The big news on March 12 of this year was of the Go-playing AI-system AlphaGo securing victory against 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol by winning the third straight game of a five-game match in Seoul, Korea. After Deep Blue's victory against chess world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the game of Go was the next grand challenge for game-playing artificial intelligence. Go has defied the brute-force methods in game-tree search that worked so successfully in chess. In 2012, Communications published a Research Highlight article by Sylvain Gelly et al. on computer Go, which reported that "Programs based on Monte-Carlo tree search now play at human-master levels and are beginning to challenge top professional players." AlphaGo combines tree-search techniques with search-space reduction techniques that use deep learning. Its victory is a stunning achievement and another milestone in the inexorable march of AI research.

Call it artificial intelligence with a human touch. This week, two California universities separately announced new centers devoted to studying the ways in which AI can help humanity. USC's Viterbi School of Engineering and its School of Social Work said Wednesday that they had joined forces to launch the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Social Solutions. A day earlier, the University of California, Berkeley unveiled its newly minted Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence. Even as science and technology pundits (including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk) warn of the overthrow of humanity by advanced artificial intelligence - a prospect that appears nowhere on the horizon, experts say - scientists are increasingly looking ahead to the ways in which AI might actually aid human lives.

Amazon lures away eBay's artificial intelligence chief Microsoft is making refrigerators way'cooler' with a shot of Artificial Intelligence Amazon poaches eBay A.I. chief, continues ramping up machine learning operations Many of today's martech companies that espouse machine learning capabilities simply offer a ...

Intelligence is generally considered an exclusively human attribute, but we're fast approaching an age where machines will be considered intelligent as well. If this is indeed the case, it's only natural that machines will also develop a genuine personality. Many of them, such as Siri from Apple and Amazon's Alexa and Echo, already have names and voices. There's also Watson from IBM, a "cognitive assistant" that can read 40 million medical documents in 15 seconds and "understand, reason, and learn." Named after IBM's founder, Watson may soon eclipse all of us in knowledge as it continues to learn.

There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding around what computers can and can't do. Unfortunately, while artificial intelligence might not be as sensational as a summer blockbuster, it's just as exciting in the market research industry. A quick education on the difference between data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning (and how they play together) can give you a basic understanding of why they're the real stars of market research, and, if used together, can present a formidable tactic that one can use to conquer any data question or conundrum. Data mining is actually one of the newer methods that market research companies are employing, but it serves as a foundation for both artificial intelligence and machine learning. Data mining, as a practice, is more than just culling supersets of information from various sources. Data mining can cull and then aggregate information to alert you to patterns and correlations that you hadn't even thought of.

The entire tech industry is racing to build artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, computers that can learn and react to stuff they've never seen before, sort of like a human brain. Naturally, tech giant Google is smack dab in the middle of this trend. Just like the move to mobile gave rise to companies like Uber and Snapchat, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt believes that machine learning will underpin the next crop of game-changing successful companies. Google has built a team of machine learning researchers that call themselves the Google Brain Team. As this team creates new machine learning technology, they make it available to others as a service on Google's cloud.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

Google said Friday it will provide a new stream of automated insights in its Google Analytics mobile app, allowing marketers to see key data metrics in a matter of minutes. Previously, it could take marketers several hours to discover the same data points, Google said. The new feature is available today on both Android and iOS. Other companies offer analytics products to their customers through machine learning -- IBM and its Watson Analytics comes to mind -- but few, if any, offer similar features on a mobile app. This can be especially useful for marketers who are on the go, about to head into a meeting or unfamiliar with analytics products. "I think what Google is realizing is people tend to exhibit the same behaviors when they pull reports from Analytics," said Kevin Lee, executive chairman and co-founder of Didit, a full-service digital agency that specializes in search.

LONDON – 25 August 2016 – IP EXPO Europe, Europe's number one enterprise IT event, has today announced the addition of several influential industry speakers to this year's keynote and seminar programme. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear how key IT issues are affecting businesses and humanity alike, from Author & Founding Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute: Nick Bostrom; the'Father of Java': James Gosling; the creator of the'MySpace worm' and now an Independent Security Researcher: Samy Kamkar; and Independent Cyber Security Consultant Dr Jessica Barker. These additions to the 2016 IP EXPO Europe program are the latest in a list which already includes some of the world's most renowned technology innovators, from the likes of HPE, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. With his work influencing the likes of Bill Gates, Professor Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk, keynote speaker Nick Bostrom, Author & Founding Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, is one of the world's foremost authorities on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Opening Day One at this year's IP EXPO Europe, Bostrom will be discussing the impact that AI and intelligent machines will have on business and society, and sets out to answer the question: 'Will AI bring about the end of humanity?'

SAN FRANCISCO • For years, science fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway. Now, five of the world's largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence (AI). While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of AI to humans, researchers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of AI on jobs, transportation and even warfare. Tech companies have long over-promised what artificially intelligent machines can do.