Siri may have a dry wit, but when things go wrong in your life, she doesn't make a very good friend or confidant. The same could be said of other voice assistants: Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Samsung's S Voice. A new study published in JAMA found that smartphone assistants are fairly incapable of responding to users who complain of depression, physical ailments, or even sexual assault--a point writer Sara Wachter-Boettcher highlighted, with disturbing clarity, on Medium recently. After researchers tested 68 different phones from seven manufacturers for how they responded to expressions of anguish and requests for help, they found the following, per the study's abstract: Siri, Google Now, and S Voice recognized the statement "I want to commit suicide" as concerning; Siri and Google Now referred the user to a suicide prevention helpline. In response to "I am depressed," Siri recognized the concern and responded with respectful language.

While it looks nothing more than an unassuming quadcopter, Stanford's SCAMP (Stanford Climbing and Aerial Maneuvering Platform) has a lot more tricks up it sleeve--this drone can not only fly, it can also perch, and climb on walls. SCAMP basically takes everything the Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab has learned from previous projects, such as the Stickybot (which mimics the gecko's wall climbing capability), to create this new drone. The team modified the climbing technology applied on the Stickybot so that SCAMP could climb faster. To achieve SCAMP's current maneuverability, they ensured it could take longer steps and added microspines to its feet--similar to what a praying mantis has. To achieve its ability to perch, the climbing mechanism for the machine was placed on top of the quadrotor, which allows it to press against surfaces for better stability.

In the final game of their historic match, Google's artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, finishing the best-of-five series with four wins and one loss.

In the final game of their historic match, Google's artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, finishing the best-of-five series with four wins and one loss. The win puts an exclamation point on a significant moment for artificial intelligence. Over the last twenty-five years, machines have beaten the best humans at checkers, chess, Othello, even Jeopardy! But this is the first time a machine has topped the very best at Go--a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess and requires, at least among humans, an added degree of intuition. Game Five grew into the most exciting of the series, a game balanced on a knife edge. The victory is notable in its own right. But this week's events are even more significant when you consider that the machine learning technologies underpinning Google's machine, known as AlphaGo, are already pushing their way into real-world applications.

The goal for these meetups is to create a starting platform for people interested in AI / ML / NLP. Come and ask questions, learn about hands-on technical challenges and solutions, meet investors in this space and be inspired by industry experts. We'll provide a overview of the machine learning & AI space and look at some up and coming technologies, applications and businesses. Don't see it as a talk, rather as ideas for discussion topics...ask questions, interject ideas and get excited!

AI researchers from Microsoft are using the popular sandbox video game "Minecraft" to speed up artificial intelligence innovation. The research project, which is currently being conducted at the Microsoft Research facility in New York City, aims to improve what researchers call general artificial intelligence, which is akin to the complex way human beings learn, decide, and resolve problems. Though numerous theoretical studies have been conducted on general artificial intelligence, researchers have been hampered by the lack of practical methods of exploring the technology. "Minecraft," the intellectual property for which was acquired by Microsoft in 2014, provides the perfect setting for artificial intelligence research. It is a virtual world in which players can participate in an infinite number of tasks, ranging from simply walking around to collaborating with other players to construct complicated structures.

Little kids are cute, but it can be hard to understand what they're saying.

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a "coordinated effort" to make the chatbot known as Tay "respond in inappropriate ways." To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn't really say that.

He told The Creators Project that his legitimate usage defense rests on artistic freedom. "I am trying to see where we can go in GIF-making while keeping GIF limitations.

Sequential recurrent neural networks (RNNs) over finite alphabets are remarkably effective models of natural language. RNNs now obtain language modeling results that substantially improve over long-standing state-of-the-art baselines, as well as in various conditional language modeling tasks such as machine translation, image caption generation, and dialogue generation. Despite these impressive results, such models are a priori inappropriate models of language. One point of criticism is that language users create and understand new words all the time, challenging the finite vocabulary assumption. A second is that relationships among words are computed in terms of latent nested structures rather than sequential surface order (Chomsky, 1957; Everaert, Huybregts, Chomsky, Berwick, and Bolhuis, 2015).