Google grant of $800K to start writing stories with the help of artificial intelligence

Google is giving the Press Association news agency a grant of €706,000 ($806,000) to start writing stories with the help of artificial intelligence TheVerge inform. The money is coming out of the tech giant’s Digital News Initiative fund, which supports digital journalism in Europe. The PA supplies news stories to media outlets all over the UK and Ireland, and will be working with a startup named Urbs Media to produce 30,000 local stories a month with the help of AI.

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AI, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Cryptocurrency Trading

Just because Grindelwald and Dumbledore had a deadly brawl during their quest to revolutionise magic doesn’t mean two great powers cannot be used in concert to change the world. This could be the worst way to start an important conversation about financial technology, but stick with me, it gets more interesting. We are speaking about the world-altering technology of Artificial Intelligence as the first superpower coupled with the financial system disruptive technology of cryptocurrency — a decentralised payment system that circumvents government manipulation of currency and is forcing us to redefine the concept of money. The question is: Can these two technologies be used together to change the way ordinary people like you and me invest our money — without expiring in a shower of blue sparks? “Avada Kedaura!”

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New optical chip for AI is a thousand times more effective than silicon

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a processor for in-depth training, working on an optical chip. Such a chip requires a thousand times less energy than traditional CPUs and GPUs, and better cope with some tasks.

“Deep learning” computer systems, based on artificial neural networks that mimic the way the brain learns from an accumulation of examples, have become a hot topic in computer science. In addition to enabling technologies such as face- and voice-recognition software, these systems could scour vast amounts of medical data to find patterns that could be useful diagnostically, or scan chemical formulas for possible new pharmaceuticals.

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Financial institutions turning to artificial intelligence for data mining, cost savings

BB&T Corp. has a well-earned reputation for being deliberate when it comes to adopting technological advances.

That’s why BB&T executives’ enthusiasm for plugging artificial intelligence and robotics into its back-office, customer service and compliance operations has raised eyebrows with analysts and economists.

BB&T joins Wells Fargo & Co. and other national and super-regional banks in spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue what they believe will be significant future cost savings from data mining of customer patterns.

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In a neurotechnology future, human-rights laws will need to be revisited

New human rights laws to prepare for rapid current advances in neurotechnology that may put “freedom of mind” at risk have been proposed in the open access journal Life Sciences, Society and Policy.

Four new human rights laws could emerge in the near future to protect against exploitation and loss of privacy, the authors of the study suggest: The right to cognitive liberty, the right to mental privacy, the right to mental integrity, and the right to psychological continuity.

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$1,360 and Growth Up: What’s Next For Bitcoin Prices?

The price of bitcoin is once again trading near an all-time high Coindesk said.

After about a month of uncertainty following the rejection of a major investment vehicle, bitcoin prices reached $1,343.59, a new all-time high on the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index on last Thursday of April, breaking the previous record of $1,325.81, set in March.

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Better Than Doctors: AI Predicts Heart Attacks

Using data from the medical records of more than 300,000 patients, researchers created an algorithm that can accurately predict 7.6 percent more heart attacks than doctors using standard methods.  Doctors have gotten very good at determining which of their patients are at high risk for a heart attack. But new research suggests that artificial intelligence may be even better — and that widespread use of AI could save many of the lives now lost to heart disease, the leading killer in the U.S.
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40,000 Tinder selfies scraped to make a facial dataset for AI experiments

Someone scraped 40,000 Tinder selfies to make a facial dataset for AI experiments. Tinder users have many motives for uploading their likeness to the dating app. But contributing a facial biometric to a downloadable data set for training convolutional neural networks probably wasn’t top of their list when they signed up to swipe.

A user of Kaggle, a platform for machine learning and data science competitions which was recently acquired by Google, has uploaded a facial data set he says was created by exploiting Tinder’s API to scrape 40,000 profile photos from Bay Area users of the dating app — 20,000 apiece from profiles of each gender.

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Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence may supersede humans, disrupt economy

 Stephen Hawking, the world-famous theoretical physicist, recorded in advance a keynote speech titled Guiding AI to benefit humanity and the environment for the 2017 Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing, which has kicked off on Thursday at the China National Convention Center. The development of artificial intelligence, as one of the key topics for the innovative technology event, has spurred interest in Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time.

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Robots Are Winning the Race for American Jobs

Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now they’ve declared a different winner: the robots.

The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.

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