Provided by Quartz Pigs are seen on a family farm in Xiaoxinzhuang village, Hebei province Alibaba is best known-as China's largest e-commerce company, but it's lately made forays into artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Through a program it calls ET Brain, it's using AI to improve traffic and city planning, increase airport efficiency, and diagnose illness. The company's latest AI foray is taking place among pigs. Alibaba's Cloud Unit signed an agreement on Feb. 6 with the Tequ Group, a Chinese food-and-agriculture conglomerate that raises about 10 million pigs each year (link in Chinese), to deploy facial and voice recognition on Tequ's pig farms. According to an Alibaba representative, the company will offer software to Tequ that it will deploy on its farms with its own hardware.

Yet again, Microsoft has released new AI-based features for Microsoft Excel, Word, Outlook, and more -- a continuing trend since 2016's launch of the Microsoft AI and Research Group. If your business is subscribed to Office 365, this article will acquaint you with the newest features! Finding useful information lurking in massive tables of jumbled numbers and data can be quite a headache. This feature uses machine learning to analyze Excel data, highlight patterns, and create visualizations to make information easier to locate and digest. Thanks to Office 365's Intelligent Search feature, any printed words in images uploaded to SharePoint and OneDrive are now automatically detected, extracted, and made searchable.

We used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity,

The majority of the UK's SMEs are largely unconcerned about the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI), with the potential of improved productivity seen as a possible major benefit, according to research from Close Brothers Asset Finance. The results were obtained from the Close Brothers Business Barometer, a quarterly survey that questions over 1,000 UK and RoI SME owners and senior management across a range of sectors and regions. "The potential impact of the rise of artificial intelligence and the so-called fourth industrial revolution have been discussed and debated for some time now," said Neil Davies, CEO, Close Brothers Asset Finance. "What our survey tells is that 65% of firms feel that AI is either going to improve productivity or that it's too far in the future to be worried about. The remaining 35% are more apprehensive, citing ethical concerns and the threat to jobs as their reasons for not being advocates of AI."

WALTHAM, MA--Heralding its latest product as a breakthrough in artificial-intelligence technology, defense contractor Raytheon announced Friday it has built a military robot capable of composing heart-wrenchingly poignant poems about the relentless horrors of war. The robot, known as the Laureate-IV, reportedly uses sophisticated radar imaging to survey the carnage of war-torn landscapes and runs state-of-the-art facial recognition software to scan the terrified expressions of survivors, data it can then analyze using a complex poetic algorithm to create lyric verse with up to 40 times the pathos of poems produced by human writers. "With its 17.3 petaflop processor and bomb-proof titanium chassis, this robot can enter any combat zone and, employing poetic devices such as meter, enjambment, apostrophe, and symbolism, give full expression to the anguish and disillusionment war brings," said Raytheon CEO Thomas A. Kennedy, explaining that a single machine would be able to match the poetic output of several thousand PTSD-ravaged veterans. "Within minutes of deployment, the Laureate-IV can assess the situation on the ground and draft plaintive lines about what it's like to survive an IED ambush only to be left holding a 20-year-old's intestines in as he bleeds out from a shrapnel wound, his dreams for life disappearing with the wind-blown desert sands." "The result will be beautiful, hauntingly descriptive verse," the executive added.

A team at Google is using everyday humans to shape the decisions that machines make, no coding required. Researchers built a web app that showed people Google's previously reported AI-generated drawings of things like cats and rhinos, and recorded their reactions through a webcam. When people smiled after seeing the doodle, it registered as a positive signal. When they frowned or looked confused, it registered as a negative reaction. After gathering all the drawings that people reacted positively to, the Googlers retrained the AI system with a focus on the "good" examples. The results were better drawings of cats and dogs.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Market leaders such as Amazon, eBay and Netflix are using artificial intelligence (AI) to take their customer experience to a whole new level. Meanwhile, many small-business owners still believe their web sites' live chat will be enough to serve potential buyers. AI has changed online commerce by enabling brands to make sense of their data and put it to good use with smarter algorithms. In this age of conversational commerce, artificial intelligence is critical to providing a personalized experience.

At first it seemed like director Ryan Coogler was simply listening to cultural kismet when he tapped Kendrick Lamar to put together the companion album to Black Panther. Casting the decade's reigning monarch (butterfly) of complex blackness in popular music logically followed from assembling a royal procession of black actors (among whom even Angela Bassett can sashay in as the Wakandan queen mother and barely steal focus) and a palatial retinue of behind-the-camera black excellence to mount a redefinition of the decade's reining genre of popcorn entertainment, the superhero movie. From Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City onward, Lamar's always represented his own trinity of black superhero, supervillain, and mortal in one person, exiled in a world not of his making. Who else, then, but King Kendrick or, as he's more Afrocentrically dubbed himself, King Kunta, for this epic of imagined African kingship transcending an American cartoon mythos? Who else but Kung Fu Kenny for this action film meant to dropkick historical trauma with a kinetic pivot to utopian possibility?

This idea is really interesting. Sadly I don't have nearly enough linear algebra experience to understand the details though. Would IRL still be feasible if the state was not explicit? It seems like this technique depends on prior knowledge of the state machine, but from what I understand about deep reinforcement learning, the state may be very complex, and the value function could actually be a deep neural network.