October 2015 – AIReligion

Google says it’s ‘rethinking everything’ around machine learning

It’s already sorting your email and translating your voice searches, and machine learning will play a bigger role in Google’s services moving forward.Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported its quarterly financial results Thursday, with revenue and profit both up from a year earlier. New Google CEO Sundar Pichai took part in his first earnings call, and in between discussing the numbers he revealed how important Google thinks machine learning is to its future.

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Forget Siri: Here’s a New Way for Robots to Talk

Image: Georgia TechGeorgia Tech researcher Dr. Crystal Chao interacts with Simon, a social robot.

Samantha from “Her.” She was smart, feisty, and sometimes pensive. Sam was easy to talk to and brimming with personality.

The AI from Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie caught our attention not just because it had the knowledge base of a thousand IBM Watsons, but also because conversations with Samantha were like chats with a close friend.

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Artificial intelligence comes to toys

Artificial intelligence, which has already made inroads into fields ranging from medicine to aerospace engineering, could end up on end-of-year shopping lists.

That’s because several toy companies – including industry leader Mattel – are planning to roll out an assortment of AI-enabled toys for kids as young as three.

The one toy that everyone has been talking about is Mattel’s Hello Barbie, which is powered by a proprietary platform that was developed by ToyTalk, a San Francisco-based AI company founded by two former Pixar employees. The doll, slated to hit shelves in November, will retail for $74.99 (about R1 000).

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Honda joins race for self-driving car

Honda said Wednesday it would put a commercialized self-driving car on the road by 2020, challenging rivals Toyota and Nissan which are also betting on the future of autonomous vehicles.

The announcement, ahead of the Tokyo Motor Show next week, comes as the auto giants step on the accelerator in a bid to race past overseas competitors on the next-generation technology.

Google has been testing self-driving cars in Silicon Valley, as have U.S.-based Tesla and General Motors, while Nissan has vowed to put an automated car on Japan’s highways as soon as 2016.

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Google invests in Chinese artificial intelligence firm

Google has taken a stake in a Chinese artificial intelligence startup which is aiming to develop smart wearable technologies.

The amount on investment in Mobvoi was not disclosed.

But the companies said that the firm, created by a former Google researcher, has now raised $75 million in equity financing.

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10 artificial intelligence insiders to follow on Twitter

With the flood of news on self-driving cars, drones, caring robots, and more, it isn’t always easy to keep up-to-date with the latest in the artificial intelligence universe. For the insiders’ view on what’s happening in AI, follow these 10 researchers, professors, institutions, and other great thinkers who offer human insight into the world of machines.

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IBM sells Watson’s artificial intelligence to startups

IBM's Watson

An iPad kiosk called VineSleuth wants to help. When it arrives in grocery store aisles next year, you’ll be able to press a button and say what you want in your own words.

“I’d like a cheap rosé that’s not too sweet to go with a Caesar salad.”

Sounds simple enough, but understanding natural spoken language, picking out keywords and using them to identify specific wines is complicated. And VineSleuth is a small startup with only one full-time employee.
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Artificial intelligence is making better drugs

Niven R Narain

Niven R Narain
AI Drug Developer

WIRED 2015 is our annual two-day celebration of the innovators, inventors, artists and entrepreneurs who are reinventing our world. For more from the event, head over to our WIRED 2015 hub.

Creating new drugs is expensive. On average, it takes $2.6bn (£1.7bn) and between ten and 15 years to get a drug from planning to pharmacist, according to some estimates. And that’s because current methods are so untargeted — for every 100 drugs that reach first stage clinical trials, only one goes on to become an actual treatment.

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Microsoft Co-Founder Announces $500 Million Artificial Intelligence Research Project

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen announces that he will invest $500 million to fund two teams of researchers pursuing breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Allen, who is 62 and has an estimated worth of $17 billion, has developed a plan and a research team to systematically attack gaps in artificial intelligence know-how. “We are starting with biology” he explains, “But first you have to figure out how you represent that knowledge in a software database. I wish I could say our understanding of the brain could inform that, but we’re probably a decade away from that. Our understanding of the brain is so elemental at this point that we don’t know how language works in the brain.”

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Intelligent Machines: AI had IQ of four-year-old child

Image captionCurrently AI systems are at a very early, childlike stage of learning

An artificial intelligence system (AI) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken an IQ test designed for a young child.

The results, written up by MIT Review, revealed that its IQ was equivalent to that of a four-year-old.

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