Al Jazeera launches new integrative AI model, 'The Core' Al Jazeera Media Network is launching a new integrative artificial intelligence (AI) model in collaboration with Google Cloud. Al Jazeera said on Sunday that it was expanding its collaboration with Google Cloud on the network's new initiative, dubbed "The Core", that will integrate AI into its news operations. "The Core" aims to shift the role of AI "from a passive tool to an active partner in journalism", Al Jazeera said. Relying on six pillars, the initiative will integrate AI systems to help Al Jazeera journalists process complex data, produce immersive content, gain access to analytical context and automate internal workflows, among other things. "Al Jazeera is committed to establishing a global technological ecosystem that cements our leadership in the AI era," said Sheikh Nasser bin Faisal Al Thani, director general of Al Jazeera Media Network.

's most controversial moment was years in the making. It took many more for the fallout to come into full view. One morning in 2010, Alex Trebek walked onto the IBM campus not far outside New York City and prepared to inspect what would become the most unusual player in's history. The trip, clear across the country from the show's Culver City set, had been carefully planned. David Ferrucci, a computer scientist at IBM, had spent years leading a team to develop what would become the first and, so far, last nonhuman ever to compete on Longtime host Trebek would watch three practice games played with "Watson," as the system was named, and two human contestants. Then the team would be taken to lunch nearby, and Trebek would ultimately take the stage and host two more Watson practice games himself. By then the preparations for a future televised contest with IBM's creation were well underway, but this was the first time Trebek would encounter the technology in person, and his approval was crucial. Ferrucci was eager to show off one element in particular: the display, which had been rigged to show Watson's top three guesses whenever it answered, along with the numerical confidence rate it had in each one. For Ferrucci, this feature was central to demonstrating the computer's language-processing capabilities, because it showed that Watson wasn't just spitting out answers--it was reasoning. If Watson were ever going to be deployed to industries like health care, its human users wouldn't just want to know its best guess. It would be infinitely more valuable to know if Watson was 95 percent confident or just 30 percent, and whether those confidence levels were in line with its actual accuracy rate. It also made for better viewing. Ferrucci had brought his young daughter to the lab earlier in the process and showed her Watson as it played against human opponents. When Watson declined to ring in, Ferrucci's daughter turned to him and asked if the computer had crashed. He struggled to explain that it hadn't--it just wasn't confident enough to hazard a guess.

Last night in a livestreamed broadcast, Sony showed its new video game console, the PlayStation 5, for the first time, along with 28 new games that will be out this year or next. It is a futuristic-looking thing, all white curves and black and blue-LED accents and a touch of mid-00s service robot about it. One version is digital-only, the other comes with a drive for people who prefer to buy games on disc. As cloud-based and Netflix-like subscription services have gained traction in the video game world, the "end of the console" has become a popular conversation point. Two years ago at E3, the yearly video games conference, Microsoft's Phil Spencer told the Guardian that "we pivoted about three or four years ago to thinking about the gamer first, not the device first … Our focus is on bringing console quality games that you see on TV or PC to any device."

Last month's E3 video game expo was a strange one for PlayStation. Traditionally, video games' biggest companies use the annual Los Angeles conference as an opportunity to bombard attendees and fans watching online with new games. For rival consoles Xbox and PlayStation, ostentatious showcase press events are especially important and competitive: once a customer chooses between the two, they are likely to play on that console for years to come. Microsoft showed 50 games at its Xbox press conference at E3 2018, on a big stage with lots of fancy lighting. By contrast, Sony constructed several elaborate sets on an LA film lot, each themed around a different forthcoming PlayStation 4 games: The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man and Death Stranding.

It seems like only yesterday when everyone was talking about the impact of Big Data on the insurance industry. Talk about Big Data now and you will almost seem old-fashioned – it's all about artificial intelligence and InsurTech. Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be everywhere. It is making decisions about what we buy, when we buy it and how much it costs. It is controlling interactions between customers and suppliers.

Computers are now defeating us in casino table games. Libratus, an Artificial Intelligence system developed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has been squaring off against four professional poker players since Jan 11. Libratus is up nearly $800,000 through 80,000 hands of heads-up no limit Texas Hold'em against the four pros. "It's not about the money," said Jason Les, a professional from Costa Mesa, CA, in an interview with The Verge. With 40,000 hands left to play, the $800,000 deficit is nearly impossible for the humans to make up.

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords," he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a "Simpsons" episode. From now on, if the answer is "the computer champion on "Jeopardy!," the question will be, "What is Watson?" For I.B.M., the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt and a $1 million prize, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them. Watson, specifically, is a "question answering machine" of a type that artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades -- a computer akin to the one on "Star Trek" that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them. Watson showed itself to be imperfect, but researchers at ...

Watson has already won a practice round on the show against two top contestants, showing that artificial intelligence has come a long way in simulating how humans think. "We have created a computer system which has the ability to understand natural human language, which is a very difficult thing for a computer to do," said John Kelly, director of IBM Research. "In the field of artificial intelligence, people spend their lifetimes trying to advance that science inches. What Watson does and has demonstrated is the ability to advance the field of artificial intelligence by miles." Watson, who is named after legendary International Business Machines President Thomas Watson, is a showcase of the company's computing expertise and research in advanced science.

Over a three-day period in February, millions of people watched as the supercomputer steadily triumphed over Jennings and Rutter, beating the men at complicated clues like "A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called this'of the Hedgehog'?" You don't have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up" (response: "What is narcolepsy?"). Watson also made some funny mistakes, like when it responded "What Is Toronto?????" to a clue about the names of a city's airports, while his human opponents correctly met the prompt with "What is Chicago?" In the end, Watson racked up $77,147 to Jennings's and Rutter's respective $24,000 and $21,600; IBM was awarded $1 million to give to charity; Jennings jokingly welcomed "our new computer overlords"; and Jeopardy!got a ratings spike. At the time, IBM was estimated to have spent somewhere between $900 million and $1.8 billion developing Watson's artificial-intelligence technology and, as far as the public could see, all the company had to show for it was an elaborate parlor trick. "IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek," wrote Jennings in a Slate pieceabout his encounter with the machine. "The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson." Five years later, that future appears to be knocking at the door. While Watson's servers and memory have the capacity to process the entire American Library of Congress, the system, as IBM research head John Kelly put it to Charlie Rose on a recent 60 Minutes, "has no inherent intelligence as it starts.