Artificial Intelligence has been heralded as a game changer in the drive toward the intelligent enterprise. While AI and machine learning has been around for more than five decades, it's today's increasingly interconnected world and the continuing explosion of data that is driving an increase of applications powered by AI. AI promises to deliver exciting opportunities to the IT as well as the business world, and many believe the reality is not far off. According to a recent report by Research and Markets, the AI market is estimated to grow from 419.7 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 53.65% from 2015 to 2020. Major factors driving growth include diversified application areas of AI, improved productivity, and increased levels of customer satisfaction.

Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, can help internet users with a variety of activities, especially when they're on the go. According to June 2016 research, nearly two-thirds of AI users in the US use these personal assistants to answer general questions. San Francisco, CA–based AYTM Market Research surveyed 1,000 US internet users about their dealings with an AI assistant. Overall, 58% had never used one, while about a quarter used AI assistants on at least a monthly basis. According to the survey, the majority (64.5%) of AI users said they used AI assistants to ask general questions, followed by getting directions while driving (39.7%) and making calls (25.2%). Other research confirms, though, that few mobile phone owners in the US actually use a voice-controlled personal assistant regularly.

Artificial Intelligence for Sysadmins Artificial intelligence (AI) is on a roll. It's happening through developments spurred on by 800 pound tech gorillas like Amazon and IBM, and big brands in transportation like Uber and Jaguar. Before we ponder that further, if you haven't had the time to keep up here are seven recent notches on the artificial intelligence belt…er, chipset. Back in 2011, IBM's Watson blew away the human "Jeopardy" champions. IBM is now betting big on Watson once again and cognitive computing opportunities in the health care industry and beyond. Following the success of Apple's intelligent agent Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Now, Amazon's Alexa has garnered a loyal following and is… Link to Full Article: Artificial Intelligence for Sysadmins

PRINEVILLE, Ore. – In a row of racks deep inside a massive data center sits the engine of Facebook's ambitions in artificial intelligence. Each server chassis is packed with computing horsepower, including graphics processing units (GPUs) that can crunch enormous volumes of data. This is Big Sur, and it is the key to Facebook's bid to create a smarter newsfeed for its 1.6 billion users around the globe. Using Big Sur, Facebook can train its machine learning systems to recognize speech, understand the content of video and images, and translate content from one language to another. Machine learning holds tremendous promise, but requires a lot of horsepower.

Virtual marketing assistant Kit CRM today announced the launch of its chatbot on Facebook Messenger. This will be its third platform and comes three months after Kit became one of the first companies to announce an integration with Facebook's conversational platform. Now, any of the more than 900 million monthly app users will be able to have access to a virtual employee right at their fingertips. The idea in bringing this marketing assistant to Facebook Messenger is to enable merchants without marketing support to more easily manage their online marketing promotions on Facebook and Instagram. This assistant offers a more user-friendly interface, instead of asking them to sort through ad-serving networks and interfaces.

In the event of a c-section, if a robot suggested who should perform it, would you listen? Ninety percent of the time, nurses and physicians did. A robot programmed by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) suggests where to move patients and who should perform caesarian sections. The team from CSAIL thinks robots are most effective in helping with one of the most "complex" tasks in the labor ward of the hospital: scheduling. "The aim of the work was to develop artificial intelligence that can learn from people about how the labor and delivery unit works, so that robots can better anticipate how to be helpful or when to stay out of the way--and maybe even help by collaborating in making challenging decisions," says MIT professor Julie Shah, senior author on two papers based on CSAIL's research.

Conventional collaborative filtering techniques treat a top-n recommendations problem as a task of generating a list of the most relevant items. This formulation, however, disregards an opposite - avoiding recommendations with completely irrelevant items. Due to that bias, standard algorithms, as well as commonly used evaluation metrics, become insensitive to negative feedback. In order to resolve this problem we propose to treat user feedback as a categorical variable and model it with users and items in a ternary way. We employ a third-order tensor factorization technique and implement a higher order folding-in method to support online recommendations. The method is equally sensitive to entire spectrum of user ratings and is able to accurately predict relevant items even from a negative only feedback. Our method may partially eliminate the need for complicated rating elicitation process as it provides means for personalized recommendations from the very beginning of an interaction with a recommender system. We also propose a modification of standard metrics which helps to reveal unwanted biases and account for sensitivity to a negative feedback. Our model achieves state-of-the-art quality in standard recommendation tasks while significantly outperforming other methods in the cold-start "no-positive-feedback" scenarios.

Artificial intelligence is on the lips of every influencer in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg is building his own artificially intelligent butler, and Elon Musk recently launched an AI company. But AI is on the rise, and it's already driving change in retail and consumer businesses. Several aspects of AI have advanced significantly in recent years, particularly speech recognition and text understanding. Speech recognition, also known as voice understanding, interprets spoken words and matches them with concepts, tasks, and people.

Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant -- you may think you're pretty familiar with these products today, but that's nothing compared to how close you'll be with them if all goes as planned for tech titans who are developing them. Many are looking to voice technology to help us finally move most functions of our lives away from the mouse and keyboard, past the touchscreen and beyond. Sure, right now, using voice assistants can be a pretty frustrating experience -- particularly for a technology that's been on mainstream devices for years. But developers are hard at work improving them so that they can work reliably from your home, your car and, well, anywhere you are.

At x.ai, we are building an artificial intelligence powered personal assistant. The software will schedule meetings for our customers automatically without subjecting them to the typical back and forth over email negotiating when and where to meet someone. We are looking for a smart, self-motivated, and enthusiastic individual to join us on the journey in building the artificial intelligence of the future. You'll get to work side by side with a small team of serial entrepreneurs moving at breakneck speed.