Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

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Even though artificial intelligence may have positive effects, why create it if it has the potential to backfire. Many big tech companies are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence to make their businesses more efficient. In January 2015, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and dozens of artificial intelligence experts signed an open letter on artificial intelligence calling for research on the societal impacts of AI. Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, self driving cars and robots often seem like a part of science fiction movies, but in reality, they have already started affecting our daily lives. For example, companies like Wipro and Infosys are deploying AI platform to do the job of engineers.

There are always good and bad sides to every new technology and AI is no exception to this condition. Given below are three examples of the good, the bad and the ugly of Artificial Intelligence.

When Siri Failed to Understand Typical Accents

When Apple released its digital AI assistant, Siri, in October 2011, iPhone users had a lot of expectations with the new bot. Yet despite its growing popularity, Siri was often criticized for its problems and technical glitches. Siri has not been well received by some English speakers with distinctive accents. The personal assistants lack of understanding different accents clearly depicts the restrictions of present AI technology.Today artificial intelligence cant understand changing needs of humans, how will they control our lives then?

Microsoft AI Chatbot Tays Disastrous Debut:

Tay, an artificial intelligence chatbot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation via Twitter on March 23, 2016.It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, forcing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch. According to the company, this error was caused by trolls who "attacked" the service as the bot made replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter.

Shopping via Voice with Amazons Alexa:

Amazon Alexa seemed to be the star last year as Alexa devices topped Amazon's best-seller list last year. Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon Lab126, made popular by the Amazon Echo. It is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real-time information. Alexa can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation hub.

Currently, interaction and communication with Alexa are only available in English and German. What sets apart Alexa from other AI assistants is its personal shopping feature. The device is directly linked to the e-commerce website catalog, which allows customers to order products through voice purchasing option.

A self confessed Bollywood Lover, Travel junkie and Food Evangelist.I like travelling and I believe it is very important to take ones mind off the daily monotony .

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Good, Bad & Ugly! Artificial Intelligence for Humans is All of This & More - Entrepreneur

Facebook has started using a new artificial intelligence (AI) system to identify users showing warning signs of suicide.

The AI has been trained to spot status updates and subsequent comments that could indicate someone was at risk.

The algorithm would immediately send a report to a real reviewer, who could then contact the user with suggestions and resources to help if appropriate. At the moment, Facebook relies on a human reporting system regarding potential suicides, where friends of users can click a button to tell the company about concerning updates.

But it is hoped more people will be helped by an automated system. The AI will look out for statuses that suggest the user is sad or in pain, as well as responses from friends expressing concern.

Facebook is also adding suicide prevention tools to Facebook Live after several deaths have been broadcast since the feature was introduced. This would give viewers the option to report a friend if they are concerned, and gives the reporter resources to help.

The broadcaster at risk will also be given the option to contact a friend, mental health helpline or see tips.

At the moment, this is only being testedin the United States.

This article was originally published at the news.com.au

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Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Spot Potentially Suicidal Users - Heat Street

The Chancellor Philip Hammond will outline plans in Wednesdays Budget to make hundreds of millions of pounds available to scientists and researchers to develop solutions to hi-tech challenges including artificial intelligence and robotics, next generation batteries and new techniques for manufacturing medicines.

The Chancellor will also set out out further details on making sure the UK is at the leading edge of 5G mobile phone technology.

Mr Hammondis expected to allocate more than 500 million from the National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF), which was created in last years autumn statement to help innovative UK companies lead the way in the new technologies set to transform the world.

270 million will be earmarked for British businesses and universities to meet specific challenges with huge potential, which will include the use of robots to work in nuclear and offshore power generation, space and deep mining. There will also be cash set aside for companies developing the kind of batteries that will unlock the potential of electric cars.

The National Productivity Investment Fund is already working to upgrade the countrys mobile and broadband network, and the budget will outline the UKs first 5G strategy, including trials spread across leading research institutions. 5G will be significantly faster than current 4G networks. It also has implications for health, with companies developing wearable sensors that can foresee and warn of an imminent stroke or heart attack.

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Budget 2017: Prizes for robotics, artificial intelligence and battery innovators to be announced - The Independent

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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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.

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Amazon Deepens University Ties in Artificial Intelligence Race - Fortune

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.

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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