It seems like everyone wants to invest in artificial intelligence (AI). And it's not just the tech giants: USAA is using AI to protect its users from identity theft and Under Armour has connected its health app, MyFitnessPal, to IBM Watson so users can get a more thorough read of their health. AI is already a 15 billion dollar industry, according to the MIT Technology Review, with more than 2,600 companies developing their own tech, and the value of AI is reported to rise to over 70 billion by 2020. Because of AI's business opportunities, hundreds of designers in digital agencies, people who were taught to create products and services that live on the Internet, are starting to build physical products that interact with us, respond to our moods, and make decisions for us. It's a challenge that requires every skill they've learned, plus many they haven't. Still, designers know the basics: The principles of user-centric design lay the groundwork for building a great AI system.

In NLP we use sentiment to refer to the positive or negative emotions a person expresses in their language. It may be measured categorically (negative) or numerically (-1.2). It may be measured at the utterance level or as applied to a particular entity or topic. It may be calculated via any number of algorithms, but from the standpoint of a user of text analytics software, you provide text to a program and get back information about the sentiment. When you design the conversational paths of your chatbot you are concerned primarily with the topics of conversation.

No longer confined to science fiction, artificial intelligence is here and it's set to transform the way we live and work. At the forefront of this computing revolution is IBM, which has its sights set on changing the world with its cognitive computing engine Watson. As many will know, Watson shot to fame in 2011 when it appeared on US game show Jeopardy, beating two previous winners to secure the 1m prize. Since then IBM have put the technology to use in various industries including retail, healthcare and financial services. A survey carried out by IBM earlier this year showed that 50% of top CEOs predict AI and Cognitive Computing will disrupt their industry.

The artificial intelligence (AI) system is "based on deep learning, a machine-learning algorithm used for a range of applications including speech recognition and image recognition," explains Andrew Beck, an associate professor in pathology at Harvard Medical School, who heads the team developing the new system at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), in Boston, MA. Prof. Beck and colleagues demonstrated the new AI system in a competition held at the annual meeting of the International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2016) in Prague in April. He and his colleagues are developing AI methods that train computers to interpret pathology images to improve the accuracy of diagnoses. The approach they are using teaches computers to interpret the complex patterns seen in such images by "building multi-layer artificial neural networks," says Prof. Beck. The process is thought to be similar to the way learning takes place in the layers of neurons in the neocortex of the brain, the region where thinking occurs.

Physical wellbeing has been the focus of most wearables to date. At the same time some startups are appearing which try to track mental states. But these are usually head bands which make you like an updated 21st Century Hippie. The new ZENTA wrist-wearable takes a different approach. Created by VINAYA, a London-based technology design house, the Zenta goes down this mental wellness path.

Devin Butts walked the tiled halls of the Pueblo Mall early one Friday morning in April, amazed at what he saw. The mall, the main shopping center for the city of Pueblo in southern Colorado, was larger than anything the 25-year-old was used to while living on the streets of quiet prairie towns in north central Texas. He wandered through T-shirt stores and schlocky gift shops, past American flag-adorned beer bongs and marijuana-emblazoned "Rocky Mountain High" shirts, not noticing how employees warily eyed his baggy jeans and the tattoos peeking out from the sleeves and collar of his Bob Marley T-shirt. Or maybe he'd learned from experience to ignore the looks. Butts inquired at shop after shop. Often he received an apologetic shake of the head. Sometimes he was told to fill out an application online, no easy feat for someone who didn't own a computer.

We've noticed a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) among online marketplaces, including eBay (eBay CEO Devin Wenig said AI technology will render the search box redundant), Alibaba (invested in Twiggle), and Amazon (CEO Jeff Bezos said we're at the beginning of a golden age of AI). According to Facebook's detailed post published on Wednesday, June 1, DeepText is a deep-learning artificial intelligence system that is able to understand the content of several thousand posts per second. The system will also be able to filter out malicious, hateful, or hurtful speech on the social network, along with photos that contravene Facebook's policies. Published By: Eunice Gettys on June 5, 2016 08:37 am EST Microsoft Corporation ( NASDAQ:MSFT) announced back in March that Windows 10 had exceeded 300 million active users, calculating from when the operating system was launched in mid-2015, making it the company's most successful operating system ever. Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business.

Dan Schutzer (photo left), a senior technology consultant at the Financial Services Roundtable's BITS technology division defined artificial intelligence as'the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.' According to Schutzer, efforts in the 1990s to build artificial intelligence-like systems for use in financial services has resulted in'disillusionment as realization set in that these systems were harder and more costly to build and maintain than first anticipated.' Fast forward to 2015 when advances in high performance computing, algorithmic theory and cloud computing are bringing us closer to true AI capabilities for commercial use by the financial industry. Patrick Tucker, author of The Naked Future: What Happens In a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?, wrote that "When the cost of collecting information on virtually every interaction falls to zero, the insights that we gain from our activity, in the context of the activity of others, will fundamentally change the way we relate to one another, to institutions, and with the future itself." "One of the first things to note about AI is its ability to process enormous amounts of data very quickly and far more data than it's ever been processed in the past by humans or computer programs. That is going to enable banks to improve the services they provide to customers, including better, more targeted advice," said Astrid Raetze (photo right), a partner at Baker & McKenzie.

You'll find the Future of Humanity Institute down a medieval backstreet in the centre of Oxford. It is beside St Ebbe's church, which has stood on this site since 1005, and above a Pure Gym, which opened in April. The institute, a research faculty of Oxford University, was established a decade ago to ask the very biggest questions on our behalf. Notably: what exactly are the "existential risks" that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of? When I arrive to meet the director of the institute, Professor Nick Bostrom, a bed is being delivered to the second-floor office. Existential risk is a round-the-clock kind of operation; it sleeps fitfully, if at all. Bostrom, a 43-year-old Swedish-born philosopher, has lately acquired something of the status of prophet of doom among those currently doing most to shape our civilisation: the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley.

Is your smart phone really smart? Do you ever fear it will get too smart? Will it wake up one morning and decide to start running your life – deleting contacts it doesn't like, booking holidays online that it wants to go on with you or shifting your calendar appointments to suit its tastes? Perhaps, more realistically, you may be inclined to feel that your printer has a mind and mood swings of its own, seemingly out to get you when you are facing the most desperate deadline. But actually, the more we progress in the field of robotics, the more we are forced to recognise and appreciate that the mind is a unique wonder of the living world.