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Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

1. Introduction, What is Artificial Intelligence ? (Malayalam) By Ashish Jose – Video

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1. Introduction, What is Artificial Intelligence ? (Malayalam) By Ashish Jose
Topic:- Artificial Intelligence (Malayalam) By Ashish Jose Seminar Organized By :- Freethinkers Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/ftkerala4) Venue :- C Achutha Menon Hall Date...

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1. Introduction, What is Artificial Intelligence ? (Malayalam) By Ashish Jose - Video

Rodney Brooks: "Intelligent Machines are Different" – Solid 2014 Keynote – Video

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Rodney Brooks: "Intelligent Machines are Different" - Solid 2014 Keynote
From the 2014 Solid Conference: In the old days software seemed pretty deterministic. If you ran your program 10 times it got the same answer all ten times. Once software was connected to the...

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Rodney Brooks: "Intelligent Machines are Different" - Solid 2014 Keynote - Video

x.ai Secures $2M in Seed Funding

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New York, NY (PRWEB) May 21, 2014

x.ai builds and maintains an artificial intelligence powered personal assistant that schedules meetings for its business customers.

x.ai, inc., an artificial intelligence company, today announced that it has secured $2.1M in seed funding led by IA Ventures, Softbank and Lerer Ventures. The investment will expand data and science efforts towards fully emulating a human scheduling negotiation - so 87 million US knowledge workers can get their own assistant.

I scheduled 1,019 meetings for myself in 2012 and loved every human interaction as much as I hated every email ping pong necessary to get it on the calendar, said Dennis R. Mortensen, CEO and Founder of x.ai.

x.ai is a personal assistant that use email to schedule meetings. Customers talk to Amy as they would to any other person - and they can have her do all the tedious email ping pong that comes along with scheduling a meeting. It requires no sign-in, no password, no download; all they do is CC: amy@x.ai.

Ive been cc-ing amy@x.ai for months and I find it difficult to see how I would go back to a time without her help. The nature of my business is meeting with people -- entrepreneurs, corporate execs, fellow investors -- and efficiently taking away the tedious task of scheduling my meetings is a huge boon to my productivity, said Jonathan Lehr, Director at Work-Bench.

x.ai is currently looking for some of the best and brightest to fill positions in the following areas; Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Backend Engineers and Ai Trainers. So if you want to be the arbiter of time, head over to x.ai/jobs.

x.ai is taking on a well-accepted pain, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to a degree rarely seen, said Brad Gillespie, Partner at IA Ventures. Dennis and the x.ai team is executing on a very ambitious plan, which, if successful, could change the paradigm for how we schedule meetings in the future, perhaps even how we choose to spend our time at work.

About x.ai, inc. x.ai was founded in 2014 by former Visual Revenue (Predictive Analytics software acquired by Outbrain) CEO Dennis R. Mortensen and his co-founders Alex Poon and Matt Casey. The wider founding team are industry veterans from analytics, big data and the predictive modeling world.

For more details on x.ai, inc. visit the corporate website at x.ai, email hello(at)x(dot)ai or simply see 'how Amy schedules your meetings'.

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x.ai Secures $2M in Seed Funding

Artificial Intelligence & Kathy Brown – Somebody To Love (Massappeals Remix) – Video

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Artificial Intelligence Kathy Brown - Somebody To Love (Massappeals Remix)
Nine Cherries - The music you wish you already knew Awesome remix (but not finished, so we wait for more!). Enjoy! Show some love to Massappeals: https://sou...

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Artificial Intelligence & Kathy Brown - Somebody To Love (Massappeals Remix) - Video

IBM acquires artificial intelligence firm Cognea

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May 20, 2014 - 16:09 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - IBM has acquired artificial intelligence specialist Cognea in a move designed to enhance its Watson cognitive computing technology by bringing more natural interaction to the tool, according to V3.

In a blog post, Watson group senior vice-president Michael Rhodin said the deal will help to change the way people interact with computers: "For decades, moviemakers and TV producers have featured talking computers as futuristic props," he said.

"Yet, even though the way we interact with computers has come a long way since the days of punch cards, in large part we are still forced to deal with them mainly on their terms and hampered by their limitations. Not much longer."

Rhodin said Cognea's "virtual assistants" would help to make using computers a more individualistic, conversational and communicative experience.

"We're working on a host of technologies - a set of conversational services - aimed at enriching the relationship between you and the system," he said. "These conversational services range from helping systems understand us as individuals to selecting the appropriate words and responses that are most meaningful to each of us."

He touted the ability Cognea offers to create a raft of virtual assistants - "from suit-and-tie formal to kid-next-door friendly" - as ideal for meeting the needs of businesses in numerous sectors.

"We believe this focus on creating depth of personality, when combined with an understanding of the users' personalities, will create a new level of interaction that is far beyond today's 'talking' smartphones."

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. IBM said that it would continue to invest in companies and has a $100mln fund at its disposal.

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IBM acquires artificial intelligence firm Cognea

The Age of Quantum Computing Has (Almost) Arrived

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Better yet, Rose and Ladizinsky predicted that a quantum annealer wouldnt be as fragile as a gate system. They wouldnt need to precisely time the interactions of individual qubits. And they suspected their machine would work even if only some of the qubits were entangled or tunneling; those functioning qubits would still help solve the problem more quickly. And since the answer a quantum annealer kicks out is the lowest energy state, they also expected it would be more robust, more likely to survive the observation an operator has to make to get the answer out. The adiabatic model is intrinsically just less corrupted by noise, says Williams, the guy who wrote the book that got Rose started.

By 2003, that vision was attracting investment. Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson wanted to get in on what he saw as the next big wave of computing that would propel machine intelligence everywherefrom search engines to self-driving cars. A smart Wall Street bank, Jurvetson says, could get a huge edge on its competition by being the first to use a quantum computer to create ever-smarter trading algorithms. He imagines himself as a banker with a D-Wave machine: A torrent of cash comes my way if I do this well, he says. And for a bank, the $10 million cost of a computer is peanuts. Oh, by the way, maybe I buy exclusive access to D-Wave. Maybe I buy all your capacity! Thats just, like, a no-brainer to me. D-Wave pulled in $100 million from investors like Jeff Bezos and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

The D-Wave team huddled in a rented lab at the University of British Columbia, trying to learn how to control those tiny loops of niobium. Soon they had a one-qubit system. It was a crappy, duct-taped-together thing, Rose says. Then we had two qubits. And then four. When their designs got more complicated, they moved to larger-scale industrial fabrication.

As I watch, Hilton pulls out one of the wafers just back from the fab facility. Its a shiny black disc the size of a large dinner plate, inscribed with 130 copies of their latest 512-qubit chip. Peering in closely, I can just make out the chips, each about 3 millimeters square. The niobium wire for each qubit is only 2 microns wide, but its 700 microns long. If you squint very closely you can spot one: a piece of the quantum world, visible to the naked eye.

Hilton walks to one of the giant, refrigerated D-Wave black boxes and opens the door. Inside, an inverted pyramid of wire-bedecked, gold-plated copper discs hangs from the ceiling. This is the guts of the device. It looks like a steampunk chandelier, but as Hilton explains, the gold plating is key: It conducts heatnoiseup and out of the device. At the bottom of the chandelier, hanging at chest height, is what they call the coffee can, the enclosure for the chip. This is where we go from our everyday world, Hilton says, to a unique place in the universe.

By 2007, D-Wave had managed to produce a 16-qubit system, the first one complicated enough to run actual problems. They gave it three real-world challenges: solving a sudoku, sorting people at a dinner table, and matching a molecule to a set of molecules in a database. The problems wouldnt challenge a decrepit Dell. But they were all about optimization, and the chip actually solved them. That was really the first time when I said, holy crap, you know, this things actually doing what we designed it to do, Rose says. Back then we had no idea if it was going to work at all. But 16 qubits wasnt nearly enough to tackle a problem that would be of value to a paying customer. He kept pushing his team, producing up to three new designs a year, always aiming to cram more qubits together.

When the team gathers for lunch in D-Waves conference room, Rose jokes about his own reputation as a hard-driving taskmaster. Hilton is walking around showing off the 512-qubit chip that Google just bought, but Rose is demanding the 1,000-qubit one. Were never happy, Rose says. We always want something better.

Geordie always focuses on the trajectory, Hilton says. He always wants whats next.

In 2010, D-Waves first customers came calling. Lockheed Martin was wrestling with particularly tough optimization problems in their flight control systems. So a manager named Greg Tallant took a team to Burnaby. We were intrigued with what we saw, Tallant says. But they wanted proof. They gave D-Wave a test: Find the error in an algorithm. Within a few weeks, D-Wave developed a way to program its machine to find the error. Convinced, Lockheed Martin leased a $10 million, 128-qubit machine that would live at a USC lab.

The next clients were Google and NASA. Hartmut Neven was another old friend of Roses; they shared a fascination with machine intelligence, and Neven had long hoped to start a quantum lab at Google. NASA was intrigued, because it often faced wickedly hard best-fit problems. We have the Curiosity rover on Mars, and if we want to move it from point A to point B there are a lot of possible routesthats a classic optimization problem, says NASAs Rupak Biswas. But before Google executives would put down millions, they wanted to know the D-Wave worked. In the spring of 2013, Rose agreed to hire a third party to run a series of Neven-designed tests, pitting D-Wave against traditional optimizers running on regular computers. Catherine McGeoch, a computer scientist at Amherst College, agreed to run the tests, but only under the condition that she report her results publicly.

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The Age of Quantum Computing Has (Almost) Arrived

Artificial intelligence lenses for the blind created

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7 hours ago

Combining computational geometry, artificial intelligence, geo and ultrasound techniques, among others, scientists from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) created a device to help people with low vision or blindness to navigate more easily.

This project, developed in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, began formally in 2009, and in less than five years a prototype was created and is about to be transferred to the technology company Qualtop, said Eduardo Jos Bayro Corrochano, project leader.

The navigation device consists of glasses with stereo sound sensors, GPS technology and a tablet, which guides the blind person to a specific point and avoids hitting static or moving obstacles, also recognizes money bills of various denominations, and color of clothing.

The expert, who also developed the first inexpensive humanoid robot in Mexico called Mexone, said it was from progress made during his research in robotics that he considered using stereoscopic vision algorithms in a guiding device for people with visual disability.

The idea came from a doctoral thesis at the CINVESTAV on the use of stereoscopic vision lenses designed for people with blindness. To do this, the researchers went to the School for Blind Girls in Guadalajara, which addresses this type of disabilities, in order to meet the needs of the visually impaired.

It was after the financial support of the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) in 2012 and 2013 when they could accelerate the development of the lens, set the hardware, adapt processors and try different types of sensors used in the device.

"We currently have a light weight, ergonomically acceptable prototype since it almost looks like a normal pair of glasses and can work in real time with batteries that last approximately four hours in continuous use. We hope to have a commercial prototype by next August at the latest, and being able to market it in early 2015," Bayro Corrochano said, who is also a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

Researcher at the CINVESTAV estimate that the commercial product would cost between ten and fifteen hundred dollars ($13,000- $19,500 Mexican pesos), and consist of the glasses with sensors and a tablet from which a voice would tell directions and/or warnings.

Although globally there are similar devices, says Bayro Corrochano, the development at Cinvestav combines new algorithms and technology which makes it unique. For example, the use of ultrasound techniques to detect translucent obstacles, like glass, or the use of artificial intelligence (machine learning) in order to recognize places, signs and objects. These glasses are also useful for those with poor eyesight, as they help to improve perception.

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Artificial intelligence lenses for the blind created

Baidu Challenges Google as it Extends Into Silicon Valley

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Baidu has opened a new artificial intelligence (AI) lab in Silicon Valley to compete with its tech rivals in China and the U.S.

Chinese Internet search giant Baidu has extended its technology arm to the U.S., by investing around $300 million in a new research and development (R&D) center in Sunnyvale, California.

The Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab, along with the Beijing Deep Learning Lab (formerly known as the Institute of Deep Learning), and the Beijing Big Data Lab, will be led by Baidu's new chief scientist Andrew Ng. Ng was founder of Googles deep-learning project, director of Stanfords artificial intelligence lab, and a co-founder of massive open online course (MOOC) provider Coursera.

Baidu's move highlights the pace of global growth for Chinese Internet companies, with some of its competitors already establishing setups within the U.S. For example, domestic rival Alibaba has burrowed its way into the Silicon Valley investment circles, snapping up large stakes and board seats in fast-growing start-ups. One can only presume that the company is gearing up to compete with the likes of Amazon or eBay on their home turf.

The predominant focus for Baidu's AI lab will be deep learning - the smarter use of data to provide more insightful consumer experiences. Deep learning is a new area that tech companies are moving into. In January of this year, Google acquired London-based start-up DeepMind which had a large concentration of researchers in deep learning. Meanwhile, Facebook recruited a group of experts last September to work on this technology.

Although deep learning has become a buzzword in technology, it is a field where researchers are in short supply. According to Yoshua Bengio, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal, there are only around 50 experts worldwide in deep learning.

It is still unclear whether or not Baidu's move into the deep learning arena will boost revenues for the company. One thing for sure, though, is that the proliferation of data will definitely give it the competitive edge it needs to keep up with its Google-like rivals.

Image via Shutterstock.

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Baidu Challenges Google as it Extends Into Silicon Valley


  1. Artificial Intelligence