WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Companies new to the space can learn a great deal from early adopters who have invested billions into AI and are now beginning to reap a range of benefits.

All the Autonomous Store Platform needs in order to operate is the right number of cameras, which are designed to be easy to install and environmentally friendly. Our work in Vision AI focuses on understanding the interaction between humans and the physical world.

The National Retail Federation expo resembles the electronics trade show CES, fixating on artificial intelligence, big data and automation.

We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.

Deep learning has revolutionized the world of artificial intelligence. But how much does it improve performance?  How have computers gotten better at different tasks over time, since the rise of deep learning?

In 2012, Google made a breakthrough: It trained its AI to recognize cats in YouTube videos. Five years later, a contest Google is sponsoring speaks volumes about the field’s advancement. Instead of finding cats, researchers will be required to train an AI to identify more than 5000 different species of plants and animals.

Computers have got much better at translation, voice recognition and speech synthesis, says Lane Greene. But they still don’t understand the meaning of language. Language is widely seen as humankind’s most distinguishing trait. AI researchers insist that their machines do not think like people, but if they can listen and talk like humans, what does that make them? As humans teach ever more capable machines to use language, the once-obvious line between them will blur.

Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu and professor at Stanford, said during his widely popular NIPS 2016 tutorial that transfer learning will be -- after supervised learning -- the next driver of ML commercial success.

Aparicio says the research is exciting because the reliability of the arm offers a clear path toward commercialization.

Developments in machine dexterity may also be significant for the advancement of artificial intelligence. Manual dexterity played a critical role in the evolution of human intelligence, forming a virtuous feedback loop with sharper vision and increasing brain power. The ability to manipulate real objects more effectively seems certain to play a role in the evolution of artificial intelligence, too.

...it forces CEOs to rethink how companies execute, with new business processes, management practices, and information systems, as well as everything about the nature of customer relationships. I’m seeing leaders who get this. They’re all over it: they want to launch five transformation initiatives right now; they’re talking to me and every digital leader they know about where the technology threats are coming from; and they’re hiring the best people to advise them. Yet I’m shocked by—even fearful for—the many CEOs I know who seem to be asleep at the switch.

This paper examines the essential eight technologies that matter and what business leaders now need to do about them, and emerging technologies in general.

Apache PredictionIO is an open source Machine Learning Server built on top of a state-of-the-art open source stack for developers and data scientists to create predictive engines for any machine learning task.

Something that often bothers me about sci-fi is the loner inventor trope. A guy in a garage builds a robot, or AI, or frequently both that are somehow decades beyond the technology of his day. It’s hard to even appreciate how hard this is for robots to do, because it’s hard to appreciate how difficult walking still is for humanoids. I wrote a whole piece about the problem of building walking robots back in 2011 — it wasn’t pretty back then, and it’s still a challenge for most full-sized humanoids.

It may come as no surprise that technology-centric roles stole the show among emerging jobs in the United States, but the prevalence of machine learning and data science roles and skills indicate a shift in the types of technology we can expect to be using in the near future, as well as what professionals should be preparing themselves for.

Having an academic background and a comprehensive suite of skills were also strong trends, especially among professionals who are now machine learning engineers and data scientists. Both of these roles are also often held by professionals with 10 years or more of professional experience, so for those just starting out and having trouble landing one of these titles, don’t be discouraged!

It’s always a good reminder that soft skills will always be important, no matter the profession. The ability to collaborate, be a leader, and learn from colleagues will stand out in interviews, and even more once starting a job.

In response to growing concerns about autonomous weapons, a coalition of AI researchers and advocacy organizations released a fictitious video on Monday that depicts a disturbing future in which lethal autonomous weapons have become cheap and ubiquitous. The video was launched in Geneva, where AI researcher Stuart Russell presented it at an event at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons hosted by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Russell, in an appearance at the end of the video, warns that the technology described in the film already exists and that the window to act is closing fast.

In an evermore connected world, large-scale cyberattacks and online threats to businesses are rising exponentially. The Cyber-Risk & Resilience special report, published in The Sunday Times, features insights into the impact cybercriminals can inflict on organisations and individuals. From chatbots spreading fake news, risks concerning personal data, biometrics and fraud, as well as tackling phishing emails, the potential dangers are unprecedented. Also included is an infographic on why hackers hack and an article on the top five ways quantum computing will change cybersecurity for good.

You can learn a lot about an area just from the cars parked on its streets.

The dot-com boom and bust is often compared to the Gold Rush. But Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says its more like the early days of the electric industry.

So leaders need to focus on asymmetrical rivals and unlikely allies, on hackers and hobbyists, on rooftop solar panels and 3-D printers. They must also adapt their strategies to the possibility of shared infrastructure, to data that wants to be big, to the implacable embrace-and-extend bear hug of Google and Amazon and the National Security Agency. Conventional business models may be simultaneously too big and too small. How should executives respond? Here are the four major drivers of the new industrial architecture and the key strategic imperatives for companies.

Machine Learning Research Should Be Clear, Dynamic and Vivid.
Distill Is Here to Help. The web is a powerful medium to share new ways of thinking. Over the last few years we’ve seen many imaginative examples of such work. But traditional academic publishing remains focused on the PDF, which prevents this sort of communication.