This week, Microsoft made a big splash by announcing great new services, including:
- A Bot Framework to help developers easily design multi-channel multi-language bots
- Cognitive Services, a set of speech/text/image/entity analysis APIs, currently in limited preview
Providing access to Machine Learning in the Cloud is an interesting way for Microsoft to better position its Azure offering against competing AWS (which does not currently offer similar APIs) and Google's Cloud.
In the News
Silicon Valley looks to Artificial Intelligence for the next big thing
As the oracles of Silicon Valley debate whether the latest tech boom is sliding toward bust, there is already talk about what will drive the industry’s next growth spurt.
Google AI ethics board remains a mystery
Google's artificial intelligence (AI) ethics board, established when Google acquired London AI startup DeepMind in 2014, remains a real mystery, with both Google and DeepMind refusing to reveal who sits on it.
Shutterstock upgrades its search tools with neural networks
Every time someone clicks on an image on their site (and that happens a lot—the company sells 4.7 images per second), the algorithm searches through the 70 million photos to serve up those it deems most similar.
Learning
Neural networks demystified
Set of simple videos to introduce you to the basic concepts of neural networks (structure, backpropogation...)
Understanding Popularity on Reddit
There are lots of theories about what makes something go viral, but few ways to test those theories. The developers here built a game to find out.
Software tools & code
Activity Net
Activity Net is ImageNet for videos - i.e. a large database of classified videos to help train neural networks -with a focus on human activities
Google BigQuery Public Datasets
A public dataset is any dataset that is stored in BigQuery and made available to the general public. This page lists a special group of public datasets that Google BigQuery hosts for you to access and integrate into your applications.
Hardware
IBM's "True North" Neural Processors
True North is a radically energy-efficient design with a circuitry designed to mimic the structure of the neural connections within an animal's brain. Each chip is a big cluster of small cores that can potentially communicate with any other core on the chip
Some thoughts
Why is Artificial Intelligence so bad at empathy?
A study reveals that voice assistant AIs, like Siri and Cortana, might be clever, but they lack fundamental empathy at their core.
About
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