Pyramidal neurons represent the majority of excitatory neurons in the neocortex. Each pyramidal neuron receives input from thousands of excitatory synapses that are segregated onto dendritic branches. The dendrites themselves are segregated into apical, basal, and proximal integration zones, which have different properties. It is a mystery how pyramidal neurons integrate the input from thousands of synapses, what role the different dendrites play in this integration, and what kind of network behavior this enables in cortical tissue. It has been previously proposed that non-linear properties of dendrites enable cortical neurons to recognize multiple independent patterns.

Flickr/Peyri HerreraAn artificial intelligence director (not this robot, but you get the idea.) Ad agency McCann Japan has appointed an artificial intelligence creative director, AI-CD?, who will be attending McCann Worldgroup's new employee welcoming ceremony on April 1, along with 11 new college graduates. AI-CD? was actually created by the agency under its'Creative Genome Project', the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency's'McCann Millennials taskforce'. The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation's CM Festival. President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said: "Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we're very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee."

Why we don't need to worry about machines taking over the world … (yet!) Artificial Intelligence (AI) is finally coming of age; for those of us of a certain generation the actual application of AI today is the science fiction of our youth in front of our eyes. For mainstream media and general understanding it appears in the popular press as though the machines are set to take over; making us redundant from'work'. The crushing defeat of Lee Sedol, World Champion at the board game Go by the Google designed and built AlphaGo artificial intelligence machine has attracted headlines globally. Far more complex than Chess in terms of possible moves AlphaGo won the series 4-1 based on its capability to'learn' through playing itself numerous times; attracting headlines for its'creativity' and'intuition' in the moves it made on its way to victory. But how clever is it?

YouTube/IPAMGeoffrey Hinton splits his time between Google and academia. Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert who splits his time between Google and the University of Toronto, believes machines could match human abilities in five years. Hinton, known as the godfather of "deep learning," said the most powerful machines are still about a million times smaller than the human brain. They only have the equivalent of around a billion synapses (the connections between the neurons in the brain), compared to 1,000 trillion in the human brain. But machines are becoming more sophisticated every year.

Oil company Total has almost tripled the performance of Pangea, a supercomputer it uses for analyzing subsurface imaging in search of new oilfields. Pangea's performance is now 6.7 petaflops (floating-point operations per second), up from 2.3 petaflops, the French company said Tuesday. That's enough to put it among the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, according to Total, which based its claim on rankings published last November by Top500.org, the international supercomputer ranking organization. Total's claim is based on the assumption that no other computer has been similarly upgraded in the meantime, something we won't know for sure until the next edition of the list is published in June. But there's another wrinkle that might cast doubt on Total's top 10 status, and that's what exactly the 2.3 petaflop figure represents.

More than 50 U.S. airports will test a new system to make themselves more aware of drones flying near their runways. Airport executives and the drone industry expect the Digital Notice and Awareness System (D-NAS) to improve safety amid concerns raised by 764 drone sightings near airplanes in 2015. Drone hobbyists are required to notify airports of their plans when flying within five miles of an airport, but doing so has been a difficult process. For one, hobbyists have to track down the appropriate phone numbers. "You don't want to give out air traffic control's phone number on a public website for obvious reasons. Well, how are you going to manage that?" said Steve Runge, division manager of the Houston Airport System's safety and emergency management.

You know that you want to build a predictive model. You've framed your problem in terms of classification or regression. You've prepared some training data (which took an age). You've heard or experienced first hand that Random Forests, Elastic Net Regression or Deep Belief Networks are "the business" and so you're going to use one of these (you've probably already verified that these algorithms are appropriate to your problem based on their general capabilities: whether it be their ability to deal with real valued data, "big" streaming data, multiple classes and so on). However, no two algorithms are the same (if they were we'd simply have fewer to choose from). As such there are a host of questions that you may not have even thought to ask which could make or break your choice.

The BMW 7 Series is the world's first production car that can operate with no driver aboard, if only to dazzle the neighbors when it eases into your home garage. Press a button on the remote, with its palm-size LCD readout, and watch the BMW drive itself into a garage or back its way out. With its camera and ultrasonic sensors, the BMW can fit into small or stuffed garages that are too tight to allow opening the car's doors. This roboparking feature is offered only in Europe for now, but BMW is pressing U.S. regulators for approval. The car can thrill when you're behind the wheel, as I discovered on a track test at Monticello Motor Club in New York's Catskills region.

"Sonic the Hedgehog," ''Space Invaders" and "John Madden Football" are among 15 games named Tuesday as finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame. The winners will be inducted May 5 at The Strong museum in Rochester, where the hall opened last year. The contenders also include: "Elite," ''Final Fantasy," ''Grand Theft Auto III," ''The Legend of Zelda," ''Minecraft," ''Nurburgring," ''The Oregon Trail," ''Pokemon Red and Green," ''Sid Meier's Civilization," ''The Sims," ''Street Fighter II" and "Tomb Raider." The finalists "span decades, gaming platforms and countries of origin, but what they all have in common is their undeniable impact on the world of gaming and popular culture," said Jon-Paul Dyson, director of The Strong's International Center for the History of Electronic Games. The list was culled from thousands of nominations from more than 100 countries, hall officials said.

Tonight, Lee Sedol is supported by one 33-year-old human brain and approximately 12 ounces of coffee. At its core, the game of Go, which originated in China more than 2,500 years ago, is an abstract war simulation. Players start with a completely blank board and place black and white stones, one at a time, to surround territory. Once placed, stones do not move, and they're removed only if they're "killed"--that is, surrounded completely by the opponent's stones. And so the game goes--black stone, white stone, black stone, white stone--until the board is covered in an intricate tapestry of black and white.