Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), one of Hamad Bin Khalifa University's (HBKU's) national research institutes, has partnered with Qatar Living, a rich source of non-official information on Qatar, to incorporate natural language understanding technology on the Qatar Living website. QCRI's Arabic Language Technology Group has worked on the advancement of the technology for over two years. In collaboration with a team of engineers from Qatar Living, the development is now ready for industry application, allowing visitors to the website the ability to easily and quickly find answers to their questions on the forum to save time. QCRI joined forces with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL)to develop novel algorithms for language processing on the data provided by Qatar Living. "The collaboration with Qatar Living provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate our technology, and acquire insights from these kinds of real-world applications," said Dr Alessandro Moschitti, principal scientist at QCRI and principal investigator on the QCRI side of the project.

Telstra Network Disruptions challenged Kagglers to predict the severity of service disruptions on their network. Using a dataset of features from their service logs, participants were tasked with predicting if a disruption was a momentary glitch or a total interruption of connectivity. Mario Filho, a self-taught data scientist, took first place in his first "solo win". In this blog, he shares a high-level view of his approach. My background in machine learning is completely "self-taught". It all began in 2012 when I decided to learn Calculus on my own through the videos from a MIT class.

I was just given an Amazon Echo as a gift and was very excited to connect it and set it up. For those of you less familiar with Echo, it is Amazon's cloud based intelligent agent, which interacts using voice recognition and performs some useful tasks using voice commands. The hardware is a cylinder about 9 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. The "wake up phrase," and therefore the name of the agent, is "Alexa." After setting it up I walked through some of the features – asking about the weather, setting a timer, listening to a radio station, asking about specific facts (like capitals of states or countries, measures, math problems), asking about local movies, getting an NPR "flash briefing" and a few other interesting functions.

Artificial intelligence has made significant inroads in the consumer world, but use of the technology in the enterprise is still in its infancy. Stephen Pratt, who recently quit his job as global leader of Watson for IBM Services, is looking to change that. On Monday, he launched Noodle Analytics, a company that promises to bring the power of AI to businesses. Billed as "the enterprise artificial intelligence company," Noodle is built on the premise that AI is the next big thing that will set companies apart. Anyone who searches on Google, navigates with Waze or shops on Amazon has already used a consumer AI service.

Dire predictions that humans will be replaced by machines in the workplace continue to make headlines. Drones are delivering packages to your doorstep. The manufacturing, automotive and healthcare industries are already highly automated in many countries, and technology companies are racing to create the next "new and improved" version of artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, a much-cited Oxford study that looked at 702 occupations in the U.S. concluded that 47% of U.S. employment is at risk of being lost to computerization. U.S. employee anxiety notwithstanding, this begs the question: What has your company done in the wake of such news?

Office work is also set to change. Earlier this week, Blue Prism announced plans to debut on the London Stock Exchange. The company, which grew 35 percent in 2015, develops "software robots" which can perform clerical and administration tasks. "Software robots have been deployed successfully and strategically by large, blue chip organizations that have derived tremendous value from this new solution to the labor market," said Alastair Bathgate, the company's co-founder and CEO, in a press release. However, workers should not be overly worried.

It's hard to tell if there's anything left to invent. While the world is full of infinite possibilities, sometimes it seems that every n 1 of those possibilities has already been addressed. A platform for selling musical instruments to strangers or post fetish wanted ads? How about a robot that instantly pulls and returning info from the internet when requested? Sixteen years ago, three guys had that exact idea--and it didn't exist.

What do our representations of AI say about gender and sexuality? Recent films, like Her and Ex Machina, portray specifically female AI. Her presents Samantha as a questing mind with emotional needs similar to those of humans. Samantha has true consciousness in her ability to love Theo. Yet, because she is non-corporeal, she is not quite human.

Dmitry Slepov is the managing director and a co-founder of Tibbo Technology. Before we begin, I feel compelled to make an important disclosure: I love robots! To me, robots are cooler than people, who are only cool occasionally. I especially love industrial robots: They help us "make" things. Now please allow me to make an obvious observation: Like me, many folks think robots in general, and industrial robots in particular, are very cool.

Guest blog post by Dalila Benachenhou, originally posted here. Dalila is Professor at George Washington University. In this article, benchmarks were computed on a specific data set, for Geico Calls Prediction, comparing Random Forests, Neural Networks, SVM, FDA, K Nearest Neighbors, C5.0 (Decision Trees), Logistic Regression, and Cart. Introduction: In the first blog, we decided on the predictors. We knew that different predictive models have different assumptions about their predictors.