Toggle light / dark theme

As part of I BM’s annual InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, the company is announcing a new machine learning course in partnership with workspace and education provider Galvanize to familiarize students with IBM’s suite of Watson APIs. These APIs simplify the process of building tools that rely on language, speech and vision analysis.

Going by the admittedly clunky name IBM Cognitive Course, the class will spend four weeks teaching the basics of machine learning and Watson’s capabilities. Students will be able to take the class directly within IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform.

“Not everyone knows what to do with a Watson API,” says Bryson Koehler, CTO of IBM Watson & IBM Cloud. “The group of engineers that are experts is really small.”

Read more

In the popular TV show Sherlock, visual depictions of our hero’s deductive reasoning often look like machine algorithms. And probably not by accident, given that this version of Conan Doyle’s detective processes tremendous amounts of observed data—the sort of minutiae that the average person tends to pass over or forget—more like a computer than a human.

Sherlock’s intelligence is both strength and limitation. His way of thinking is often bounded by an inability to intuitively understand social and emotional contexts. The show’s central premise is that Sherlock Holmes needs his friend John Watson to help him synthesize empirical data into human truth.

In Sherlock we see the analog for modern AI: highly performant learning machines that can achieve metacognitive results with the assistance of fully cognitive human partners. Machine intelligence does not by its nature make human intelligence obsolete. Quite the opposite, really—machines need human guidance.

Read more

In this video series the Galactic Public Archives takes bite sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future.

In this entry, we take a look at the rapidly developing technology of Brain to Machine interfaces.

Interesting links for more information:

http://www.medgadget.com/2017/02/non-invasive-brain-computer…dhary.html

Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching another class on deep learning.

Ho is a 34-year-old Facebook digital graphics engineer known to everyone as “Solti,” after his favorite conductor. He couldn’t see a way of signing up for the class right there in the app. So he stood up from his half-eaten lunch and sprinted across MPK 20, the Facebook building that’s longer than a football field but feels like a single room. “My desk is all the way at the other end,” he says. Sliding into his desk chair, he opened his laptop and surfed back to the page. But the class was already full.

Internet giants have vacuumed up most of the available AI talent—and they need more.

Read more