You may not have the resources to do everything, and you may not have the capacity, the bandwidth, the processing power to do everything in an individual product, so you have to make selections," says Tom Kerber, an analyst with Parks Associates. "Limiting those choices to the critical few is important." Meanwhile, consumers are left to untangle a spider web of product integrations. Samsung SmartThings devices, for instance, are controllable through Amazon's Alexa system, but not through Siri. August smart locks are controllable through Siri, but not through Alexa.

We opened Watson to the world a few years ago so we could put our cognitive technology directly in the hands of developers across every industry and geography. We did this by creating an AI platform that's based on advanced science yet simple for developers to adopt, and is designed to scale. In just a short time, more than 80,000 developers are already innovating on the Watson platform, building with our APIs and creating novel solutions for healthcare, finance, legal, sports and more. In some cases, developers are solving some of society's greatest challenges, in others they're tackling smaller initiatives to gain better insights from data. We're constantly motivated and inspired by what they're creating.

Salesforce.com's automation efforts got a boost Monday with the news it has acquired AI startup MetaMind. Salesforce will integrate MetaMind's technology into its own services for new marketing-automation and personalization capabilities, according to a blog post from MetaMind founder Richard Socher. "We'll extend Salesforce's data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform," Socher wrote. Socher's personal Web page now lists his title as chief scientist at the customer relationship management giant. MetaMind's products will be discontinued on May 4 for users of its free versions, and on June 4 for paid users.

While the internet of things (IoT) is changing the automotive industry, most young US internet users still prefer a traditional car to a self-driving vehicle, according to October 2015 research. Nielsen polled 1,133 US children and teens ages 8 to 18. More than half of respondents in grades 3 through 5 said they prefer traditional vehicles. US children and teens in older grade levels also preferred traditional cars. For example, 59% of respondents in grades 6 through 8 said they preferred traditional cars, while 41% in that age group said they favored self-driving cars.

A wave of innovation has made it possible for people to get their banking done without walking into a branch if they don't want to. People can now deposit checks using a smartphone or digitally fire off cash to friends using Venmo. The end result is a pretty sweet experience for consumers...but an imminent threat to people who work at bank branches. The downsizing of the bank workforce is about to accelerate as more technology takes over jobs humans used to do, according to a new Citigroup report. Another 30% of bank jobs could be lost between 2015 and 2025, mainly due to retail banking automation, Citi warned.

Tinder isn't as private as many of its users think, and a new website which aims to exploit that is causing concern among users of the dating app. Swipebuster promises to let Tinder users find out whether people they know have an account on the dating app, and even stalk them down to their last known location. The website charges 4.99 ( 3.50) to let someone see whether the target is using Tinder, and can narrow down results by first name, age, gender and location. But it doesn't do so by hacking into Tinder, or even by "scraping" the app manually. Instead, it searches the database using Tinder's official API, which is intended for use by third-party developers who want to write software that plugs in with the site.

You may think your contacts and photos are safely locked away on your iPhone. But a new bug has been discovered that seemingly lets people unlock iPhone 6S and 6S Plus models without inputting a password or using the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Bypassing the security measures is possible because the bug takes advantage of unauthenticated access to Siri, which can then be used to tap into a phone owner's contacts. A new bug has been reported that appears to let people access private data such as photos and contacts on iPhone 6S and 6S Plus models without inputting a password or using the Touch ID fingerprint scanner. Spanish tech expert, Jose Rodriguez, claims to have discovered the bug and demonstrated the exploit in a YouTube video punished under the name Videosdebarraquito.

There are five main schools of thought in machine learning, and each has its own master algorithm – a general-purpose learner that can in principle be applied to any domain. The symbolists have inverse deduction, the connectionists have backpropagation, the evolutionaries have genetic programming, the Bayesians have probabilistic inference, and the analogizers have support vector machines. What we really need, however, is a single algorithm combining the key features of all of them. In this webinar I will summarize the five paradigms and describe my work toward unifying them, including in particular Markov logic networks. I will conclude by speculating on the new applications that a universal learner will enable, and how society will change as a result.

Facebook is using an artificial intelligence system to automatically caption photos in an effort to increase the accessibility of its website and apps. The feature, called "automatic alternative text", uses image recognition technology developed through machine-learning to identify the objects pictured. It's not perfect yet, with sample captions from Facebook, shared by The Verge, reading more like a laundry list than a descriptive overview: "Image may contain: two people, smiling, sunglasses, sky, outdoor, water" reads the caption on one picture of a couple taking a photograph on a beach, while "image may contain: pizza, food" is the caption for a picture of a tasty-looking pepperoni and olive pizza. Related: AI is already making inroads into journalism but could it win a Pulitzer? But the technology, which is launching first on iOS, will do a great deal towards making the Facebook app more usable for blind and visually impaired visitors.

The era of the one-size-fits-all supercomputer is over. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), the market leader in this space, is now producing high performance computing systems for specific needs. The shift is being driven, in part, by the increasing desire for systems that can process data efficiently. HPE on Monday announced a series of new systems targeted at specific processes such as "deep learning." This is a branch of machine learning used, in particular, to analyze images and sound.