Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Ford has already been testing self-driving car technology.

Ford announced today a $1 billion investment in machine-learning startup Argo AI. Through the agreement, Argo AI will work exclusively for Ford on the software brains to enable self-driving.

Ford previously announced it will offer a self-driving car by 2021, although it would likely be limited to urban environments and be used by ride-hailing services as a kind of robo-taxi.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Argo AI is a new company dedicated to developing a software system to guide self-driving cars. CEO Bryan Salesky said of the investment that it would allow Argo AI to recruit the kind of talent needed to develop these systems.

Ford CEO Mark Fields said, "For accounting purposes, Argo AI will be a subsidiary of Ford, but have a lot of independence. Its sole focus over the next five years will be developing self-driving software for Ford vehicles."

Self-driving, or autonomous, cars use sensors, GPS and onboard computing power to recognize their environments and take passengers to destinations. Almost every major automaker is developing this technology, while the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has been supporting it as a means of reducing the 32,500 fatalities that occur on US roads every year.

Ford Chief Technical Officer Raj Nair pointed out that Ford will concentrate on building the hardware platform, the physical car, and use its expertise to develop toward large-scale manufacturing. Argo AI will focus on the software side.

Fields also said that Argo AI will look into licensing its technology to other automakers at a later date.

Ford and Argo AI announce an investment in self-driving cars. From right to left, Argo AI's Peter Rander and Bryan Salesky, and Ford's Mark Fields and Raj Nair.

Read more:

Ford spending $1 billion on self-driving artificial intelligence - CNET

Artificial intelligence is the hottest arena in the tech world today, but the complexities of developing practical applications from the technology have made it slow to impact people's everyday lives. That may be starting to change.

Leading stun gun and body camera manufacturer TASER International (NASDAQ:TASR) announced on Thursday that it has acquired two companies that are creating artificial intelligence technology. It's a bold move for the company, but it could make both its Axon cameras and the Evidence.com cloud platform more valuable over the long term.

Police officer docking body camera. Image source: TASER International.

The purpose of an A.I. service from TASER would be to help sift through the enormous quantity of video and data law enforcement agencies are storing every single day. That data can be great for both law enforcement and the public, but it can be overwhelming to determine what information is useful and where it is.

A.I. can help identify objects, places, and actions people are taking. This may mean identifying a weapon in a confrontation, or spotting where a foot chase starts and stops on a video recording. That in turn can help it to categorize segments of video, which will help in the process of searching it for specific information.

TASER International is giving a bigger presentation on how the technology will be used on Feb. 15, so investors and observers can learn more then. But this will likely be an add-on to TASER's Evidence.com product.

If you want to understand how A.I. could fit into TASER International's business, one line from today's press release pops out:

The benefits of this groundbreaking technology leads to a future of hands-free reporting and real time intel in the field.

The goal is to make everything about law enforcement officers, and the citizens they interact with, easier to document and find. Not only will life be easier for officers on a day-to-day basis, court requests or public information requests will be easier to process, reducing headaches for agencies.

At least, that's the theory.

Where TASER is going to need to tread lightly is in how these products are used by law enforcement. If A.I. improves officers' efficiency and police accountability, it could be a win-win for law enforcement and the public. But the ACLU has already raised concerns. In an interview with Forbes, it postulated that this will be a surveillance mechanism for the government more broadly.

That's big potential a can of worms, and a question of how A.I will be used here that has yet to be well defined by either the technology's developers or the government. Used with care and moderation, it could be great for everyone. But there's a potential for abuse as well. TASER International will play a role in defining how the technology is used in the law-enforcement milieu, a position it may not be ready for. While A.I. is an interesting addition to its portfolio, management will need to tread carefully if it wants to avoid a public backlash against it in the future.

Travis Hoium owns shares of Taser International. The Motley Fool recommends Taser International. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Read more:

TASER International Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Law Enforcement - Motley Fool

A G6 teaser hints at a possible portable battery.

Two weeks ahead of LG's Mobile World Congress 2017 event, the South Korean phone maker sent out a couple of online teasers about its upcoming marquee handset, the G6.

There have been two teasers that we know so far. One (above) reads, "More Juice. To go." This could mean the G6 has a swappable battery, which contradicts existing rumors that because the G6 will probably be water-resistant, its battery probably won't be removable. Or it could mean nothing, the battery is still embeddable, and it just lasts long enough to keep you "going" throughout your day. Without official specs, everything is still possible.

The second teaser reads, "Less artificial. More intelligence." This could be a nod to Google Assistant, which the G6 is expected to have baked-in. The only other phone to have Assistant built in is the Pixel (and its larger counterpart, the XL). Assistant is a signature software program from Google that uses machine learning, Google's vast search database and two-way interaction to help users go about their daily lives.

CNET will be on the ground in Barcelona reporting from LG's presser, so check back for more details soon.

Read the rest here:

LG G6 teasers emphasize battery life, artificial intelligence - CNET

Thought-provoking commentary on technologies that are changing the way mankind does things.

Network World | Feb 10, 2017 5:45 AM PT

Your message has been sent.

There was an error emailing this page.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is so last year, according to some experts.

Scientists at MIT this week claimed a breakthrough in how human intuition can be added to algorithms. And in a separate, unrelated report, Deloitte Consulting is chastising the business community for not comprehending fully that new, cognitive computing technology should be exploited.

Artificial intelligence is only the beginning, researchers write in aDeloitte University Pressarticle about Deloitte's February study.

Advanced cognitive analytics is just one of the fast-evolving technologies businesses need to get a handle on, they say. A kind of artificial intuition and cognition through algorithms is one part of that machine intelligence (MI). Notably, its not AI. MI is more cognitive and mimics humans, the firm explains, while AI is simply a subset of MI.

To focus on AI is to miss the forest for the trees, writes Blaise Zerega in aVentureBeat article about the Deloitte report.

MI includes machine learning, deep learning and cognition, among other tools like Robotics Process Automation (RPA), and bots. Deloitte says the time is ripe to latch on to umbrella-term MI and stop single-mindedly concentrating on apparently one-dimensional AI.

It cites reasons that include data growth for making it all possible finally. The consulting firm says collected data doubles every year now, and it will reach 44 zettabytes by 2020.

Faster distributed systems, introduced by better chips and networks, sensors and Internet of Things (IoT)coupled with those huge swaths of data and smarter algorithms that simulate human thinkingare other important elements that are going to unleash MI over AI.

Its those advanced algorithms that are probably the most excitingand the most different.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one organization racing to design them. The school recently said it now knows how to include human intuition in a machine algorithm. Thats a big deal.

Its going to do it by copying how clever people solve problems, researchers say in an MIT News article.

In recent testing, it asked a sample of brainy MIT students to solve the kinds of issues that planning algorithms are used forlike airline routing.

Problems in that field include how to optimize a fleet of planes so all passengers flying the airline network get to where they want to go, but no plane flies empty and doesnt visit a city more than once during a period.

The cleverest students results were better than the existing algorithm.

The researchers then analyzed how the best of the students approached the problem and found that in most cases, it was through a known high-level strategy called linear temporal logic. Looking at something being true until something else makes it not true is part of it.

The researchers then encoded the strategies into a machine readable form.

That, along with other human cognition and instinct analysis, is part of whats going to be behind MIs leap forward. Cognitive Agents, Deloitte calls it.

The MIT students were able to improve the performance of [existing] competition-winning planning algorithms by 10 to 15 percent on a challenging set of problems, MIT News says, of the logic it plans to copy.

This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join?

Patrick Nelson was editor and publisher of the music industry trade publication Producer Report and has written for a number of technology blogs. Nelson wrote the cult-classic novel Sprawlism.

Sponsored Links

See more here:

Artificial intuition will supersede artificial intelligence, experts say - Network World

Business quiz: What do these company name abbreviations stand for: AT&T. 3M. NCR. Geico. Did you know them all? If so, well done. The answers: American Telephone & Telegraph, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, National Cash Register, and Government Employees Insurance Co.

Now, heres the hard question: What do all these names have in common? Answer: None of them accurately express what those companies do today.

Think about that. Each of these companies had the good sense to follow new technologies and new business opportunities even if they were inconsistent with their very name.

Then, on the other hand, ask yourself why Blockbuster doesnt own the streaming video market. How did it lose to upstart Netflix? Why doesnt Kodak, a brand that used to be virtually synonymous with photography, dominate the digital camera market? In both instances, it is because the entrenched leader failed to see that a new technology had transformed the entire industry.

Most of the time, the technology that the big company fails to adopt is isolated to its industry. But every now and then, something comes along that is so transformative, virtually every company must adopt it very quickly, or perish. The replacement of animal power with mechanical power is one example, as is the electrification of industry and the assembly line as a means of manufacturing. Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly be another one, for the implications of this technology are every bit as transformative as electricity.

Can that really be seen with such certainty? Absolutely. A business is simply the product of two factors: decisions and execution. Companies that succeed make better decisions and execute better than their competitors. Thats it.

It is hard to exactly quantify, but most employees at a company make a few hundred business decisions a daywhich emails are most important to answer, which meetings to attend, how to prioritize their time, and so forth. Marketing people figure out what message to deliver to what audience through what channels. Salespeople decide which leads to call on with what offers. Programmers decide how to solve coding problems, product people decide what to bring to market, and so on.

So every person in the company makes, lets call it, 200 business decisions a day. If your company has 1,000 employees, that is 200,000 decisions a day, or a million decisions every week.

And every one of them can be made better using AI.

Let me repeat that: Every business decision employees make can be made better using AI trained on the relevant data.

Imagine if SmallCo aggressively uses AI to make its key business decisions while BigCo doesnt; who do you think wins in the long run? If every week, BigCo makes a million decisions based on their gut and SmallCo makes decisions using AI based on data, which would you bet on? Week after week, the power of better decisions compounds until at some point, BigCos executives will look around and find their products and their company irrelevant. They will wonder how they lost, but the simple truth will be that someone else made better decisions.

AI is still in many regards a nascent technology. Only in the past few years have the tools to implement it across the enterprise come to market. While with many technologies it makes sense to take a wait and see approach, this is not one of them. The power to make better decisions is not something you want to equivocate on. I am sure that when steam power came along, some old-timers thought their animal-powered factories worked just fine. But in the blink of an eye, that whole world changed and those who did not make the transition fast enough did not have the time to recover and catch up.

I hate to say it, but most large companies fail to make the right changes in time. Of the original companies that made up the Dow Jones industrial average, only one remains on the index. And that one is General Electric, another company that transformed beyond the limits of its name. Those other companies had every advantage imaginable, but they failed, because the world changed, and they did not.

Join us next week in San Francisco as we explore how to implement AI in your enterprise today.

Tags ai GigaomAI

Visit link:

The Peril of Inaction with Artificial Intelligence - Gigaom

Forbes

Nvidia Beats Earnings Estimates As Its Artificial Intelligence Business Keeps On Booming Forbes Nvidia continued to see demand for its graphics processors in the emerging world of artificial intelligence in its fourth quarter earnings reported Thursday. In its fourth quarter earnings release, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company reported revenue ... To keep up its freakish growth, Nvidia needs to convince the world it's a leader in AIQuartz all 126 news articles »

Read this article:

Nvidia Beats Earnings Estimates As Its Artificial Intelligence Business Keeps On Booming - Forbes

Forbes

Could Artificial Intelligence Ever Become A Threat To Humanity? Forbes Also, there is a complete fallacy due to the fact that our only exposure to intelligence is through other humans. There are absolutely no reason that intelligent machines will even want to dominate the world and/or threaten humanity. The will to ...

Continue reading here:

Could Artificial Intelligence Ever Become A Threat To Humanity? - Forbes

Forbes

Artificial Intelligence Is Coming To Police Bodycams, Raising Privacy Concerns Forbes But with all that footage comes a tsunami of data that's becoming increasingly difficult to sift through. Taser International, one of the largest manufacturers of police bodycams, wants to bring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to ... Taser to bring artificial intelligence to police on-body camerasThe Stack all 14 news articles »

Read more from the original source:

Artificial Intelligence Is Coming To Police Bodycams, Raising Privacy Concerns - Forbes

Wall Street Journal (blog)

Wells Fargo Innovation Group to Focus on Artificial Intelligence, Payments and APIs Wall Street Journal (blog) Wells Fargo & Co., still grappling with fallout from a sales-practices scandal, is reorganizing its payments, virtual solutions and innovation group as the bank looks to increase its use of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The ... and more »

See the original post here:

Wells Fargo Innovation Group to Focus on Artificial Intelligence, Payments and APIs - Wall Street Journal (blog)

SAP S/4HANA is going multi-tenant public cloud. Can SAP bring AI to its customer base?

SAP is planning to step up its machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts in hopes that its applications will have a broader reach when it comes to automating processes such as employee approvals, payment processing, and sales discounting.

At the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, SAP is outlining its public cloud versions of its S4/HANA enterprise resource planning suite. The ERP cloud suites come in three versions focused on project management, finance, and enterprise management and are hosted in SAP data centers.

Darren Roos, president of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, said in an interview that SAP does plan to support other public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other key players.

But the S/4 HANA public cloud coming out party is a bit of a diversion from what SAP plans to do with artificial intelligence and machine learning in its roadmap. SAP is just starting to talk about machine learning and AI at a time when rivals and the broader enterprise technology ecosystem have dominated the conversation.

Consider:

How to Implement AI and Machine Learning

The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started.

Add it up and SAP's S/4HANA launch and analyst meeting in New York is about the machine learning and AI roadmap as much as it is ERP. SAP CEO Bill McDermott previewed the focus on AI on the software company's fourth quarter earnings call. McDermott told analysts:

Roos acknowledges that SAP hasn't been beating the drum for machine learning just yet. Why? SAP wanted to highlight a bevy of use cases. "The use cases are really just beginning whether it's matching invoices to payments with machine learning to eliminate human error or advising users on how to match hiring plants with markets and budgets," said Roos. "We've invested in specific machine learning use cases. The reality is that machine learning doesn't have any real value until you get it to the user and the application."

SAP's approach to AI will revolve around bringing functionality to customers via its public cloud offerings. SAP will develop its own tools, but it also isn't going to be shy about partnering. "I don't think where the machine learning or AI capabilities come from is relevant. SAP will partner to leverage AI and machine learning to enhance our applications," said Roos. "We don't think about where the engine comes from as much as how it impacts the customer."

Go here to read the rest:

SAP aims to step up its artificial intelligence, machine learning game as S/4HANA hits public cloud - ZDNet