Effortless customer engagement is top of mind for Quinn Banks, senior product marketing manager at Farmers Insurance -- and he's spearheading the implementation of machine learning to get the company there. "We are working with machine learning to make our app more efficient when customers come in, or even to anticipate what a customer will need when they come into the application, based on their habits, their environmental changes, even Read More ... Tags: Corporate Enterprises Computer systems Customers Artificial intelligence Machine intelligence Machine learning Google crams machine learning into smartwatches in A.I. push Google is bringing artificial intelligence to a whole new set of devices, including Android Wear 2.0 smartwatches and the Raspberry Pi board, later this year. These devices don't require a set of powerful CPUs and GPUs to carry out machine-learning tasks. Google researchers are instead trying to lighten the hardware load to carry out basic A.I. tasks, as exhibited by last week's release of the Android Wear 2.0 operating system Read More ... Tags: Smart Devices Computer systems Smart Watches Artificial intelligence Machine intelligence Machine learning Wearable devices In this video from the 2017 HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference, DK Panda presents: Best Practices: Designing HPC & Deep Learning Middleware for Exascale Systems. "This talk will focus on challenges in designing runtime environments for exascale systems with millions of processors and accelerators to support various programming models.

Carnegie Mellon's No-Limit Texas Hold'em software made short work of four of the world's best professional poker players in Pittsburgh at the grueling "Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence" poker tournament. Poker now joins chess, Jeopardy, go, and many other games at which programs outplay people. But poker is different from all the others in one big way: players have to guess based on partial, or "imperfect" information. One of the most annoying things about Android has long been the custom skins that manufacturers would slap on top of the operating system. Things have gotten better in recent years, but plenty of users would be happier using Android as Google intended.

An artificial intelligence program has written a Christmas carol. Researchers at the University of Toronto used their "" program to write a Christmas carol based off of a "Christmassy photograph," The Guardian reports. The scientists simply uploaded the photograph into a computer hosting the program and then "let it do its thing." The artificial intelligence program then wrote several lines of lyrics and sang them to music it Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Computer Software Artificial intelligence Google's DeepMind'Lab' opens up source code, joins race to develop artificial general intelligence Following right on its heels came Google's that, its machine learning platform, has created a "lab." The DeepMind Lab offers a 3D training environment, and its entire code library is now available on the open source hosting service GitHub. With Universe, OpenAI aimed to address a primary challenge for AI research, which is a lack of "a large variety of realistic environments [for AI agents to] learn progressively more Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Artificial general intelligence Places: Americas North America United States Microsoft's digital assistant, Cortana, could be getting an upgrade--and Intel may be helping.

Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a "Like" button. In the pixelated cube world of "Minecraft," players can create almost anything their hearts desire. Now, Microsoft is using the popular world-building game to build and test artificial intelligence in the fictional environment. Microsoft has made a platform for (AI) research using a modified version of "Minecraft" that will become available to the public following a limited release to select researchers.

Google buys machine vision startup focusing on'instant object recognition' It's a good time to be a machine learning startup. Two weeks after Twitter bought, has purchased . The acquisition was made for an unknown sum, and seems primarily a grab for talent. Moodstocks' engineers and researchers will move to Google's Paris R&D site, and the startup's primary commercial product -- an image recognition API for smartphones -- will be phased out. "Ever since we started Moodstocks, our Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Machine intelligence Machine learning Places: Americas North America United States Google today announced it has acquired French machine learning startup Moodstocks for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the next few weeks and seems to be focused primarily on the talent, with the team at Moodstocks moving to Google's Paris R&D site, and its image recognition API for smartphones to be gradually phased out.