The $5 million IBM AI Watson XPrize is revealing the top 10 finalists for the 2017 round and awarding a total of $15,000 in prize money to the top two finishers today (Dec. 8) at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2017; Long Beach, Calif.). Amiko AI (Milan), which is upgrading respiratory care with sensor technologies and digital health tools, has come in first and is being awarded the $10,000 top prize for this year. The $5,000 second-place prize goes to aifred Health (Montreal), which is using deep-learning algorithms to personalize treatments for depression. The two top finishers also were scheduled to present detailed descriptions of their projects on stage at the event.

If there’s a poster child for machine learning, it’s neural networks. We gave a practical introduction to the topic here, but this time I’ll take a different approach and explain the background to how neural networks, er, work.

SpeechMatics, the company founded by British neural network pioneer Tony Robinson, has made major advance in speech recognition.

Speechmatics’ Automatic Linguist can now add a new language to its system automatically – without human intervention or tuning – in about a day, crunching through 46 new languages in just six weeks.

Consider that there are around 7,000 languages in the world, and that the top 10 languages cover less than half the world’s population. The top 100 most popular languages still only get you to about 85 per cent. So speeding things up is significant.

H2O.AI started almost six years ago with a mission to simplify and democratize artificial intelligence. Today the company announced a $40M Series C round.

Nvidia and Wells Fargo led the round with participation from New York Life, Crane Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Transamerica Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised so far to $75 million. The last round was for $20M almost exactly two years ago.

CEO Sri Ambati says his company is attempting to democratize AI, even as the biggest tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Salesforce try to take control of this market by building proprietary tools and sucking up much of the talent.

https://www.h2o.ai/

“Artificial intelligence is coming for your job.” That’s been the mantra of skeptics, naysayers, and even pragmatic analysts for years. A quick Google search will yield dozens, if not hundreds, of articles, such as this Mother Jones article by columnist Kevin Drum, on how the expansion of AI and robotics is going to radically shift the job market for the worse as we offload tasks, such as assembly and even driving and customer service, normally performed by humans to machines.

Tech Giants Are Paying Huge
Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/technology/artificial-intelligence-experts-salaries.html

Nearly all big tech companies have an artificial
intelligence project, and they are willing to pay
experts millions of dollars to help get it done.

Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future.

The Massive Hedge Fund Betting on AI
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-27/the-massive-hedge-fund-betting-on-ai

Initially wary of the technology, Man Group was soon persuaded by the returns from algorithm-centric funds.

Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick-pony/

Just about every AI advance you’ve heard of depends on a breakthrough that’s three decades old. Keeping up the pace of progress will require confronting AI’s serious limitations.