Apple is joining fellow tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM as the sixth founding member of the recently-formed artificial intelligence research group - the Partnership on AI. The non-profit said Apple has been "involved and collaborating with the Partnership since before it was announced" in September and is "thrilled to formalize its membership." "We glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI," Tom Gruber, Apple's head of development for its intelligence personal assistant Siri, said in a statement on the Partnership's website. "We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers." The Partnership also announced that six new non-industry trustees will be joining its board including Jason Furman, former top economic adviser for Barack Obama; Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of AI.

Apple Inc. is set to join the Partnership on AI, an artificial intelligence research group that includes Amazon.com Apple's admission into the group could be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the situation. Representatives at Apple and the Partnership on AI declined to comment. When the nonprofit organization was announced in September, it anticipated gaining additional members. Apple, Twitter Inc., Intel Corp. and China's Baidu Inc. were among noticeable absentees at the time.

Apple published its first paper on AI last month and now the company is set to join five others in a newly-formed research group. The Partnership on AI announced today that Apple would become its sixth founding member, adding to a lineup that already touts Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft. The group was first formed last September as a means of supporting research, establishing ethical guidelines and promoting both transparency and privacy when it comes to AI studies. In today's announcement, the Partnership on AI explained that Apple has already been working with the group before it was made official last fall, but now the company is a full member alongside those other tech titans. Part of today's news was also that the group selected its board of trustees that will oversee the initiative.

Apple is preparing to join the Partnership on AI, a group researching the uses of artificial intelligence, according to a Bloomberg News report late Wednesday. Apple's admission to the nonprofit group could be announced later this week, the report said. The Partnership's members are a Who's Who of tech heavyweights that includes Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. It also includes IBM, the creator of the Watson supercomputer system that won the TV game show "Jeopardy!" The Partnership's mission is "to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public's understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society."

Apple Inc. is set to join the Partnership on AI, an artificial intelligence research group that includes Amazon.com Apple's admission into the group could be announced as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the situation. Representatives at Apple and the Partnership on AI declined to comment. When the nonprofit organization was announced in September, it anticipated gaining additional members. Apple, Twitter Inc., Intel Corp. and China's Baidu Inc. were among noticeable absentees at the time.

Technology and data made possible advances in...technology and data. JL The Economist reports: New techniques have made training deep networks feasible. This takes a lot of number-crunching power, which became available when several AI research groups realised that graphical processing units (GPUs), the specialised chips used in PCs and video-games consoles to generate fancy graphics, were also well suited to running deep-learning algorithms. HOW HAS ARTIFICIAL intelligence, associated with hubris and disappointment since its earliest days, suddenly become the hottest field in technology? The term was coined in a research proposal written in 1956 which suggested that significant progress could be made in getting machines to "solve the kinds of problems now reserved for humans…if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer". That proved to be wildly overoptimistic, to say the least, and despite occasional bursts of progress, AI became known for promising much more than it could deliver.

THE TERM "artificial intelligence" has been associated with hubris and disappointment since its earliest days. It was coined in a research proposal from 1956, which imagined that significant progress could be made in getting machines to "solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans…if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer". That proved to be rather optimistic, to say the least, and despite occasional bursts of progress and enthusiasm in the decades that followed, AI research became notorious for promising much more than it could deliver. Researchers mostly ended up avoiding the term altogether, preferring to talk instead about "expert systems" or "neural networks". But in the past couple of years there has been a dramatic turnaround.

THE TERM "artificial intelligence" has been associated with hubris and disappointment since its earliest days. It was coined in a research proposal from 1956, which imagined that significant progress could be made in getting machines to "solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans…if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer". That proved to be rather optimistic, to say the least, and despite occasional bursts of progress and enthusiasm in the decades that followed, AI research became notorious for promising much more than it could deliver. Researchers mostly ended up avoiding the term altogether, preferring to talk instead about "expert systems" or "neural networks". But in the past couple of years there has been a dramatic turnaround.

Facebook is releasing for free the designs of a powerful new computer server it crafted to put more power behind artificial-intelligence software. Serkan Piantino, an engineering director in Facebook's AI Research group, says the new servers are twice as fast as those Facebook used before. "We will discover more things in machine learning and AI as a result," he says. The social network's giveaway is the latest in a recent flurry of announcements by tech giants that are open-sourcing artificial-intelligence technology, which is becoming vital to consumer and business-computing services. Opening up the technology is seen as a way to accelerate progress in the broader field, while also helping tech companies to boost their reputations and make key hires.

That drone and its basic capabilities are summarized in Figure 1. The flexibility and controllability of quadrotor helicopters have made them a recent focus of interest among robotics and AI research groups. At the same time, their popularity has led to a wide range of commercially available platforms, some at prices accessible for undergraduate educational use. This project evaluates the ARDrone quadrotor helicopter as a basis for use in undergraduate classes such as robotics, computer vision, or embodied AI. We have encountered both successes and frustrations in using the ARDrone to date. Looking forward, the quadrotor's capabilities do seem a promising basis for future curricular offerings.