Fortune magazine last week released a list of 50 Companies Leading the AI Revolution, and the prestigious list includes three hot Israeli companies in the artificial intelligence sector: Logz.io, Voyager Labs, and Zebra Medical Vision.

Fortunes infographic includes only six countries and features an equal number of notable AI companies from Israel (population 8.5 million) as China (population 1.38 billion) and the United Kingdom, and more than France and Taiwan. Only the United States has more companies on the graph.

Fortune relied on research firm CB Insights AI 100 list of the most promising artificial intelligence startups globally, based on factors like financing history, investor quality, business category, and momentum.

The CB Insights list also includes Israeli companies Prospera Technologies (ag-tech at work in Spain, Mexico, and New York) and Chorus.ai (conversation intelligence for sales teams).

A look at the 50 largest startups on the list, ranked by total funds raised, shows that investment in AI is surging worldwide, Fortune writes. That number in 2016 was $5 billion.

Logz.ios AI-powered log analysis platform helps DevOps engineers, system administrators, and developers centralize log data with dashboards and visualizations and discover critical insights within their data.

Voyager Labs, established in 2012, has raised $100 million and recently came out of stealth mode with its artificial intelligence engine to extract real-time tailored insights into human behavior by analyzing massive amounts of publicly available unstructured data. The company has R&D roots in Tel Aviv, and offices in New York, Washington, and London.

Zebra Medical, whose technology teaches computers to read medical images, last month unveiled a new algorithm to detect compression and other vertebral fractures, and was named on Fast Companys Top 10 AI list.

(via Israel21c)

[Photo: A Health Blog / Flickr ]

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Three Israeli Firms Among Top 50 Artificial Intelligence Companies - TheTower.org

By Jeffrey Dastin | SAN FRANCISCO

SAN FRANCISCO Amazon.com Inc has launched a new program to help students build capabilities into its voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the company told Reuters, the latest move by a technology firm to nurture ideas and talent in artificial intelligence research.

The e-commerce company said it is paying for a year-long doctoral fellowship at four universities for an undisclosed sum. Working with professors, the Alexa Fund Fellows will help students tackle complex technology problems in class on Alexa, like how to convert text to speech or process conversation.

Amazon, Alphabet Inc's Google and others are locked in a race to develop and monetize artificial intelligence. Unlike some rivals, Amazon has made it easy for third-party developers to create skills for Alexa so it can get better faster - a tactic it now is extending to the classroom.

The fellowship may also help Amazon recruit sought-after engineers whose studies will make them more familiar with Alexa than with other voice-controlled assistants. The schools in the program are Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, the University of Southern California and Canada's University of Waterloo.

"We want Alexa to be a great sandbox" for students, said Doug Booms, vice president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon, in an interview on Wednesday.

He added that the fellowship's goal is to excite the next generation of scholars about natural language understanding and other voice technologies, not to produce research for Amazon. Under the program, students' projects remain their own intellectual property.

At the University of Waterloo, students are improving Alexa's interaction with air conditioners so it understands requests to cool a room to its normal temperature, without requiring the user to specify a number in Celsius, said Fakhri Karray, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who is overseeing the work.

Securing close ties to university talent and research has become an urgent priority for many tech firms. Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] in 2015 took 40 people from Carnegie Mellon's robotics center in-house to work on self-driving cars and other projects. Microsoft Corp has awarded fellowships to doctoral researchers in different areas of computer science, like artificial intelligence, for years.

Amazon itself created the Alexa Prize competition among universities to push forward conversational artificial intelligence, with a $100,000 stipend for each sponsored team.

The money for the new fellowship comes from the Alexa Fund, an investment by Amazon of up to $100 million to advance voice technology.

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Bernard Orr)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. A top U.S. Federal Reserve official on Friday raised caution about central banks issuing digital currencies as they are vulnerable to cyber attacks and criminal activities along with privacy issues that still need to be addressed.

NEW YORK Digital currency bitcoin hit a record high on Friday on optimism about the approval of the first U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded fund by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

More U.S. consumers complained about imposter scams than identity theft for the first time in 2016, as fraudsters relied more on the phone and less on email to find victims, the Federal Trade Commission said on Friday.

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Amazon deepens university ties in artificial intelligence race - Reuters

Machines are finally getting the best of humans at poker.

dolgachov/iStockphoto

By Tonya RileyMar. 3, 2017 , 2:15 PM

Two artificial intelligence (AI) programs have finally proven they know when to hold em, and when to fold em, recently beating human professional card players for the first time at the popular poker game of Texas Hold 'em. And this week the team behind one of those AIs, known as DeepStack, has divulged some of the secrets to its successa triumph that could one day lead to AIs that perform tasks ranging from from beefing up airline security to simplifying business negotiations.

AIs have long dominated games such as chess, and last year one conquered Go, but they have made relatively lousy poker players. In DeepStack researchers have broken their poker losing streak by combining new algorithms and deep machine learning, a form of computer science that in some ways mimics the human brain, allowing machines to teach themselves.

"It's a a scalable approach to dealing with [complex information] that could quickly make a very good decision even better than people," says Murray Campbell, a senior researcher at IBM in Armonk, New York, and one of the creators of the chess-besting AI, Deep Blue.

Chess and Go have one important thing in common that let AIs beat them first: Theyre perfect information games. That means both sides know exactly what the other is working witha huge assist when designing an AI player. Texas Hold 'em is a different animal. In this version of poker, two or more players are randomly dealt two face-down cards. At the introduction of each new set of public cards, players are asked to bet, hold, or abandon the money at stake on the table. Because of the random nature of the game and two initial private cards, players'bets are predicated on guessing what their opponent might do.Unlike chess, where a winning strategy can be deduced from the state of the board and allthe opponents potential moves, Hold em requires what we commonly call intuition.

The aim of traditional game-playing AIs is to calculate the possible results of a game as far as possible and then rank the strategy options using a formula that searches data from other winning games. The downside to this method is that in order to compress the available data, algorithms sometimes group together strategies that dont actually work, says Michael Bowling, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

His teams poker AI, DeepStack, avoids abstracting data by only calculating ahead a few steps rather than an entire game. The program continuously recalculates its algorithms as new information is acquired. When the AI needs to act before the opponent makes a bet or holds and does not receive new information, deep learning steps in. Neural networks, the systems that enact the knowledge acquired by deep learning, can help limit the potential situations factored by the algorithms because they have been trained on the behavior in the game. This makes the AIs reaction both faster and more accurate, Bowling says. In order to train DeepStacks neural networks, researchers required the program to solve more than10 million randomly generated poker game situations.

To test DeepStack, the researchers pitted it last year against a pool of 33 professional poker players selected by the International Federation of Poker. Over the course of 4 weeks, the players challenged the program to 44,852 games of heads-up no-limit Texas Hold em, a two-player version of the game in which participants can bet as much money as they have. After using a formula to eliminate instances where luck, not strategy, caused a win, researchers found that DeepStacks final win rate was 486 milli-big-blinds per game . A milli- big-blind is one-thousandth of the bet required to win a game. Thats nearly 10 times that of what professional poker players consider a sizable margin, the team reports this week in Science.

The teams findings coincide with the very public success several weeks ago of Libratus, a poker AI designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a 20-day poker competition held in Pittsburgh,Libratus bested four of the top-ranked human Texas Hold em players in the world over the course of 120,000 hands. Both teams say their systems superiority over humans is backed by statistically significant findings. The main difference is that, because of its lack of deep learning, Libratus requires more computing power for its algorithms and initially needs to solve to the end of the every time to create a strategy, Bowling says. DeepStack can run on a laptop.

Though there's no clear consensus on which AI is the true poker champand no match between the two has been arranged so farboth systems have are already being adapted to solve more complex real-world problems in areas like security and negotiations. Bowlings team has studied how AI could more successfully randomize ticket checks for honor-system public transit.

Researchers are also interested in the business implications of the technology. For example, an AIthat can understand imperfect information scenarios could help determine what the final sale price of a house would be for a buyer before knowing the other bids, allowing that buyer to better plan on a mortgage. A system like AlphaGo, the perfect information gameplaying AI that defeated a Go world champion last year, couldnt do this because of the lack of limitations on the possible size and number of other bids.

Still, DeepStack is a few years away from truly being able to mimic complex human decision making, Bowling says. The machine still has to learn how to more accurately handle scenarios where the rules of the game are not known in advance, like versions of Texas Hold em that its neural networks havent been trained for, he says.

Campbell agrees. "While poker is a step more complex than perfect information games, he says, it's still a long way to go to get to the messiness of the real world."

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Artificial intelligence goes deep to beat humans at poker - Science Magazine

Am Amazon "Echo" device. Photo by Bloomberg Getty Images

Amazon.com has launched a new program to help students build capabilities into its voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the company told Reuters, the latest move by a technology firm to nurture ideas and talent in artificial intelligence research.

The e-commerce company said it is paying for a year-long doctoral fellowship at four universities for an undisclosed sum. Working with professors, the Alexa Fund Fellows will help students tackle complex technology problems in class on Alexa, like how to convert text to speech or process conversation.

Amazon ( amzn ) , Alphabet Inc's Google ( goog ) and others are locked in a race to develop and monetize artificial intelligence. Unlike some rivals, Amazon has made it easy for third-party developers to create skills for Alexa so it can get better fastera tactic it now is extending to the classroom.

Get Data Sheet , Fortunes technology newsletter.

The fellowship may also help Amazon recruit sought-after engineers whose studies will make them more familiar with Alexa than with other voice-controlled assistants. The schools in the program are Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, the University of Southern California and Canada's University of Waterloo.

"We want Alexa to be a great sandbox" for students, said Doug Booms, vice president of worldwide corporate development at Amazon, in an interview on Wednesday.

He added that the fellowship's goal is to excite the next generation of scholars about natural language understanding and other voice technologies, not to produce research for Amazon. Under the program, students' projects remain their own intellectual property.

At the University of Waterloo, students are improving Alexa's interaction with air conditioners so it understands requests to cool a room to its normal temperature, without requiring the user to specify a number in Celsius, said Fakhri Karray, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who is overseeing the work.

You Can Make Your Amazon Alexa Smarter

Securing close ties to university talent and research has become an urgent priority for many tech firms. Uber ( uber ) in 2015 took 40 people from Carnegie Mellon's robotics center in-house to work on self-driving cars and other projects. Microsoft ( msft ) has awarded fellowships to doctoral researchers in different areas of computer science, like artificial intelligence, for years.

Amazon itself created the Alexa Prize competition among universities to push forward conversational artificial intelligence, with a $100,000 stipend for each sponsored team.

The money for the new fellowship comes from the Alexa Fund, an investment by Amazon of up to $100 million to advance voice technology.

See the original post:

Amazon Deepens University Ties in Artificial Intelligence Race - Fortune

In Brief

Facebook has gradually grown from supposed social media fad to an everyday essential that has amassed a monthly base of 1.86 million users. Theever-scaling operation frequently pushes out new features to keep users interested, and at the moment, its flagship project is Facebook Live,a service that lets users broadcast real-time videos to their followers. While ithas found favor with professionals and laymen alike, ithas also become an unfortunate platform for live suicides.

Noting that live suicides had occurred on similar platforms before, Facebook has been working to develop a pattern-recognizing algorithm that could check for signs even before the tragic incident occurred.

Now, when suicide-like behavior is detected, Facebook will provide the at-risk user with resources that range from the ability to contact a friend or helpline to a few potentially helpful tips for dealing with depression without halting their stream. On the other end, viewerscan flag broadcasts that they think demonstrate at-risk behavior while also receiving guidance from Facebook on how to proceed.

While the system is rolling out worldwide, the option of contacting a crisis counselor helpline via Facebook Messenger will be available in the U.S. only.

Skeptics may argue that a message from Facebook might not be as effective as immediately involving a friend. However, Vanessa Callison-Burch, a Facebook product manager,told BBCthat the social media companyis hoping to avoid invading anyones privacy or tampering with personal dynamics between friends. They acknowledge how critical a fast response time is, so as soon asthe system identifies an at-risk user, a community operations team rapidly reviews the case.

The U.S. alone averages one suicide every 13 minutes, and it is the countrys tenth leading cause of death. While Facebooks system is still new, it is reassuring to see that the social media companyisdedicated to protecting its users from adding to this troubling statistic.

Read more from the original source:

Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Can Now Identify Suicidal Behavior - Futurism

Many of you are old enough to recall the Personal Computer OS war of the late 80s and early 90s. I can clearly remember being pressured by my boss to make a choice between IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows.

I chose the wrong one. Then came the browser war, followed by the smartphone war. And more recently the streaming music and video wars.

The next technology war on the horizon is shaping up to be consumer artificial intelligence (AI) devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana and Apple Siri. Consumers dont want to buy more than one but they just might have to so they can reap all the benefits. If you are Google-centric for mail, calendar, documents and search then Google Home is probably a great choice. But you may also be an Amazon Prime member so the Echo is a great fit. And if you love your iPhone then you already have Siri but unless your Apple TV is on 24x7 you have to find your iOS device first before you can shout Hey Siri! You could easily have all three AI platforms. And dont forget Microsoft Cortana will likely be there at work on your Windows 10 device.

[Related: Penn Medicine's Brian Wells to EHR vendors: We need these 7 features to put genetic data to work at the point of care]

But do you really want to have to remember which alert phrase (Alexa, Hey Siri, OK Google) to use based on the result you want? One phase to turn on the lights, another to check your calendar, a different one to contact your healthcare provider, another to play some classic rock? Or should consumers just wait until the AI vendors all develop similar capabilities? The browsers are just about all the same now. Smartphones are nearly equal in form and function.

Since that is not the case with AI, however, independent developers need to understand the significant limits with this new technology.

If you are an independent developer who wants to leverage the cool voice interaction features, you must either choose a horse to ride or port your solution to three or four different platforms. This is grueling. Developers already have to be compatible with three or four browsers and at least two smartphone/tablet OSes. Before we get too far, this burgeoning AI field needs to define a standard API that creates a layer that sits on top (perhaps under?) the voice response layer of these disparate AI platforms. This will make it easy to just develop one single back end. As it is now, developers need to write Skills for Alexa, Actions for Google Assistant and link to Siri using the SiriKit API (iOS 10 only and just six app domains). Microsofts soon to be released Cortana Skills Kit purports to leverage already developed Alexa Skills but time will tell if that is a help or a capability limiting approach.

And while I am making demands, another challenge is that all of these AI solutions are designed to work in a home or personal environment and are generally linked to a single user account. In a corporate environment we need the ability to deploy devices that are connected to a generic account or a secure domain over a highly secure Wi-Fi network. And then enable AI users to quickly authenticate to their locally authorized account while they are requesting information or actions. Then after a period of no use, automatically disconnect the previous user and await the next connection. This will enable corporate use cases that today are too difficult to deploy and manage.

The potential of this technology is staggering. But to truly make it ubiquitous and increase adoption, the challenges for independent developers and corporate users need to be addressed. Just as passengers on the Starship Enterprise did, we all will want to ask our virtual assistant for answers or to take actions.

We should not need multiple assistants or worry about whether our information is secure.

Brian Wells is associate vice president of health technology and academic computing atPenn Medicine.

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The next technology war? Artificial intelligence, Penn Medicine IT exec says - Healthcare IT News (blog)

The leader of one of the worlds largest automobile producers expectsthat cars will soon drive themselves and sync to the world around them but dontcount out the human behind the wheel just yet.

Carlos Ghosn, the chief executiveand chairman of an alliance that includes Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, said Thursday that humans will remain involved in the operation of vehicles for the foreseeable future, even as cars with self-driving technology enter the market in the next five years. You will push a button to activate the cars autonomous driving feature, he said, but it will encounter everyday scenarios it cannot compute and that require human assistance.

Artificial intelligence is still way below the creativity of the human brain, Ghosn said.

Imagine a self-driving carcoming upon a broken-down vehicle in the road, but there is a solid line to either side of it, Ghosn said. The car is wired to recognize both as impassable and doesnt have the judgment to cross over the line and pass the vehicle as long as the roadway is clear. A human will have to do the job.

Thats just one common scenario in which artificial intelligence comes up short. General Motors recently acknowledged that its own vehicles arenot sophisticated enough to respond when another motorist honks hishorn.

Ghosns perspective onthe humans role in autonomous driving is not universally shared. One of the major questions hanging over self-driving cars is how much they should depend on humans in the vehicle to intervene, if at all. Studies show that autonomous vehicles can lull passengers into a passive state, and stirring them to act when a problem arises takes time and may pose safety concerns.

Ford has seen engineers fall asleep in its self-driving cars during testing, Bloomberg reportedlast month. Both Ford and Waymo, Googles self-driving car company, intend to eliminate the role of the human driver entirely, according to Bloomberg, though other major automakers, including GM, Audi and Tesla, still plan to rely onhuman vigilance.

Self-driving technology is also expected to be an economic force with both positive and negative consequences. The technology could lead to widespread unemployment among professional drivers, for example, whether they work behind the wheel for ride-hailing services like Uber or long-haul trucking companies.

Ghosn disagrees. He said Thursday the technology will enable companies to satisfy their constant shortage of drivers, while also freeing up existing drivers to do more substantive tasks while en route.

Technology is not going to replace human beings; its going to support you, Ghosn said. Its more, I have a limitation, and I want to eliminate this limitation by bringing this technology in.

Nissan unveiled its vision for the future of cars almost exactly a year ago at the Geneva International Motor Show. Called Nissan Intelligent Mobility, the concept calls for cars that are autonomous, electric and connected to the world around them.

The company brought that vision closer to reality at the International CES technology show in January, when it debuted in-car artificial intelligence that admits when it doesnt know enough to make decisions. The car will then come to a stop and contact a human mobility manager in a command center for instructions.

As the system learns from experience, and autonomous technology improves, vehicles will require less assistance and each mobility manager will be able to guide a large number of vehicles simultaneously, Nissan said in January.

Last year, Nissan began selling a minivan in Japan that comes equipped with ProPilot technology that allows the vehicle to drive itself on single-lane highways.

Ghosn will step down as Nissans chief executivein April. He took the helm of Nissan in June 2001 and oversaw its ascent from a beleaguered automaker to part of a massive automotive alliance that includes Renault and Mitsubishi. He remains the chief executiveof Renault and chairman of all three companies.

He will be replaced at Nissan by Hiroto Saikawa, the companys co-chief executive and former chief competitive officer.

Read more from The Washington Posts Innovations section.

General Motors CEO says Trumps border tax would be problematic for auto industry

The big moral dilemma facing self-driving cars

The simple question about self-driving cars that we still cant answer

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Why Nissan's CEO says the human brain still trumps artificial ... - Washington Post

In an era of maturing artificial intelligence technology, what does the future of the corporation look like? Will the rise of robots help us do our jobs better, or harm them ? This dynamic has become a mainstay of the dialogue around AI, with voices from technology visionaries such as Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking weighing in.

But at Fortunes Most Powerful Women International Summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday, leaders at two of the worlds most powerful tech giants pushed back on those concerns. AI is intended to helpnot hinderthe human workforce, they said.

AI is actually not new for us, said Vanitha Narayanan, chairman of IBM India, whose Watson supercomputer has risen to global acclaim. But technology always comes way ahead of policy.

Just as her boss, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, has insisted "it will not be man or machine," Narayanan said that many companies, especially service-oriented firms, benefit from the technology.

Consider a bank in Brazil that has 50 different products, she said. The average call center rep cannot handle 50 products. So theyre using Watson in their call centernot to replace the call center rep, but actually help the call center rep understand their products and their offerings and be able to serve that customer much better than he or she may have been able to.

Leonie Valentine, managing director of sales and operations at Google Hong Kong, likened use of artificial intelligence to a murmuration, when a starling flock take flight without any kind of preprogrammed system.

The birds just know how to find how to find formation in a murmuration. And it just kind of works, Valentine said. Its a fantastic analogy for what the future of organization will look like.

Subscribe to the Broadsheet, Fortunes newsletter for powerful women.

The Google executive also defended artificial intelligence as a means of supplementing human workers.

Take the example of call center operators, When you go and survey your customers about where they would like your staff to spend your time," she said, "its not on problem-solving, troubleshooting, credit issues, or billing, right? Its Help me, advise me, send me on the trip that I wanted to go to.

Valentine said that since a lot of the technology has been put in place, well actually finally get to the place thats been Nirvana for the last 20 or 30 years in corporations, which is moving people to high-value tasks, which is actually taking the intelligence of the organization and forming that human intelligence, and where we need value-based judgments and real-time decision-making and a human touch, putting that back into the hands of the customer.

Said Valentine: Thats the sort of stuff Im looking forward to."

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Google and IBM: We Want Artificial Intelligence to Help You, Not Replace You - Fortune

Gone are the days of the hobbyist hackermodern malware is a trillion-euro business.

Dr Eva Maia at VisionTechLab, a young cybersecurity firm in Matosinhos, Portugal, said that attacks on computer networks are not only multiplying, they are also growing sneakier.

Malwares typically go unnoticed for months by remaining dormant on infected computers, said Dr Maia. This was recently the case in the Panama Papers attack, where no one knew that the network had been compromised until long after the damage was done.

In the EU-funded SecTrap project, VisionTechLab has been studying the market for a new line of defence that could rob malicious software of its current hiding places.

Conventional antiviruses and firewalls are trained like nightclub bouncers to block known suspects from entering the system. But new threats can be added to the wanted list only after causing trouble. If computers could instead be trained as detectives, snooping around their own circuits and identifying suspicious behaviour, hackers would have a harder time camouflaging their attacks.

The challenge is that machines have traditionally been built to follow orders, not recognise patterns or draw conclusions. Dr Maia is working on advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to change that.

Bootcamp

We are seeing a boom in AI techniques, said Dr Maia. Research that was previously theoretical is now moving from academic laboratories to industry at an unprecedented pace.

Research that was previously theoretical is now moving from academic laboratories to industry at an unprecedented pace.

Dr Eva Maia, VisionTechLab, Portugal

Over the past few years, computers have started driving passenger cars,following voice orders and outmatching humans at identifying faces on photographs. These breakthroughs are the fruit of a new trend in AI based on mimicking living neural networks.

In the same way as our brains sort new information based on past experiences, enough practice data can teach computers to learn, categorise and generalise for themselves.

How many examples are needed to identify a trend can run into astronomical numbers. Fortunately, vast hoards of behavioural data are strewn everyday across the internet by heedless bloggers, commentators and social media users.

Computers learnt their first cognitive functions by devouring terabytesof this online text, sound and images. With the help of recent computing power and the kind of algorithms developed by Dr Maia, they have become so good at identifying content that they now label some of it for us.

The challenge in cybersecurity is to use this ability to distinguish between innocent and malicious behaviour on a computer. For this, Alberto Pelliccione, chief executive of ReaQta, a cybersecurity venture in Valletta, Malta, has found an analogous way of educating by experience.

ReaQta breeds millions of malware programs in a virtual testing environment known as a sandbox, so that algorithms can inspect their antics at leisure and in safety. It is not always necessary to know what they are trying to steal. Just to record the applications that they open and their patterns of operation can be enough.

So that the algorithms can learn about business as usual, they then monitor the behaviour of legal software, healthy computers, and ultimately the servers of each new client. Their lesson never ends. The algorithms continue to learn from their users even after being put into operation.

In doing so, ReaQtas algorithms can assess whether programs or computers are behaving unusually. If they are, they inform human operators, who can either shut them down or study the tactics of the malware infecting them. The objective of the artificial intelligence is not to teach computers what we define as good or bad data, but to spot anomalies, said Pelliccione.

Nowhere to hide

This is welcome news for IT administrators. Cyber criminals typically attack the computer networks of large organisations by compromising the machines of less security-savvy users on their periphery and working their way through to the centre. A few weak links in a sprawling network are difficult to spot and can progressively put an entire company at risk.

To make matters worse, hackers install dormant access points on each machine that they compromise. If security analysts manage to block one, hackers return through another. Dormant access points are notoriously difficult to spot because they do nothing until hackers activate them.

As part of the European ProBOS project, ReaQta has developed software that can be nested at the very core of machines, between their operating system and hardware. Its role is to monitor daily operations in every corner of the system, allowing AI algorithms to sift through ubiquitous data and spot any malicious installation.

ReaQta is licensing the security platform across European and Southeast Asian markets this month. Its first clients are companies that operate over 500 computers simultaneously.

Next year, VisionTechLab plans to release its first AI security services for banks and governments. In the longer term, Dr Maia sees applications for individuals.

For all the benefits of mobile devices, social networking and cloud computing, these technologies are placing more private data at risk. While AI may not yet be capable of guaranteeing its safety, it can now shine a powerful search light on any attempts to steal it.

Cybersecurity is at the heart of the EU's strategy for the Digital Single Market.

The EU's cybersecurity strategy was created to embed cybersecurity into new policies in areas such as automated driving, make the EU a strong player in the cybersecurity market, and ensure that all Member States have similar capabilities to fight cyber crime.

Link:

Artificial intelligence being turned against spyware - Horizon magazine

Forbes

The Future Of Work: The Intersection Of Artificial Intelligence And Human Resources Forbes Artificial intelligence is transforming our lives at home and at work. At home, you may be one of the 1.8 million people who use Amazon's Alexa to control the lights, unlock your car, and receive the latest stock quotes for the companies in your ...

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The Future Of Work: The Intersection Of Artificial Intelligence And Human Resources - Forbes

As vain and manufactured as our online personas can be, Facebook is still a popular avenue for venting and rambling about our day-to-day struggles. Facebook recognizes this, and is now working on new ways to help troubled users with the use of artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, in addition to expanding its suicide prevention tools.

The new tools are similar to what Facebook launched back in 2015, which allows friends to flag a troubling image or status post. Now, this feature is available on Facebook Live with the goal of connecting a user with a mental health expert in real-time. If Facebook believes a reported Live streamer may need help, that user will receive notifications for suicide prevention resources while theyre still on the air. The person who reported the video will also get resources to personally reach out and help their friend, if they wish to identify his or herself.

Facebook is partnering with organizations like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the National Eating Disorder Association, and the Crisis Text Line so when users posts are flagged and they opt to speak to someone, they can connect immediately via Messenger.

Using data from reported posts, Facebook says it will be using its AI technology to spot patterns between flagged items, identifying posts that suggest that user may be suicidal. Our Community Operations team will review these posts and, if appropriate, provide resources to the person who posted the content, even if someone on Facebook has not reported it yet, Facebook wrote in a blog post.

In his recent mission statement update, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the need to detect signs of suicidal users to offer help before its too late. There have been terribly tragic events -- like suicides, some live streamed -- that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner, he wrote. To prevent harm, we can build social infrastructure to help our community identify problems before they happen.

The new tools are currently being tested in the United States. No timeline was given for future rollouts.

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Facebook leverages artificial intelligence for suicide prevention - The Verge

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) was one of the hottest tech stocks of 2016, jumping 230% over the past 12 months. The company makes the vast majority of its revenue from gaming -- about 62% in the fiscal fourth quarter 2017 -- but NVIDIA is much more than just a gaming processor company.

The artificial intelligence (AI) market is quickly expanding, and NVIDIA is positioning itself to make big gains in the space. According to an investor note published by Goldman Sachs' Toshiya Haria couple of months ago, NVIDIA's total addressable market in AI and deep learning could be as big as $5 billion to $10 billion -- out of a total market of $40 billion.

Take a look:

Data source: Goldman Sachs. Chart by author.

Hari mentioned that NVIDIA already has a lead in the AI space and that the company's competition "continues to face high barriers to entry." He went on to add that NVIDIA already holds nearly 90% of the market for chips that are used for training tasks in machine learning (referring to the company's GPUs).

NVIDIA's position in the burgeoning AI market market comes from several of the company's products. Its Drive PX 2 supercomputer uses deep learning to process image information for self-driving vehicles and help them decide how they should react in certain situations.

More than 80 automakers and Tier 1 automotive suppliers already use a version of Drive PX, including Tesla. The electric-auto maker is rapidly moving toward a self-driving car future and has already added key driverless car technologies -- including NVIDIA's computers -- to make it a reality.

But the company isn't satisfied just with using its GPU-based AI computers for autonomous driving. NVIDIA's DGX-1 supercomputer server uses machine learning systems to process information faster than previous deep learning machines of its kind, and is currently being used by SAP for enterprise solutions for 320,000 customers.

NVIDIA says that its latest Pascal chip architecture is"purpose-built for AI," and other major tech companies have already taken notice. BothIBM and Microsoft are using NVIDIA's GPUs for some of their AI services as well."

While NVIDIA's AI opportunity is huge, investors should know one thing: AI makes up only a small percentage of revenue right now.

In the fiscal fourth quarter 2017, NVIDIA brought in just $296 million from its data center division -- 13% of total revenue -- and even its automotive business (which includes the Drive PX 2 AI supercomputer) brings in less than 6% of total revenue.

That means the company will need to continue releasing new hardware and adding more customers to reach its full AI potential. But at this point, NVIDIA is already well on its way to fully tapping into the AI market, and it's doing so at the perfect time.

This year may be one of the best years to invest in AI, as tech companies and governments around the world are ramping up investments in artificial intelligence. NVIDIA's current position in AI, potential market share, and focus on new AI hardware should push the company to the top of the list for anyone looking to invest in AI over the long term.

Teresa Kersten is an employee of LinkedIn and is a member of The Motley Fools Board of Directors. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Chris Neiger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Nvidia and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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NVIDIA's Artificial Intelligence Opportunity in 1 Chart - Motley Fool

Baidu Ventures exists on the front-lines of the Chinese search giants push to brand itself as an artificial intelligence company. In an effort to bridge the AI ecosystems of China and the United States, Baidu Ventures is partnering with Comet Labs, a San Francisco-based fund specializing in machine intelligence.

Unlike other venture capital firms looking to diversifyinto AI, Comet Labs lives exclusively in the space providing capital, technical resources and mentorship to its startups. Wei Liu, now head of Baidus $700 millionventure arm, was part of the founding team at Comet Labs before he was poached into the world of corporate venture.

Baidu founded Baidu Ventures to build an ecosystem around AI technology and do investment to help AI startups with money,technologyand connections to industrial players, assertedLiu.

The mission overlaps considerably withthat of Comet Labs. Where Baidu Ventures has the capital to invest ingrowth stage companies, Comet has the infrastructure to aggressively finance early-stage machine intelligence companies.

We think the most useful things we can give to startups are things theycant buy with money like mentorship, expertise and the ability to fast track into production, says Saman Farid, Managing Partnerat Comet Labs. These are things that, even with $100 million, you might not be able to get overnight.

Comet Labs has been organizing a series of Labs focused on specific industry verticals like transportation.The effort supports specialized startups with the help of corporate partners and targeted mentorship. Groupslike Bosch Ventures and TomTomprovide things liketraining data sets and technical expertise.

Unlike these partnerships that Comet Labs has been establishing for months, its relationship with Baidu Ventures will exist at a level that transcends the individual Labs. In some ways, Baidu Ventures is Comets partner in China connecting portfolio companies with other strategic partners and a large market.

Outside of venture,Baidu has been as vocal as its peers about the role artificial intelligence will play in its future. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all taken similar stances, engaging in acquisitions and investments through their own respective venture arms in AI, though none have been as exclusively focused on the space.

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Baidu Ventures partners with Comet Labs as both double down on artificial intelligence - TechCrunch

At the recent Davos 2017, Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in conversation with Sergey Brin, co-Founder of Alphabet Google, described his book the 4th Industrial Revolution1 published just a year ago, as rapidly evolving with the rise of artificial intelligence2. While this revolution in fusion of physical, digital, and biological worlds from 3D printing, additive manufacturing, and net shape processing to nanotechnology, bioengineering to deep neural networks were. Underpinned by hyperscaling of infrastructure and advances in consumerization and embedding technology. Most commentators and governments are looking at the positive and negative consequences of these changes both in terms of direct human work impact and indirect associated activity that may be impact from automation and a society with AI.

Transition to an AI Society

The main driver for this revolution is not only the affordability and availability of reliable sensors and computing resources, but also the advancements made in software in particular within the realm of artificial intelligence (eg. machine learning). Andrew Ng recently said there was little if any industry that could not be impacted by AI in some form, and described AI as the new electricity.

While AI is projected to have a pervasive potential for disruption across most industry and business sectors, it is nevertheless important to distinguish the hype from real expectations for such a technology, particularly for practitioners and professionals within our society. Nevertheless, we must heed the cautions expressed by the preeminent minds of our times, never before in the history of humans has there been the availability of hardware and software that will enable humans to contrast intelligent machines. The interconnection of devices when coupled with the automation using these new kinds of technology will have a very serious impact on human employment, privacy, security, social and economic wellbeing that will have huge long-term consequences and implications for the society of human beings.

Earlier revolutions of industry, agrarian, political and social dislocations started in the West and East at different times, which have now become a global phenomenon. Have we reached a point in time where Adam Smith6 economics of the 18th century that defined the basis of the wealth of Nations as economic wellbeing, needs revising in order to accommodate changing value? Changes within our society and habitat, such as aging populations and increasing limitations of global resources and concerns over greenhouse gases, etc. will inevitably present us with new challenges and hurdles for humankind to overcome often in unrealistic timeframes.

What will be the new jobs in this new world and how will these kinds of new technology help to create new jobs, which will be balanced in some manner given that the distribution of work and wealth will change drastically in the next few decades. Pursuing laissez-faire economic policies with minimal intervention on peoples rights and wellbeing may need to be rethought as changes are brought upon the very mechanisms of wealth creation and sharing are integrated, and even controlled, by machine automation.

Professor Mark Skilton, Dr Felix Hovespian

Forthcoming book: The Fourth Industrial Revolution: An Executive Guide to Intelligent Systems, 2017 Palgrave Macmillan. Professor Mark Skilton. Dr Felix Hovespian.

1. Klaus Schwab, The 4th Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, 2016 ISBN-13 978-1-944835-00-2

3. Dr. Andrew Ng: Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity, January 25 2017. Stanford MSx Future Forum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc&feature=youtu.be&a (Dr. Andrew Ng, VP & Chief Scientist of Baidu; Co-Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera; and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University)

5. Adam Smith: The Father of Economics, Sept 7 2016 , Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/updates/adam-smith-economics/

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How do we prepare for the Artificial Intelligence Society? - Huffington Post

Domino's in-app DRU Assist

Domino's has delivered new additions to its Domino's Robotics Unit (DRU) family, announcing the DRU Platform, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology that will allow customers to order a pizza using their voice.

As of Monday, customers will be able to use DRU Assist, an in-app AI virtual assistant that was built in partnership with natural language company Nuance. DRU Assist takes the pizza giant somewhat back to the start of its digital journey, with customers speaking to order a pizza via their phone.

Powered by Nuance's Nina, Domino's DRU Assist engages with customers in human-like conversation via text or speech recognition. Beyond ordering, DRU Assist can converse with the customer about menus, ingredients, store locations, and operating hours from within the Domino's app.

"DRU Assist is not just a toy, this is real platform change," Domino's Group CEO and Managing Director Don Meij said. "DRU is for us everything robotic, everything machine learned, and everything AI."

Building on DRU Assist, Domino's also announced DRU 3rd Party, an AI system that will use third party AI platforms such as Amazon Echo and Google Echo, and will allow people to order pizza from smart devices within their home.

The only setback, Meij explained, is that these voice-activated devices are currently not available in Australia.

DRU Manager was also unveiled on Wednesday, which will see the focus shift to behind-the-scenes automation inside Domino's stores. DRU Manager will see Domino's AI platform use real-time data to automate rosters, as well as easily manage store stock levels.

"In 2017, Domino's is going from mobile first to AI first. That means that from this year onwards we will be developing nearly all of our platforms with an insight to engaging with AI and machine learning first as we adapt to all the different devices in society," Meij explained.

Speaking in Sydney on Wednesday, Meij explained the shift into "AI first" forms part of Domino's vision for the "Internet of Food", which is centred on removing barriers to make it easier for customers to order and pay for their meals online.

Almost a year ago, Domino's unveiled the first commercial autonomous delivery vehicle, DRU -- which is now called land-based DRU.

Capable of driving at only 18 to 20 kilometres per hour, land-based DRU uses Google Map data and data obtained by Domino's GPS tracking technology to manipulate bridges, footpaths, and even rubbish bins placed on the curb.

Weighing in at just under 190kg, the land-based DRU has a custom-built hot and cold food compartment. Upon receiving a delivery, the customer inputs a code provided to them by Domino's, which opens the top hatch of the unit.

On Wednesday, Domino's also unveiled its Facebook Messenger Bot, which will allow customers to chat to the bot via the Messenger app, and ask for coupons or discounts based on the customer's local store as well as their method of collection.

Another announcement the pizza giant served up was Domino's Anywhere, which will allow a customer to order a pizza from where they are by dropping a pin -- similar to the way Uber locates its riders -- and have a delivery driver show up to their exact location.

The concept, set to go live in the next few months, builds on the company's existing GPS Driver Tracker initiative, which Domino's launched in early 2015 in partnership with Navman Wireless.

In November, Domino's successfully completed the delivery of a pizza to a customer in New Zealand, using a drone as its mode of transport.

The unmanned aerial vehicle, DRU Drone by Flirtey, was autonomously controlled using GPS navigation, delivered to the yard of a residence in Whangaparaoa, 25km north of Auckland.

The successful delivery came three months after the companies announced their partnership and their intention to deliver pizza by drone.

On Wednesday, Domino's chief digital officer Michael Gillespie announced that Domino's is currently working on the logistics behind getting DRU Drone by Flirtey capable of delivering more pizzas, as well as how transport difficult-to-carry drinks and sides that often require different temperature environments.

"We want a bigger drone in the air delivering at an even faster rate," Gillespie said.

Given Australia's drone regulations, Meij said Flirtey will not be in Australia in the near future.

The original land-based DRU idea was born out of Domino's innovation lab, DLAB, with help from local startup Marathon Robotics. Opened in February last year, DLAB is a startup incubator based in Brisbane, designed to attract a dynamic range of entrepreneurs from food science through digital technology.

Previously, Gillespie said that in order to succeed, companies need to embrace startup thinking.

"Learn what makes those startups special and keep that aggressive innovative thinking -- make people want to use you," he said. "We've remembered our core; we've just used digital as a method to enhance that experience and delivery of our core product, which has evolved."

For the 2016 financial year, Domino's delivered AU$82.4 million in after tax profit, on total revenue of AU$930.2 million.

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Domino's partners with Nuance for DRU artificial intelligence - ZDNet

Forbes

Can Artificial Intelligence Solve Today's Big Data Dilemma? - Forbes Forbes Companies are using AI for everything from self-driving cars to morality training. But there's a little-known application that, for the business world, has even ... 4 challenges Artificial Intelligence must addressTNW Sanlam To Launch Artificial Intelligence Investment Service ...International Adviser How Can Artificial Intelligence Be Leveraged In AdTech Industry?Techstory International Business Times, India Edition all 9 news articles »

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Can Artificial Intelligence Solve Today's Big Data Dilemma? - Forbes - Forbes

TOKYO Honda Motor Co. (HMC) is creating a research arm focused on artificial intelligence, an area where one of its American advisers says it risks falling behind.

R&D Center X will open in Tokyo in April as a software-focused counterpart to Honda's existing hardware-focused basic research center, which built the robot Asimo, the company said Monday.

Car makers are racing against global technology giants and Silicon Valley upstarts to design new technologies for self-driving cars and electric vehicles.

Software drives the value of the largest businesses in most of the world, said Honda adviser Edward Feigenbaum, "but not Japan"--where computer scientists have been working on AI for years but have been ignored by companies. Mr. Feigenbaum, a Stanford University computer-science professor, is a prominent artificial-intelligence researcher who was formerly chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force.

"In Japan, hardware innovation continues to dominate software innovation, because it is seen as lower risk," he said. "Engineers and managers are more comfortable with hardware innovation."

"Initially, R&D Center X will focus on robotics and AI," said Honda's research and development chief, Yoshiyuki Matsumoto. "However we are planning to change our target areas in accordance with changes in the world."

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The X, he said, stands for "unknown."

Honda already has a research lab in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, Calif., that is talking with Waymo, the self-driving car project of Google parent Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), about collaboration. The company is locating Center X in Tokyo in hopes of generating "something unique" to Honda, said Tsutomu Wakitani, the head of the new center.

Car makers have piled into Silicon Valley in pursuit of top technology talent, driving up salaries for engineers. Toyota Motor Corp. alone said it would spend $1 billion on its center there to drive autonomous vehicle research.

Honda and other car makers face a challenge similar to the one digital cameras posed for Kodak Co. or the Apple (AAPL) iPod for Sony Corp., Mr. Feigenbaum said. Those cases showed that the best hardware engineering was no longer enough to win.

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Honda Chases Silicon Valley With New Artificial-Intelligence Center - Fox Business

This year could be the year China solidifies its lead in artificial intelligence.

The growing presence of Chinese AI was strong enough to affect the date and location of the 2017 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference, in which top AI researchers, scientists, practitioners, and invited speakers were held in one place. When AAAI first announced the 2017 meeting will be held in New Orleans in late January, Chinese AI experts were not pleased, since the dates happened to conflict with Chinese New Year. In the end, the meeting was relocated to San Francisco, CA in February instead.

While top-level AI experts are still from North American and the UK, over 40% of the leading AI research papers in the world are published in Chinese. Chinese researchers also have the advantage of being able to speak both English and Chinese, giving them access to a much wider knowledge pool. The language barrier creates an information asymmetry of the West and the East allowing a room for the Chinese to dominate the field.

Moreover, Chinese governments full support and investment has been the major fuel for the growth of the field. The government spending on science and technology research doubled its digits every year for the past decade, as outlined by the 2015-2020 Five-Year Plan . According to the plan, which contains little concrete details on the exact numbers and measures but a long list of priorities instead, Beijing promises to increase its R&D investment for 2.5% of the gross domestic product, compared with 2.05% in 2014.

As a part of the governments ambitious plan to become a global leader in AI, Chinese National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently approved the plan to set up a national artificial intelligence lab for researching deep learning technologies. While major Chinese top tech companies like Baidu, Didi, and Tencent are all betting on AI, Baidu will be in charge of the lab in partnership with other Chinese elite universities such as Tsinghua, the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and other Chinese research institutes.

The online lab is responsible for researching topics in seven major fields: machine learning-based visual recognition, voice recognition, new types of human-machine interaction and deep learning intellectual property. The project will be led by Baidus deep learning institute chief Lin Yuanqing and scientist Xu Wei, along with academics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhang Bo and Li Wei. The goal of the project is to enhance efficiency and to boost Chinas overall competence in AI by designing a machine that mimics human brains decision-making process.

As an open platform itself, the national lab will help more Chinese researchers, companies, and universities to access the most advanced AI technologies in China, said Yu Kai, the former head of Baidus deep learning institute and a lead of NDRC lab project.

While the exact size of the investment involved is yet to be revealed, the highly competitive Chines AI environment demonstrates the enormous potential China has to unlock.

Junse lives in the future. She secretly counts towards the day everyone lives in VR/AR world. An ex-philosophy student who went through a series of existential crisis and wrote two books inspired by Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" and St. Augustine's Confessions," she has somehow found herself in the startup and tech world."

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2017 could see China dominate in artificial intelligence - TechNode (blog)

Advances in automation technology mean that robots and artificial intelligence programs are capable of performing an ever-greater share of our work, including collecting and analyzing data. For many people, automated colleagues are still just office chatter, not reality, but the technology is already disrupting industries once thought to be just for humans. Case in point: science publishing.

Increasingly, publishers are experimenting with using artificial intelligence in the peer review process for scientific papers. In a recent op-ed for Wired, one editor described how computer programs can handle tasks like suggesting reviewers for a paper, checking an authors conflicts of interestand sending decision letters.

In 2014 alone, an estimated 2.5 million scientific articles were published in about 28,000 journals (and thats just in English). Given the glut in the industry, artificial intelligence could be a valuable asset to publishers: The burgeoning technology can already provide tough checks for plagiarism and fraudulent dataand address the problem of reviewer bias. But ultimately, do we want artificial intelligence evaluating what new research does and doesnt make the cut for publication?

The stakes are high: Adam Marcus, co-founder of the blog Retraction Watch, has two words for why peer review is so important to science: Fake news.

Peer review is science's version of a filter for fake news, he says. It's the way that journals try to weed out studies that might not be methodologically sound, or they might have results that could be explained by hypotheses other than what the researchers advanced.

The way Marcus sees it, artificial intelligence cant necessarily do anything better than humans can they can just do it faster and in greater volumes. He cites one system, called statcheck, which was developed by researchers to quickly detect errors in statistical values.

They can do, according to the researchers, in a nanosecond what a person might take 10 minutes to do, he says. So obviously, that could be very important for analyzing vast numbers of papers. But as it trawls through statistics, the statcheck system can also turn up a lot of noise, or false positives, Marcus adds.

Another area where artificial intelligence could do a lot of good, Marcus says, is in combating plagiarism. Many publishers, in fact every reputable publisher, should be using right now plagiarism detection software to analyze manuscripts that get submitted. At their most effective, these identify passages in papers that have similarity with previously published passages.

But in the case of systems like statcheck and anti-plagiarism software, Marcus says its crucial that theres still human oversight, to make sure the program is turning up legitimate red flags. In other words, we need humans to ensure that algorithms arent mistakenly keeping accurate science from being published.

Despite his caution, Marcus thinks programs can and should be deployed to keep sloppy or fraudulent science out of print. Researchers recently pored over images published in over 20,000 biomedical research papers, and found that about one in 25 of them contained inappropriately duplicated images.

I'd like to see that every manuscript that gets submitted be run through a plagiarism detection software system, [and] a robust image detection software system, Marcus says. In other words, something that looks for duplicated images or fabricated images.

Such technology, he says, is already in the works. And then [wed] have some sort of statcheck-like programthat looks for squishy data.

This article is based on aninterviewthat aired on PRI'sScience Friday.

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Should artificial intelligence be used in science publishing? | Public ... - PRI

(Bloomberg) -- Britain is betting that the rise of the machines will boost the economy as the country exits the European Union.

As part of its strategy to champion specific industries, the U.K. government said in a statement on Sunday that it would invest 17.3 million pounds ($21.6 million) in university research on robotics and artificial intelligence. The government cited an estimate from consultancy Accenture that AI could add 654 billion pounds to the U.K. economy by 2035.

We are already pioneers in todays artificial intelligence revolution and the digital strategy will build on our strengths to make sure U.K.-based scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs continue to be at the forefront, Culture Secretary Karen Bradley said in the statement, which referenced AIs contribution to smartphone voice and touch recognition technologies.

The announcement is part of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa Mays plan to identify industries worth supporting to help transform the economy and boost productivity. The government has said it intends to target areas where it thinks the U.K. could excel in the future, including biotechnology and mobile networking.

The U.K.s digital strategy proposal, set to be unveiled on Wednesday, also includes a review of AI to determine how the government and industry can provide further support.

Investment in robotics and artificial intelligence will help make our economy more competitive, build on our world-leading reputation in these cutting-edge sectors and help us create new products, develop more innovative services and establish better ways of doing business, Business Secretary Greg Clark said in the statement.

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Britain banks on robots, artificial intelligence to boost growth - Information Management