Founded in 2014, California-based Nervana offers a hosted platform for deep learning that’s optimized “from algorithms down to silicon” to solve machine-learning problems, the startup says.

Businesses can use its Nervana cloud service to build and deploy applications that make use of deep learning, a branch of AI used for tasks like image recognition and uncovering patterns in large amounts of data.

Also of interest to Intel, Nervana is developing a specialty processor, known as an ASIC, that’s custom built for deep learning.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but one estimate put the value above $350 million.

“We will apply Nervana’s software expertise to further optimize the Intel Math Kernel Library and its integration into industry standard frameworks,” Diane Bryant, head of Intel’s Data Center Group, said in a blog post. Nervana’s expertise “will advance Intel’s AI portfolio and enhance the deep-learning performance and TCO of our Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi processors.”

Though Intel also acquired AI firm Saffron late last year, the Nervana acquisition “clearly defines the start of Intel’s AI portfolio,” said Paul Teich, principal analyst with Tirias Research.

“Intel has been chasing high-performance computing very effectively, but their hardware-design teams missed the convolutional neural network transition a few years ago,” Teich said. CNNs are what’s fueling the current surge in artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning.

As part of Intel, Nervana will continue to operate out of its San Diego headquarters, cofounder and CEO Naveen Rao said in a blog post.

The startup’s 48-person team will join Intel’s Data Center Group after the deal’s close, which is expected “very soon,” Intel said.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/intel-to-acquire-deep-learning-company-nervana.html

Collaborative robots, or “cobots”, tend to be inexpensive, easy to use and safe to be around. They can easily be adapted to new tasks, making them well-suited to small-batch manufacturing and ever-shortening product cycles.

Cobots can typically lift loads of up 10 kilograms (22 lb) and can be small enough to put on top of a workbench. They can help with repetitive tasks like picking and placing, packaging or gluing and welding.

Some can repeat a task after being guided once through the process by a worker and recording it. The price of a cobot can be as little as $10,000, although typically they cost two to three times that.

The global cobot market is set to grow from $116 million last year to $11.5 billion by 2025, capital goods analysts at Barclays estimate. That would be roughly equal to the size of the entire industrial robotics market today.

“By 2020 it will be a game-changer,” said Stefan Lampa, head of robotics of Germany’s Kuka, during a panel discussion organized by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) at the Automatica trade fair in Munich.

Growth in industrial robot unit sales slowed to 12 percent last year from 29 percent in 2014, the IFR said on Wednesday, weighed by a sharp fall in top buyer China.

The world’s top industrial robot makers – Japan’s Fanuc and Yaskawa, Swiss ABB and Kuka – all have collaborative robots on the market, although sales are not yet significant for them.

But the market leader and pioneer is Denmark’s Universal Robots, a start-up that sold its first cobot in 2009 and was acquired by U.S. automatic test equipment maker Teradyne for $285 million last year.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/interest-grows-in-collaborative-robots.html

The revamped App Store will let developers advertise their wares in search results and give developers a bigger cut of revenues on subscription apps, while Apple said it has already dramatically sped up its app-approval process.

The goal is to sustain the virtuous cycle at the heart of the hugely lucrative iPhone business. Software developers make apps for the iPhone because its customers are willing to pay, and those customers, in turn, pay a premium for the device because it has the best apps.

The store is now more strategically important than ever for Apple as sales of the iPhone begin to level off and the company looks to software and services to fill the gap. Apple CEO Tim Cook said on a recent conference call that App Store revenues were up 35 percent over last year.

But the store is also a victim of its own success. Eight years after its launch, it is packed with more than 1.9 million apps, according to analytics firm App Annie, making it almost impossible for developers to find an audience – and increasingly difficult for customers to find what they need, as some 14,000 new apps arrive in the store each week.

“The app space has grown out of control,” said Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the internet and now a vice president at Alphabet Inc’s Google, who was speaking at a San Francisco conference on the future of the web on Wednesday. “We need to move away from having an individual app for every individual thing you want to do.”

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/mobile-category/apple-rolls-out-a-revamped-app-store.html

Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security.

“Let’s say tomorrow there’s an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs,” Skapinetz explained. “Essentially what we’re doing is training Watson not just to understand that those documents exist, but to add context and make connections between them.”

Over the past year, IBM Security’s own experts have been working to teach Watson the “language of cybersecurity,” he said. That’s been accomplished largely by feeding it thousands of documents annotated to help the system understand what a threat is, what it does and what indicators are related, for example.

“You go through the process of annotating documents not just for nouns and verbs, but also what it all means together,” Skapinetz said. “Then Watson can start making associations.”

Now IBM aims to accelerate the training process. This fall, it will begin working with students at universities including California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Penn State, MIT, New York University and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County along with Canada’s universities of New Brunswick, Ottawa and Waterloo.

Over the course of a year, the program aims to feed up to 15,000 new documents into Watson every month, including threat intelligence reports, cybercrime strategies, threat databases and materials from IBM’s own X-Force research library. X-Force represents 20 years of security research, including details on 8 million spam and phishing attacks and more than 100,000 documented vulnerabilities.

Watson’s natural language processing capabilities will help it make sense of those reams of unstructured data. Its data-mining techniques will help detect outliers, and its graphical presentation tools will help find connections among related data points in different documents, IBM said.

Ultimately, the result will be a cloud service called Watson for Cyber Security that’s designed to provide insights into emerging threats as well as recommendations on how to stop them.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/ibms-watson-to-get-schooled-on-cybersecurity.html

It’s an interesting move for a man who in 2014 said artificial intelligence, or A.I., will pose a threat to the human race.

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence,” Musk said about a year and a half ago during an MIT symposium. “If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that… with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories with the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he’s sure he can control the demon. It doesn’t work out.”

Today, Musk is moving to help programmers use A.I. and machine learning to build smart robots and smart devices.

“We’re releasing the public beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms,” wrote Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s CTO, and John Schulman, a scientist working with OpenAI, in a blog post . “We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research. We hope it will be just as useful for the broader community.”

The OpenAI Gym is meant as a tool for programmers to use to teach their intelligent systems better ways to learn and develop more complex reasoning. In short, it’s meant to make smart systems smarter.

Musk is a co-chair of OpenAI, a $1 billion organization that was unveiled last December as an effort focused on advancing artificial intelligence that will benefit humanity.

While Musk has warned of what he sees as the perils of A.I., it’s also a technology that he needs for his businesses.

The OpenAI Gym is made up of a suite of environments, including simulated robots and Atari games, as well as a site for comparing and reproducing results.

It’s focused on reinforcement learning, a field of machine learning that involves decision-making and motor control.

According to OpenAI, reinforcement learning is an important aspect of building intelligent systems because it encompasses any problem that involves making a sequence of decisions. For instance, it could focus on controlling a robot’s motors so it’s able to run and jump, or enabling a system to make business decisions regarding pricing and inventory management.

Two major challenges for developers working with reinforcement learning are the lack of standard environments and the need for better benchmarks.

Musk’s group is hoping that the OpenAI Gym addresses both of those issues.

Source- http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/elon-musk-opens-training-gym-for-ai-programmers.html

Volvo, of Sweden, is owned by China’s Geely Automotive Holdings.

Nvidia made the announcement at the beginning of the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. Calls to Volvo’s spokesman in China were not immediately answered.

The new Drive PX 2, said company CEO Jen-Hsung Huang, has computing power equivalent to 150 MacBook Pro computers, and can deliver up to 24 trillion “deep learning” operations – allowing the computer to use artificial intelligence to program itself to recognize driving situations – per second.

Partnerships between automakers and Silicon Valley companies on self-driving technologies are taking center stage at this year’s show.

Also on Monday, General Motors Co. announced a $500 million investment in ride-sharing service Lyft.

Huang didn’t offer revenue projections for Drive PX 2, but automotive is the fastest-growing business segment for Nvidia, whose largest revenue source is video games.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/nvidia-teams-up-with-volvo-for-self-driving-car-computer.html