this sea cow? Artificial intelligence is fact, not fantasy! Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term.

Do humans make computers smarter? Artificial intelligence is fact, not fantasy! Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

It has been said that to give a man a fish is to feed him for a day, whereas to teach a man to fish is to feed him for life. Forward-looking financial service companies are similarly finding that giving computers instructions is not nearly as fruitful as teaching them to write their own. From assessing credit risks to beefing-up the security of their own networks, fintech startups, in particular, are turning to machine learning finance-based solutions in order to work smarter rather than harder. Considering that over 200 leading financial institutions will attend the upcoming October 2016 Machine Learning Fintech Conference, investment in this subset of artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be a wise move, indeed, for companies that don't want to be left behind. With leading banks starting to invest in AI, and machine learning in particular, fintech companies will be significantly disadvantaged if they fail to do likewise.

It seems only yesterday that we were lying on our friend's sofa vowing to abstain from all alcohol for the entirety of 2016 before being coerced into a pub trip by our pesky co-workers the first Friday back in the office. Yes, the start of the year seems no time ago at all, but 2016 is nearly over. There are under 9 weeks left of the year and this, coupled with the arrival of the colder weather, has got us feeling all nostalgic. Let's recap some of the biggest tech innovations of 2016 and our predictions for the tech world in 2017. Well Pokémon Go launched in July and thanks to the enormous number of nostalgic noughties kids roaming the streets with little to do, it took off at an astonishing rate.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making progress in great strides, or at least it appears so! Almost no week passes by without some major announcements of new challenges solved by AI technology or new products powered by AI. Indeed many quantifiable factors attest an unprecedented level of activity: capital investments, number of academic papers, number of products involving AI technology, they all are on a steep rise in the past five years. Computers are already very capable at some specialized tasks that require reasoning and other abilities that we typically associate with intelligence. For example, computers can play a decent game of chess or can help us order our holiday photos. Despite this genuine progress, we are still a long way from human level intelligence because our best artificial intelligence systems are not general purpose. They cannot quickly adapt to novel tasks the way most humans can do.

It may be Tesla's Elon Musk who most often invites comparison to Marvel's superhero Iron Man – the alter ego of billionaire inventor Tony Stark – but it is Mark Zuckerberg who might be the first to bring Stark's technology to life. Memorably, the Facebook CEO sets himself annual goals such as learning Mandarin in 2010, eating only meat from animals he killed himself in 2011, or reading two books a month in 2015. In January, the Facebook founder said that his 2016 challenge would be to build an artificial intelligence-based personal assistant for his home. In his Facebook post announcing his aim, Zuckerberg said that "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man." In a Facebook conversation on Thursday, Zuckerberg invited suggestions for who should voice his real-life Jarvis (which, in the Iron Man and Avengers movies, stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System). Suggestions included actors Morgan Freeman, Benedict Cumberbatch and Paul Bettany – who voices Jarvis in the movies – as well as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Artificial intelligence is one of those tech terms that seems to inevitably conjure up images (and jokes) of computer overlords running sci-fi dystopias -- or, more recently, robots taking over human jobs. But AI is already here: It's powering your voice-activated digital personal assistants and Web searches, guiding automated features on your car and translating foreign texts, detecting your friends in photos you post on social media and filtering your spam. But as practical uses of AI have exploded in recent years, one critical element remains missing: an industrywide set of ethics standards or best practices to guide the growing field. Now, the industry heavyweights are partnering to fill that gap. Called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the group consists of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Apple is also in talks to join.

With Google, Microsoft and Facebook all pushing artificial intelligence, AI is becoming the next battleground for agencies, perpetually on the hunt for new service lines. AI basically gives machines the ability to think like humans. A simple example: You can have a one-on-one conversation with another person, but AI can talk to 500 people at the same time and make decisions based on real-time data to learn what's going on in each conversation, explained Dave Meeker, vp of Isobar's U.S. operations. In the context of advertising and marketing, AI theoretically means more personalized and interactive consumer experience, including targeted programmatic ad buys, identification of site visitors' decision-making patterns, conversational commerce like bots, as well as smarter search and recommendation engines on websites, according to six agency executives interviewed for this article. At the moment, with the help of AI developed by big tech companies, agencies are able to serve cognitive ads and integrate voice-activated assistants in their campaigns.

This month Stanford launched a 100-year study of AI (AI100) with a report: Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030. The 16 member study panel issuing the report sees increasingly useful applications of AI, with potentially profound positive impacts on our society and economy over the next decade. The study identifies eight domains where AI is already having or is projected to have the greatest impact: transportation, healthcare, education, low-resource communities, public safety and security, employment and workplace, home/service robots and entertainment. Check out this Pearson video (and our review of their report): Over the next few months, we'll be exploring developments in these eight categories and the implications for employment and education. This series, #AskAboutAI, will encourage parents, teachers, mentors and advisors to engage young people in a dialog about the emerging automation economy and the ethical and economic implications of artificial intelligence (AI).

We cover many emerging markets in the startup ecosystem. Previously, we published posts that summarized Financial Technology, Internet of Things, Bitcoin, and MarTech in six visuals. This week, we do the same with Artificial Intelligence (AI). At this time, we are tracking 855 AI companies across 13 categories, with a combined funding amount of $8.75billion. To see all of our AI related posts, check out our blog!