When Amazon executive Dave Limp first saw the pitch for the product that would become Echo in 2011, his main reaction was doubt. "This is going to be hard," Limp recalls thinking. But it would require a lot of inventions." The reaction was understandable given the lofty goals outlined in the Echo's original plan: it envisioned an intelligent, voice-controlled household appliance that could play music, read the news aloud and order groceries -- all by simply letting users talk to it from anywhere in the house. Since that time, the Echo has emerged as Amazon's sleeper hit, a hot-selling gadget that's being hailed as the standard-bearer for an entirely new computing paradigm in which Amazon suddenly has an edge on rivals such as Apple and Google. But the Echo's path into consumers' homes was hardly a sure thing. The gadget was stuck in Amazon's in-house labs for years, subject to the perfectionist demands of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and lengthy internal debates about its market appeal.

Hyderabad: Computer science focused educational research institute International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad is starting a new accelerator focused on technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality. These technologies, incidentally, are focused around research areas of the premier educational institute. "The ecosystem around IIIT-Hyderabad should be able to leverage the goldmine of the institute," said Vasudev Varma, dean (research and development) at IIIT-Hyderabad. The model is similar to one in the US where research universities spawn startups centered around technologies they develop. IIIT's accelerator, named Avishkar, will be a six-month program.

It makes F-Zero and Speed Racer seem tame. But couldn't they have come up with a better name? It makes F-Zero and Speed Racer seem tame. But couldn't they have come up with a better name? Chief Designer Daniel Simon was responsible for the cars in Tron: Legacy, which goes a long way to explaining the looks of the Robocar.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the March 30 keynote session at the Microsoft Developers Build Conference in San Francisco.

Welcome to the second lesson in our Practicing Deep Learning Series. Thoughtly is writing a multi-part tutorial series focused on understanding the foundations of Deep Learning, specifically as they apply to Natural Language Processing. If you want to jump to another post check the post listing here. Last time we focused on the elements of a simple single neuron network. We specifically discussed those that feed into the neuron – the inputs and weights – and their interaction via the dot product.

In Seoul, South Korea, a Google-created artificial intelligence has been squaring off against a mortal man in the 2,500-year-old strategy game, called Go, that's several orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. When it was finally over, Google's AlphaGo won four out of five matchups, making AlphaGo a role model for young artificial intelligences everywhere. Wired reported that "AlphaGo relies on deep neural networks--networks of hardware and software that mimic the web of neurons in the human brain. With these neural nets, it can learn tasks by analyzing massive amounts of digital data." That's bad news for SEOs the world over, because Google isn't just using neural nets to beat Koreans at board games, it's also using these advanced networks to make their search results more efficient.

Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have something in common, and it's not wealth or intelligence. They' re all terrified of the AI takeover. Also called the AI apocalypse, the AI takeover is a hypothetical scenario where artificially intelligent machines become the dominant life-form on Earth. It could be that robots rise and become our overlords, or worse, they exterminate mankind and claim Earth as their own. But can the AI Apocalypse really happen?

April 02--A conference dedicated to a versatile computer chip is expected to draw thousands of researchers and hundreds of tech companies to San Jose next week for a look at advances in some of Silicon Valley's hottest technologies. Now in its seventh year, the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference opening Tuesday at the San Jose Convention Center celebrates the graphics processing unit, or GPU, a chip that has become the Swiss Army knife of computing. Some industry observers credit the annual conference for helping spark the research that has led to recent leaps forward in artificial intelligence. Patrick Moorhead, a semiconductor analyst with Moor Insight and Solutions, said that the San Jose Convention Center conference -- now in its seventh year -- became a meeting ground for scientists, academics and developers. "What happened is that once you bring these researchers together in one place and get them focused on this whole notion of using graphics to do a compute engine, they find these new ways to use it. That's exactly what happened," Moorhead said.

So i am trying to implement my first neural network. Went for Tanh implementation (so all nodes go from -1 to 1) because most documentation stated that it is superior to linear 0-1 or the same thing as tanh with 0-1 output. I am having a hard time grasping most documentation because it generates questions i can't resolve with the documentation, and all the big algebra stuff you usually find on wikipedia is voodoo to me most of the times. It explained backprop and error calculation well. However the math doesn't seem to add up on it.

At the CES 2015, I was fascinated by all sorts of possible applications of IoT – socks with sensors, mattresses with sensors, smart watches, smart everything – it seems like a scene in sci-fi movies has just come true. People are eager to learn more about what's happening around them and now they can. While I was at there I attended a talk given by David Pogue – he is awesome. He pointed out that the prevalence of smartphone is the key to the realization of the phenomenon called "Quantified Self." Smart phones play a vital role as a hub where all our personal data converge and present, seamlessly.