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In a paper published in Nature on 28th January 2016, we describe a new approach to computer Go. This is the first time ever that a computer program “AlphaGo” has defeated a human professional player.

The game of Go is widely viewed as an unsolved “grand challenge” for artificial intelligence. Games are a great testing ground for inventing smarter, more flexible algorithms that have the ability to tackle problems in ways similar to humans. The first classic game mastered by a computer was noughts and crosses (also known as tic-tac-toe) in 1952. But until now, one game has thwarted A.I. researchers: the ancient game of Go.

Despite decades of work, the strongest computer Go programs only played at the level of human amateurs. AlphaGo has won over 99% of games against the strongest other computer Go programs. It also defeated the human European champion by 5–0 in tournament games, a feat previously believed to be at least a decade away. In March 2016, AlphaGo will face its ultimate challenge: a 5-game challenge match in Seoul against the legendary Lee Sedol—the top Go player in the world over the past decade.

This video tells the story so far…

With Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind.

Deep Blue photo credit courtesy of International Business Machines Corporation, © International Business Machines Corporation.

Continue reading “Google DeepMind: Ground-breaking AlphaGo masters the game of Go” | >

Truly beautiful stuff! How far we’ve come from going to a dimly lit, coin op arcade filled with venerable games like PAC-Man and Afterburner! The Singularity accelerates every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day,. Being alive in this era of progress is truly a gift.

This is “Animation/FX Reel” by blurstudioinc on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who lovethem.

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The Antipode is the second hypersonic jet by Canadian inventor and engineer, Charles Bombardier. The Antipode design is a 10-seat private jet that uses rocket boosters to take off, detaches the rockets at altitude of 12km, fires its hypersonic engines to hit speeds of Mach 24 (20,000 km/h), and gets you from New York to London in 11 minutes.

To cool the jet from the heat of hypersonic travel.

It would channel some of the air, flowing at supersonic speed, through a nozzle located on the nose of the aircraft, producing a counterflowing jet of air that would induce LPM (a novel aerodynamic phenomenon called ‘long penetration mode), which would in turn lead to a drop in surface temperature due to aeroheating and a reduction of the shockwave and noise caused by breaking the sound barrier.

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Another Quantum Breakthrough through ultra- low temp nanoelectronics- Sub-millikelvin nanoelectronic circuits and is another step on the way to develop new quantum technologies including quantum computers and sensors.

The first ever measurement of the temperature of electrons in a nanoelectronic device a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero was demonstrated in a joint research project performed by Lancaster University, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, and Aivon Ltd.

The team managed to make the electrons in a circuit on a silicon chip colder than had previously been achieved.

Dr Rich Haley, Head of Ultra Low Temperature Physics at Lancaster, said: “This is a notable achievement in that the team has finally broken through the 4 millikelvin barrier, which has been the record in such structures for over 15 years.”

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And, another breakthrough for Quantum by Russian Scientists. Russian scientists have developed a new way to solve a key problem with cooling plasmonic components, which makes optical chips and super-fast light-based computers a definite possibility. https://lnkd.in/b9kuiSa

Russian scientists discover how to cool plasmonic components to make light-based transistors possible.

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Wise Autoresponse for your Customer Support Call Center needs — I do know that one of the large financial institutions in NYC announced in Dec. that they were replacing their tier 1 & tier 2 support with AI this summer.

BERKELEY, CA — (Marketwired) — 01/27/16 — Wise.io, which delivers machine learning applications to help enterprises provide a better customer experience, today announced the availability of Wise Auto Response, the first intelligent auto reply functionality for customer support organizations. Using machine learning to understand the intent of an incoming ticket and determine the best available response, Wise Auto Response automatically selects and applies the appropriate reply to address the customer issue without ever involving an agent. By helping customer service teams answer common questions faster, Wise Auto Response removes a high percentage of tickets from the queue, freeing up agents’ time to focus on more complex tickets and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.

“Wise Auto Response has dramatically eased the burden on our support agents, allowing us to reply to half of all tickets automatically,” said Francesca Noli, VP of Marketing at Product Madness. “Now we are able to focus agent attention on more complex, customer-facing issues like payment problems, which have a direct impact on our bottom line. Wise gives us the best of both worlds: it has the power of an artificial intelligence system like Watson, along with the lightweight integration we need to successfully apply machine learning to our service operations quickly, easily and cost effectively.”

Wise Auto Response identifies common customer inquiries that can be responded to with a high level of confidence — such as password resets and basic product functionality, or standard “thank you” email templates that don’t require hands-on follow up — and automatically responds without the need for any manually written business rules. The new functionality complements the current suite of predictive applications offered by Wise.io, including Wise Routing, which automates the support ticket triage process, and Wise Recommended Response, which provides a ranked shortlist of appropriate macros and templates for each new customer inquiry.

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Virtual Healthcare & IMSHealth is a major player in this service offering. Healthcare and clinic in your own home.

The University of Southern California Center for Body Computing has teamed with 8 partners to launch a Virtual Care Clinic. The idea with VCC is to create an integrated approach to the use of mobile apps, “virtual” doctors, artificial intelligence, data collection and analysis, as well as diagnostics and wearable sensors to create truly on-demand healthcare.

The partners involved in this effort are peer-reviewed clinical trial database startup Doctor Evidence, drug data resource IMS Health ($IMS), consumer design firm Karten Design, HIPAA-compliant cloud platform Medable, video creator Planet Grande, sensor-enabled pill startup Proteus Digital Health and vision player VSP Global.

VSP’s next-gen sensor-embedded eyewear prototype, dubbed Project Genesis, will be refined and tested at the VCC in consultation with USC CBC, which is the digital health innovation accelerator at Keck School of Medicine. The VCC will also involve USC’s Institute of Creative Technologies (ICT).

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