Axon (formerly Taser) is keenly aware of the potential for Orwellian abuses of facial recognition, and it's taking an unusual step to avoid creating that drama with its body cameras and other image recognition systems. The police- and military-focused company has created an AI ethics board that will convene twice per year (on top of regular interactions) to discuss the ramifications of upcoming products. As spokesperson Steve Tuttle explained to The Verge, this will ideally establish a set of "AI ethics principles" within police work where certain uses are off-limits. The company isn't developing any as-it-happens facial recognition systems at present, but CEO Rick Smith told the Washington Post that it's in "active consideration." He was aware of the possibility of "bias and misuse," but thought that it would be "naive and counterproductive" to deny the technology to officers who'd otherwise have to commit suspects' faces to memory.

About how modern technology allow machines to learn from memory. How Smart Is Today's Artificial Intelligence? Will Computers Ever Hear Like People Do? Explained: Google Earth imagery.

Over the past few years, Nvidia has established itself as a major leader in machine learning and artificial intelligence processing. The GPU designer dove into the HPC market over a decade ago when it launched the G80 and its parallel compute platform API, CUDA. Early leadership has paid off for Nvidia; the company holds 87 spots on the TOP500 list of supercomputers, compared with just 10 for Intel. But as machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads proliferate, vendors are emerging to give Nvidia a run for its money, including Google's new Cloud TPU. New benchmarks from RiseML put both Nvidia and Google's TPU head-to-head -- and the cost curve strongly favors Google.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Computer scientists have created a deep-learning, software-coding application that can help human programmers navigate the growing multitude of often-undocumented application programming interfaces, or APIs. Designing applications that can program computers is a long-sought grail of the branch of computer science called artificial intelligence (AI). The new application, called Bayou, came out of an initiative aimed at extracting knowledge from online source code repositories like GitHub. Users can try it out at askbayou.com.

The insurance industry has become more digital in recent years as its reliance on data and technology has grown. Despite this, many insurers and insureds still rely on paper -- especially when it comes to claims.

The insurance industry has become more digital in recent years as its reliance on data and technology has grown. Despite this, many insurers and insureds still rely on paper -- especially when it comes to claims.

IBM is bringing its enterprise artificial intelligence assistant to IFTTT, paving the way for intelligent services that can do much more than tell users the weather or answer trivia questions, the companies announced on April 26. Watson Assistant, formerly Watson Conversation, made its official debut on March 20 during IBM's Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas. In addition to new analytics capabilities and features that allow developers to create more fluid and robust conversational interactions, the virtual assistant is now available in versions tailored to the automotive and hospitality industries. IFTTT, short for "If This, Then That," is a San Francisco technology firm whose web service enables users to automate tasks across various other services or cloud applications. Using applets, each with a set of conditional commands, users can trigger a chain of actions like automatically adding new iOS contacts to one's contact list on Google or use Google Assistant to post a note on Slack with one's voice.

Our client hosts a large annual conference of 20,000 technical decision makers, IT professionals, and software developers from around the world. The conference includes over 700 sessions across multiple days that range from product demos to insights from industry leaders. Selected sessions from the annual event are repeated in smaller events in cities around the world. Each conference event generates a lot of feedback from attendees. The conference organizers analyze the feedback to determine whether each day was a success.

Google parent company Alphabet reported first quarter earnings for 2018 today, beating Wall Street estimates on sales and profit thanks in large part to its mammoth search advertising machine that continues to grow year after year. But one interesting highlight from the earnings announcement was just how much money the company's smart home company Nest earns in revenue and reports in losses. Because Nest was rolled back into Google proper earlier this year, Alphabet recast its quarterly earnings figures for 2017 to account for the fact that Nest revenues and losses would be moved from the "Other Bets" section of Alphabet's business to the standard Google revenue line item. Comparing the differences in quarterly revenues and operating income, we can see that Nest made about $726 million in revenue, yet it ultimately contributed a $621 million loss to the "Other Bets" section throughout the year. In other words, Google spent more than half a billion dollars last year to establish Nest in sectors like security cameras, alarm systems, and video doorbells.