The Windows 11 Photos app is testing a pair of key AI-powered features, continuing a surprising and welcome renaissance in Microsoft's multimedia apps. Microsoft said Thursday that the Photos app is adding background blur, the "portrait mode" that's become common smartphones. Even better, the OneDrive app now has smarter search capabilities for photos, so that you'll be able to search by the content of the picture, such as a beach scene or "snow." We criticized Microsoft earlier this year for the fact the old Photos app was better than the new one. And in some sense, it is: in Photos Legacy, you can search for content, such as the previously mentioned beach scenes.

H2O.ai Melds Machine Learning with Spark, Via Sparkling Water 2.0 by - Jul. 01, 2016 The Renaissance Continues for Open Source Artificial Intelligence Baidu Delivers a Hardened Open Source Deep Learning Tool Google Launches a Slew of Open Source Parsers, to Work with 40 Languages IBM's Massive Spark Initiatives Include an Offering for Data Scientists In recent interviews here on OStatic, found here and here, we have explored the efforts of H2O.ai, formerly known as Oxdata, which has steadily been carving out a niche with its open source software for big data analysis and machine learning. You can get the main H2O platform and Sparkling Water, a package that works with Apache Spark, by simply downloading them. You can run them on clusters powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others for just a few hundred dollars, putting powerful artificial intelligence muscle in reach of everyone. Now, H2O.ai has announced the availability of Sparkling Water 2.0. Sparkling Water 2.0 builds off the popularity of Sparkling Water, H2O.ai's API for Apache Spark, with additional features and functionality.